Lunch with the FT: Jessye Norman

I'm 10 minutes ahead of schedule and pacing circles around a small private dining room inside the Old Parsonage Hotel in Oxford, waiting for a monster to arrive.

Tales of Jessye Norman's prima donna behaviour are the stuff of legend. The American opera singer - one of the greats of the 20th century - is renowned for a voice of extraordinary richness and range, and for her stage roles as Wagner heroines, but also for spats with journalists and fellow musicians. She has been described as regal and condescending, haughty and humourless. And her memoir, titled Stand Up Straight and Sing!, which was published last year and has brought her here to speak at Oxford's Literary Festival, bristles with instances of name-dropping and score-settling.

The room is dark and club-like, the open fire fake but roaring hot and a stuffed pike glares predatorily from a large glass case. Will this be a convivial tete-a-tete, I wonder, or is Norman going to have me for lunch?

Moments later, the heavy velvet curtains in the doorway part theatrically and the diva makes her entrance. Just a few months away from her 70th birthday, she looks at least a decade younger: her hair is piled high behind an elegant headband, she is dressed in black trousers and a black woollen jumper with sequin details and, although she walks slowly and with a stick - the result of a recurring back problem, she later explains - she cuts an imposing figure.

We scan the menu, which is hearty and old-fashioned (devilled lamb's kidneys, roast guinea fowl, rabbit pie). Norman, like all self-respecting opera stars, has been hounded by rumours of extravagant backstage demands; in a book published this year, soprano Deborah Voigt claimed that while covering for Norman, she discovered that she had asked for the air ahead of her to be spritzed to remove dust as she walked on stage. Norman has dismissed the story as "not a fact" but it's in the back of my mind when I explain that while the FT will insist on paying, she is free to choose whatever she wishes. "Wonderful," she replies, smiling as she settles into a deep velvet chair. "So have you decided what you're going to have?"

. . .

Norman and her siblings grew up in Augusta, Georgia, but the extended family would congregate for weekends in the country, at her grandparents' farm in Wilkes County and some of the most engaging passages in her book describe Sunday lunches around a table laden with baked ham and homegrown vegetables.

"I always thought of it as our little Garden of Eden," she says, "because for a child it seemed huge and, of course, there were all these things growing that one could pluck and eat. My grand­father and the boys - I was never really interested - would get up at 3:30 in the morning to take milk from the cows. I remember asking, very innocently" - she laughs - "at an early age, 'Wouldn't the cows like it better if it were a little later in the day?' "

It's time to order, and Norman admits she's mystified by a starter listed as chicken oysters. Our waitress describes them as the choicest morsels of meat, and explains that they have been breaded "like posh chicken nuggets", which convinces her to give them a go. I opt for mushrooms on toast and, having braced myself for shrieked demands for expensive champagne from my guest, hide my disappointment when she politely requests sparkling water.

Family, she continues, was one of the main reasons she felt the urge to write her book. "There are not enough stories, I find, about African-American families in the Jim Crow south, where I grew up, getting on as a family, getting on as a community and feeling their worth in the world," she says. A middle-class, churchgoing family, the Normans were also involved in the civil rights struggle during the 1950s and 1960s. They kept their five children well-informed but insulated from the realities of life under segregation, and instilled in them an unshakeable sense of self-belief.

"I came from a very strong core of people who told us, practically on a daily basis, that, 'You are as good as any other of God's creations, and you will hear something different when you're outside of this house but know that the truth is here. That you will have to work hard and you will have to prove yourself - as anyone has to prove themselves - and you might have to do a bit more, but you can and you must.' "

When, at the age of 10 or 11, she was given a small radio and chanced upon a broadcast of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, live from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Norman's world expanded. She discovered Nat King Cole and James Brown around the same time but the Met broadcasts became her Saturday ritual, and she would regale her classmates with detailed accounts on Monday mornings.

"Can you just imagine? You've got some 10- and 11-year-olds in class, one is already struggling to have their attention, then there's somebody standing up talking about something called an opera that she listened to on the radio," Norman chuckles. "But Carmen was a hit - you're talking about a toreador and bullfights - oh, I had them, then!"

She declares her starter "quite delicious", though her progress through the nuggets, which she dips in a little dish of mayonnaise, is slow and methodical. Meanwhile, I have wolfed down a delicate arrangement of mushrooms and wilted wild garlic on toast.

Throughout her career, Norman has encountered numerous instances of casual racism. One conductor, having complimented her Italian pronunciation, inquired about her family's heritage, and when she explained that they were descendants of Africans, with some Native American blood, he remarked: "I was sure you were no ordinary Negro."

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She has also had to challenge the expectations of many in the opera world. Although Marian Anderson, who became the first African-American soloist to perform at the Met in 1955, had distinguished herself across a broad repertoire, the first African-American superstar of the opera stage, Leontyne Price, made her name singing the great Italian roles, so it was assumed that Norman would too: "The number of times I was invited to sing Aida, as we say in Britain, that was more than I've had hot dinners," she says.

Instead, Norman felt drawn to French, German and Austrian music - to Schubert and Mahler, and to less obvious roles, including Poulenc's Madame Lidoine, Strauss's Ariadne, Wagner's Sieglinde.

"It isn't with pride that I say that still, after all this time, I don't know another African-American woman who has sung the roles of Wagner," she adds. And yet it was with Wagner - and with characteristic gusto - that Norman launched her professional career. Having won the Bavarian Radio International Music Competition in 1968, she was invited to sing Elisabeth in Tannhauser, at the Deutsche Oper Berlin the following year. To her surprise (and evident pride, for the story is oft-told) the company's general director knocked on her dressing room door during the interval and promptly offered her a contract with the company. She was just 24 years old.

. . .

