Anne Sofie von Otter: "Grief is like a wound. Some days it's a scar, but sometimes it opens up again." Photo / Getty Images
"Grief is like a wound," says Anne Sofie von Otter. "Some days it's a scar, but sometimes it opens up again. I miss my husband a lot, and I think: 'Can't you come back? For a little while?'"
It's been four years since the Swedish mezzo-soprano's husband, Benny Fredriksson, died by suicide. And although the title of her current tour, Songs of Love and Death, has obvious resonance with her personal life, I wasn't sure how willing she would be to broach the subject in conversation. But Von Otter is an admirably direct woman.
Speaking via video link from her lakeside home just north of Stockholm, she is by turns philosophical and tender as she reflects on a 30-year marriage that ended with Fredriksson "dragged into the muck by the media" and Von Otter dubbed "the world's most prominent MeToo widow" by The Irish Times.
For 16 years, Fredriksson had been the director of Kulturhuset Stadsteatern, Stockholm's leading arts centre. But in 2017 the Swedish press published allegations that he had behaved like a "capricious dictator" in his role, tolerating sexual abuse within the organisation and harassing employees.
A Swedish tabloid quoted anonymous sources claiming that he had told one actress to rehearse naked and another to choose between having an abortion and giving up a role, and had protected male employees accused of sexual abuse. He resigned in December 2017 and, three months later, in Australia, took his own life.
Von Otter tells me that though Fredriksson could handle criticism of his work, he was unable to cope with the attacks on his character. "He had lived for the theatre since he was 13 years old. Suddenly he thought, 'Why did I put my heart and my life into this – and get this coming back at me?' His whole identity felt completely shattered. His life just fell apart. He could not imagine life would get back to normal again. He didn't have it in him.
"After maybe a month the PTSD kicked in … I think he must have decided he didn't want to live any longer. He didn't say as much. But he didn't want to be in Sweden. He had these thoughts of people coming to get him. He didn't want to leave the building. He thought this would go on and on …"
For Von Otter and the couple's two sons (now both in their early 30s) Fredriksson's rapid descent was "very heartbreaking and horrible to watch". She says: "He was in such pain. Such pain."
Could she talk to him about it? "No, no. He couldn't. They say it's very good for mentally unstable people that you should take them out for a walk. But he couldn't walk. He just fell down. He walked very, very slowly and he had a sort of collapsed look about him."
She pauses. "Had I known what I now know I would maybe have tried to have him … what's the word?" Sectioned? "Yes. But in a way I think … Not that he did the right thing. But it was a consequential thing for Benny. I think the pain was so awful that I can understand …"
It wasn't the first time Von Otter had witnessed a man she loved sinking into depression. Her father, Swedish diplomat Baron Göran von Otter, never fully recovered from a chance encounter during the Second World War. On August 20, 1942, on a train from Warsaw to Berlin, he found himself sharing a compartment with SS officer Kurt Gerstein who gave him full details of the genocide he had witnessed in the Nazi death camps and begged Von Otter to alert the Swedish government. Shaking and weeping, the German named senior personnel involved and told the Swede: "I saw more than 10,000 die today."
Von Otter filed a report, but the politically neutral Swedish government took no action. Gerstein surrendered to the French in 1945 and was charged with war crimes. He wrote asking Von Otter to corroborate their meeting, but was dead (probably by his own hand) before the diplomat could reply.
"It was a huge thing for my father to go through, and he spent his life trying to make sense of it," his daughter tells me. "I was aware of it as a child because journalists would come and interview him. He was called to Nuremberg to tell his story. It took him a long time to clear [Gerstein's] name and that was hard for my father, definitely. But he never talked to me about personal things."
Born in 1955, the youngest of four siblings, Von Otter says she was "a little bit of a surprise ... My mother was 43 when I was born and my father was 48. They were formal, old-fashioned people. After dinner my mother would knit and my father would read a book while we listened to Mozart, Bach or some organ music."
While her two older brothers and sister all engaged in "intense political debate", she always felt a "strong pull to music". Those who've seen her emotive, physical performances – "I do move a lot!" – won't be surprised to hear that as a little girl she dreamed of being a ballerina. "At home alone," she says, "I would dance around the lounge to Tchaikovsky. I had fantasies of being Margot Fonteyn."
Her father's diplomatic postings meant that, although summers were always spent in Sweden, she lived her earliest years in Berlin, then moved to London when she was seven. "My treats were tickets to the Royal Ballet. My father once got up at 4am to stand in line and buy me tickets to see Nureyev and Fonteyn. They couldn't go with me because of a diplomatic supper party, so I went with my ballet teacher, who was the sister of [actor] Leslie Howard."
Von Otter only began singing seriously in her late teens. "I started in choirs," she says. "I felt so fulfilled finding my place in the harmony." Initially she hoped to be a soprano. "I wanted to beat my own drum on the top line, sing a little louder than everyone else." But the high notes hurt her and she admits to "feeling a huge relief" after switching to alto parts.
