The Actress.(Natalie Dessay)(Interview)

Natalie Dessay, the soprano, descended a staircase into the rehearsal room at the Metropolitan Opera with the poise of a countess entering a ballroom, dressed in skinny black pants, high heels, and a belted black jacket, her eyes shielded by enormous sunglasses of the sort favored by Paris Hilton. A bright-orange handbag swung from the crook of her arm, and she held a cell phone to her ear. She seemed irritated by the words of her interlocutor--her agent in France, perhaps. She also seemed largely oblivious of the ministrations of a pair of company operatives who had rushed to disencumber her and were removing jacket, scarf, and--as Dessay carelessly extended each limp, queenly hand--an imaginary pair of gloves.

It was the first afternoon of rehearsals for Bellini's "La Sonnambula," in which Dessay is to appear at the Met, in March and April. To compensate for the opera's famously silly and thin libretto--a woman who is about to be married sleepwalks into the room of a man who is not her intended; scandal ensues; her doubting groom discovers her sleepwalking again; her honor is restored--the director, Mary Zimmerman, had given the production a playful conceit. Zimmerman's singers would appear as members of an opera company rehearsing a production of "La Sonnambula," with Dessay playing an adored, self-absorbed soprano cast as Amina, the sleepwalker of the title. At the outset of the opera, the set would be a mock rehearsal room (coffee machine, water dispenser, a chalkboard reading "Act I, Scene 1") and the cast would show up onstage wearing street clothes. In the case of Dessay, who is tiny and has the build and carriage of a dancer, this meant stretchy pants, a yoga top from Lululemon, and--forthcoming--an elegant pair of gloves.

Dessay is known for her unusual commitment to exploring the theatrical possibilities offered by opera, and she was more than happy to improvise and experiment. She delivered her first aria while trying on shoes, tossing several pairs aside before settling on black high-heeled boots, in which she hopped and twirled for a moment, showily testing them for comfort. A trolley cluttered with plastic-foam heads, bald for the purposes of rehearsal but ultimately to be equipped with wigs, was wheeled in for her perusal; Dessay cast a weary eye upon them, carelessly rummaged through them, and held one up--like a Hamlet contemplating the skull of Yorick--before tossing it aside in disdain. "La Sonnambula" is rarely played for humor, but Dessay was finding a new way into the work, and Zimmerman bounced on the balls of her feet in apparent delight, offering her celebrated star only the gentlest of guidance as to how to play a celebrated star. "Don't get too imperious," Zimmerman said. "You're just spoiled. Just thoughtless."

Dessay was entirely persuasive in the role of a self-regarding diva rehearsing a notoriously demanding role--"La Sonnambula" is infrequently performed, in part because of its plot and in part because it is technically so difficult--except that she couldn't actually sing. A week earlier, after concluding a short run of "Pelleas et Melisande," by Debussy, at the Theater an der Wien, in Vienna, she'd been struck with laryngitis. While she could still speak--her conversational voice, surprisingly low, was only slightly husky--she could not use her operatic voice, which is prodigiously high and supple. Dessay was marking the notes: singing them in a tuneful but subdued near-whisper, an octave lower than they would be heard in performance. A spectator unfamiliar with Dessay's capabilities might have taken her not for an opera singer who can act but for an actor with a surprisingly pretty little voice--a voice that, given some training, might really turn into something.

Dessay says that it is her highest artistic ambition to embody a character so persuasively, and tell a story so convincingly, that the audience forgets that she is singing. "What is interesting is to have this incredible, unbelievable way of expressing ourselves vocally paired with a total controlled and quiet body," she says. This is, she admits, very hard to achieve, not only because of the implausibility of many opera plots but also because of the physical demands of the art. "It's almost impossible to sing and really act at the same time," she says. "For me, acting is receiving, and singing is giving, and that is why it is so difficult, because your body does one thing and your mind does another."

Some of the most successful singers in the history of opera refrained from acting entirely--Pavarotti was most convincing as himself--but among the greatest of singers there have also been formidable actors and actresses, and Dessay, who calls herself a "singing actor," is the performer who best represents that tradition today. David Gockley, the general director of the San Francisco Opera, said, "She is extraordinarily demanding on herself, and her colleagues. That is what made Callas an extraordinary experience compared with Tebaldi, who was regal and stately and uninvolved dramatically. That's good enough for some people--to hear the world's most beautiful voice. But Callas was this character who was interesting on many different levels, certainly mythically, and she brought everyone in the cast up a notch. And I would say that of Natalie."

Dessay will be in New York for two months this spring for "La Sonnambula," staying at an apartment on the West Side, which she bought a little more than a year ago. (Upon arriving at her pied-a-terre the day before rehearsals began, she spent three hours cleaning it, a chore that Zimmerman's imagined diva would surely have delegated.) But whenever possible Dessay is in a suburb with a sleepy main street, half an hour outside Paris--like Pelham but with better patisserie--where she lives with her husband, Laurent Naouri, a baritone, and their thirteen-year-old son and ten-year-old daughter.