We have opted for the lightest-looking main course on the menu, and as a waiter presents us each with a large plate piled with crabmeat and fennel and avocado salad, there is a moment's pause, time to take check. Norman is proving to be a delightful lunch companion - warm and courteous, down-to-earth, even - but there is no doubting her strength of character.

Have you, I ask, ever experienced self-doubt? "Oh, I think we all have moments of self-doubt, but they don't last long," she says. "I had - I don't know about self-doubt, I think it was a lack of self-direction - after I had been at the [Berlin] opera house for three years and I was invited to sing roles for which I knew I was not vocally prepared at the time. A 26- or 27 year-old should not be singing Kundry [a role that calls for a more mature voice] in Parsifal."

This fleeting moment of uncertainty led to a brief hiatus from the stage, and since then Norman has consistently defied attempts to label and categorise her voice. She made her Royal Opera debut in 1972 as Cassandra in Berlioz's The Trojans, a role generally associated with dramatic sopranos, and throughout her heyday, from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, her voice was labelled as such. But as well as power at the top, Norman was also known for a strong low register and the remarkable texture of her voice. It's a quality that reveals itself in her everyday speech and, listening back to my recording, I notice I sound sharp and brittle by comparison.

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"I remember at the opera house in Berlin, singing the Second Norn in Gotterdammerung," she says. "I was warming up for my 10 minutes of singing, and [Swedish soprano] Birgit Nilsson, who had this voice that one could hear in the next city it was so huge, was warming up with Mozart! That is why, at 60-odd, she was still singing 'Hojotoho!' in Die Walkure better than anybody else . . . This is delicious crab salad, isn't it?" she adds. I agree. The crabmeat is sweet, and the salad, with its layer of chicory leaves, crisp.

But there's an elephant in the room and it's time to tackle it head-on. Given everything that has been written about opera's great "divas", how does Norman interpret the term? "I used to be unhappy with it because it was meant to be pejorative . . . but I decided I would not allow it to be pejorative but embrace the word," she says. "When it came into being it was meant to be a compliment and it meant that you were a woman who was very serious about your profession and tried to offer your best" - though she does concede that "the behaviour of some of us can sometimes be considered less than perfect".

I suggest that her memoir has offered her an opportunity to set the record straight. "Absolutely, that's very important," she replies, mentioning - in what I take to be a warning - journalists with agendas and the "nonsense" that has been spouted about her. One particular incident - involving Morley Safer, a presenter on US TV show 60 Minutes, making speculations about her "majestic proportions" - is covered at length.

Norman offers me an effusive reverie on the great Herbert von Karajan, with whom she performed Wagner's "Liebestod" for a landmark recording in the late 1980s, but is damning of those conductors who are not respectful of singers, those who will blame a soloist for being "bloody-minded" rather than their own lack of preparation. "I've worked with conductors who have not looked up at the stage for the entire performance." Would she, I ask, care to name them? "I wouldn't think of it," she shoots back.

. . .

Towards the end of the 1990s, Norman moved away from large-scale productions to focus on one-character operas, such as Schoenberg's Erwartung, and on one-off recitals. She was already in high demand, having sung at both Ronald Reagan's and Bill Clinton's second inaugurations, but it is widely known that the highest-earning opera stars can charge a great deal more for private galas than for leading roles on the opera stage (fees for these events are said to range from €30,000 to €200,000 per night, far exceeding the fees from leading opera houses). I put this to Norman, expecting her to bridle.

"I guess so," she says brightly, before smoothly denying that this was a factor in her decision. "I would rather be free to do a recital here, an orchestral thing there, and have more time for my not-for-profit work." This includes her involvement with the Jessye Norman School of the Arts, a free after-school arts programme for children in Augusta.

A waiter reappears with the pudding menu. The heat of the room is now quite overwhelming, and the thought of treacle tarts and apple crumbles is enough to bring on a sweat but, thankfully, Norman would just like a herbal tea - so we order chamomile for her and peppermint for me, and I ask her about more recent projects.

Since 2009, when she was asked to curate Honor!, a festival of African- American culture at New York's Carnegie Hall, Norman's work has focused on her own heritage and upbringing. In 2010 she released Roots: My Life, My Song, an album featuring spirituals such as "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" alongside "My Baby Just Cares for Me" and a high-camp "Habanera" from Carmen. This year she returned to Carnegie Hall for a Valentine's concert in which, according to the FT review, she "preened, crooned, swooped, sighed, whispered, shouted, beamed, moaned, simpered and, yes, occasionally sang" her way through a programme titled "Hooray for Love!" She enthuses about the American film and musical numbers she chose, and the Han Feng-designed red coat she wore for the occasion: "I thought, if you're going to have a recital on Valentine's Day, you may as well go for it!"

She has been fiercely protective of her privacy - her memoirs are short on backstage dramas and details of her home life in Westchester, upstate New York - but there is a coy reference to marriage proposals towards the end of the book, including one from a mysterious French nobleman. From the sound of it, I venture, there have been a few?

"Well, luckily," she laughs. "It would be awful never to have been asked. But I'm very certain and very comfortable with the decisions I've made and with the experiences I've had. It's lovely to have someone in your life who is there because he wants to be, he's not legally bound." I can't help noticing a trio of gold rings on her wedding-ring finger. "Yes, but that ring in the middle just means there's a person in my life that I like very much and he likes me too, and the other two rings are the birthstones of my parents." She points to a pair of matching bands studded with rubies.

Norman talks proudly of her 10 nephews and extended family before we emerge to find that the hotel has filled with pensioners and young mothers enjoying tiered platefuls of afternoon tea. As she weaves her way towards the door, she stoops to coo at a newborn baby in a pram, thanks the hotel's proprietor and bids me farewell.

Norman may be a diva - but she's a politician too.

Illustration by Luke Waller

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