The fluid silver of her voice soon saw her singled out for solo parts. Though she says the attention made her nervous – "I still feel nervous, like a racehorse, before I go on stage" – she also felt "I can probably do this better than anyone else … I have this sort of inner self-confidence about my music-making that's completely waterproof. Nothing ever shook me."
From 1983 to 1985, Von Otter was a member of the Basel Opera, where she made her professional debut as Alcina in Haydn's Orlando Paladino. She first sang at Covent Garden in 1985 and made her Metropolitan Opera debut three years later as Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro. A "technical nerd", she learnt to shape her parts "like potter's clay, turning things round and round, finding the shape of the phrasing".
Although other female singers have spoken out about the sexual harassment they experienced during this period, the glamorous Von Otter says "that never happened to me. I am too tall and too self … I have a lot of …" she searches for the word by humming up a scale "integrity. People, in general, tend to be a little scared of me. Which was why it was so nice with my husband because he wasn't intimidated by me at all. He just found me interesting."
Von Otter and Fredriksson were married in 1989. They shared the childcare of their sons with a nanny who would travel with Von Otter when she toured. "I am an energetic person, so I could cope with the broken nights. And I sang on colds I caught from them." But the children were unimpressed by her music and she laughs at the memory of Fredriksson having to remove her "naughty little boys" from a Stockholm auditorium halfway through a Christmas concert. "I hear of children who sit with sparkling eyes through Wagner. That was definitely not my sons!"
In the 1990s, when Deutsche Grammophon was re-recording the standard repertoire for the new CD format, Von Otter was hired as a house artist and began a successful recording career that has seen her appear on over a hundred discs. "Some great singers are not made for the microphone. Their voices are so broad that the spectrum of their overtones doesn't work," she explains. "It just so happens that my voice is quite slim and works very well with the mic." Her recording of Grieg's songs won the 1993 Gramophone Record of the Year.
As an adventurous musician she soon began working with popular musicians, recording For the Stars (featuring tracks by the Beatles and Abba) with Elvis Costello in 2001. In 2007 she recorded Terezín – Theresienstadt, lullabies, marches and cabaret songs written by prisoners at the Nazi concentration camp. Only after finishing the album did she realise that she'd been laying to rest the ghost of her father, who died in 1988. "I had done it to get his approval, to make a gift to him," she told journalists at the time.
Von Otter's questing muse keeps her seeking out new sounds. She's recorded with jazz musician Brad Mehldau and live-wire string quartet Brooklyn Rider, who arranged songs by Björk and Kate Bush for her 2016 album So Many Things. She tells me Kate Bush is "a genius" and is full of praise for the English star's "gutsy" vocals. Although when I quote some lyrics, Von Otter admits she doesn't know them. "You're talking to someone who doesn't pay attention to the words at all until forced to do so. Of course, I look at the text and I look at the important words for the phrasing. But I do not look at the overall meaning. I am just in it for the music."
Songs of Love and Death features a typically Von Otterish mix of classical and pop: Schubert lieders and songs by Canadian singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright. It took her until her 50s to appreciate Schubert's songs, "his deep despair and love of nature". She likes blending those moods with the "sassy saucy energy" of Wainwright's song Who Are You New York?
Von Otter still sings for the love of it. But she acknowledges that she's probably working harder than she would be if her husband were still alive. She tells me: "It's never easy when the children are small. You don't have a lot of time or patience for your partner. In my case I didn't. But our last 10 years were very harmonious and we were looking forward to growing old together. He was thinking about retiring. He wondered if he would take on something else or just sit in a nice chair and read good books. I was day by day getting to appreciate who he was without seeing his faults in the way I didn't when the children were growing up."
Although some headlines have billed her as an opponent of the MeToo movement, today she tells me that "there were a lot of good things about it". But she argues that "in Sweden it was worse – or better, depending on your point of view – than in other countries. There was a climate of fear and aggression. It just became a nightmare, completely bonkers. You couldn't do anything without somebody shouting at you, that you were wrong or on the wrong side."
She notes that her husband's accusers "from this anonymous Facebook group have still not come forward". And while she concedes that Fredriksson "was not a perfect person" and "could yell … could be undependable", she cannot believe he was guilty of sexist behaviour: "He was not that stupid."
Were Fredriksson still alive, she would "have made sure to take some weeks off over the summer. But now Benny's not here, so …" She pauses. "It's not that I'm lonely, or bored. I have a big garden here so there is mowing and weeding. My four-year-old grandson has just been to visit and we had a lovely time." And when she's alone? "I fiddle around with my concert programmes endlessly. I see myself as a very creative artist in that way. I always want to find something new to bring to the music."
WHERE TO GET HELP
• Lifeline: 0800 543 354 (available
24/7)
• Suicide Crisis Helpline: 0508 828 865 (0508 TAUTOKO) (available 24/7)
• Youth services: (06) 3555 906
• Youthline: 0800 376 633
• What's Up: 0800 942 8787 (11am to
11pm)
• Depression helpline: 0800 111 757
(available 24/7)
• Rainbow Youth: (09) 376 4155
• Helpline: 1737
If it is an emergency and you feel like you or someone else is at risk, call 111
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