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A Passion for Song

Soprano Ana María Martínez brings controlled emotion
to the disciplined art of opera.

Imagine Ricky Ricardo as your psychoanalyst,” quips opera soprano Ana María Martínez, while speaking of her dad. She’s joined Hispanic in South Beach for dessert and talk about life and art. In an off-white suit she looks uncharacteristically trim for an opera singer. She exudes a sustained ebullience and though she’s an advocate of technique over commercially good looks, she is attractive, with dark hair and a light complexion.
At press time, the new mother is rehearsing for the Florida Grand Opera’s performances of Mozart’s Cosi fan Tutte, where Martínez plays Fiordiligi, one of a pair of fickle girlfriends tricked into betraying their beloveds. From April 11 through May 3, she takes the stage as Mimí in Puccini’s La Bohéme at the Houston Grand Opera, the house that helped launch her career in 1994.
Of course, Martínez is in part joking when she refers to her father being a “classic, strict Cuban dad.” But family is a key to Martínez’s life and career. Her father, a Cuban exile who lived in Spain, Puerto Rico and New York City, reinvented himself as a psychologist after a successful career as an electrical engineer. Martínez’s birth mother was a Puerto Rican biochemist who worked at a nuclear facility, while also singing opera.
Now Martínez joins an expanding list of prominent Hispanics in opera, a fact she is well aware of citing a list of Spanish and Caribbean opera heroes during our interview. “I’ve always been proud of my roots,” she says. “I like to say I’m Cuba-Rican. You can trace my grandparents back to Spain and France, but I’m also very proud of coming from the islands.”
Martínez’s home knew discipline, but also calculated, high-stakes risk-taking. She experienced a brainy and Catholic upbringing, ultimately moving with her folks to New York City while maintaining regular visits to Puerto Rico, where she kept up her Spanish and her connection to her extended family. And when her father later divorced and remarried his new wife, also a psychologist, she told Martínez “risks are okay, if you think through them and know the consequences.”
“That stuck with me,” recalls the now internationally recognized soprano who grew up listening to Pat Benatar, Stevie Nicks and now favors master Cuban singer Benny Moré.
Martínez ultimately entered one of the most competitive fields of all. “People don’t realize it, but becoming a successful opera singer is actually less likely than making it in the NFL,” she says. Defying the odds, Martínez’s professional singing career took off in the mid-1990s, when the young artist was barely out of the Juilliard School of Music in New York. Auditions, pretty much a formality for letting the opera world know you entering the market, actually yielded a position at a German opera house and invitations to a competition in the U.S.
A year out of school and Martínez had a foot in the door in Europe, wound up winning a young artist competition at Houston Grand Opera, and later gained Plácido Domingo’s stamp of approval by winning another competition. Her career was launched.
Soon she would go on to play Micaela in Carmen at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. She’d travel the world and the nation, performing with top orchestras and singers including Domingo and Italian pop tenor Andrea Bocelli. And she’d take home a Latin Grammy for her collaboration with Domingo on their recording of Albeniz’s Merlin. Now, Martínez is a leading sought-after opera soprano with an expanding repertoire, celebrated for her skill and ability to communicate the full of complexity of her characters. She holds the promise of many more years ahead in her career.
While a key feature of Martínez’s personality is emotional self-control, a holdover from a strict Catholic upbringing, so is her drive to explore, another aspect of a childhood rich in learning. Martínez continues to probe the limits of the human experience, including its darker edges, through her operatic portrayals of personalities caught in extreme circumstances.
“In opera people fall in love hard, they have affairs, people get killed and they jump off bridges ... It’s all that crazy stuff you’ll see in the National Enquirer, but with great singing,” she says. “So you can’t hold your characters in judgment ... Even if the character is a murderer, you have to understand how she got there, so you can maintain that connection.”
While opera has undergone a change in a post-9/11 economy, Martínez gracefully soars along with the shifting flow. With a focus on attracting younger audiences, opera has turned to thinner, sexier looking performers, while aggressively amping up marketing efforts. And while Martínez is critical of some of those efforts, she continues to thrive.
“We are living in a world where we are bombarded with images,” she says. “The thinking is that opera lovers will go out to the show anyway, but new fans, the people who might be curious, won’t go unless they see someone performing who is, well, hot.”
How to account for her success? Was Martínez just lucky?
“For a long time luck seemed random for me, but it really wasn’t, because I worked hard, I put myself through school,” she recalls. “Luck is when preparedness meets opportunity,” she concludes. “We’re all born with many gifts and it’s up to us to discover which of those gifts we most identify with and through which gift we want to realize ourselves, so you have that passion available and when opportunity comes you are ready.”