We thought this old-fashioned age-hiding craze was reserved for Hollywood stars and other celebrities with Peter Pan Syndrome, but Wikipedia, as a digital file of biographies, is making it harder for them every day . Nor could we imagine that grandmothers would appear with delusions of motherhood, capable of emulating gay couples in renting the womb to a fertile woman to give them a new life, which, with the approval of governments, will be said to belongs to them The new desires of the citizenry are orders if they only depend on money. On the other hand, if you are an employee and your job depends on not getting older, it is no longer a matter of flirting.
Conductor Olivia Lee-Gundermann, who can now be seen on the podium of the Teatro Real conducting Nixon in China, John Adams' opera about the US president's famous visit to Mao's republic, is a young South Korean who has shown true poise in her Spanish debut. How old should he be? Curiosity is legitimate, there aren't that many women on the podiums... So we ask her bluntly during the post-premiere euphoria. "How old would you make me?" she says. 30? 35? "More, more...". Finally it does not specify. Perhaps because it is the youth that makes it even more extraordinary.
A few meters away, the mezzo Gemma Coma-Alabert, who plays one of the secretaries of the Nixon-Mao meeting, explains how ageism affects opera singers. In Germany, for example, a country that has a repertory opera house in every city and its own company of singers, there is a contract system that obliges the artist to stay until he retires he's turned 40. It's that or kick him out.
Curiously, the sopranos are the ones who come out the most scalded from this measure. Their vocal register is the one that goes with the sexiest roles: the traviatas, the lucias, the manons... When they are at their zenith at 40, the theater to which they have dedicated their professional lives will prefer to renew the nursery, with which what they will find on the street and without the connections typical of an international career. Who could blame them for wanting to take years off.
