Beginning of the end: Jake Heggie's new opera for Houston Grand Opera. The End of the Affair, offers a choice role for soprano Cheryl Barker.(Interview)

"I am all about affairs, actually," admits Cheryl Barker, and she's right: rather sordid trysts and Fatal assignations have been compromising her schedule of late. Those unfamiliar with the Australian soprano might think that she is taking the free reins of divadom a little far. Fortunately, her husband, baritone Peter Coleman-Wright--who is rehearsing just out of earshot at the Met four blocks away--wouldn't mind her confession. Of course, all of Barker's infidelities have been onstage, the stuff of operatic anti-heroines. And while roles such as Mimi in Baz Luhrmann's 1993 Opera Australia Bohkme have displayed her lambent tone, elegantly supple coloratura and profound acting ability to the masses--in addition to having garnered Barker veritable celebrity status outside the U.S.--she has yet to truly flex her abilities stateside. Thanks to another onstage adultery this month, though, that is about to change.

Having just finished Kata Kabanova at the Grand Theatre de Geneve in November, Barker is vacationing in New York, as she relates her recent experience to her upcoming role as Sarah in the Houston Grand Opera world premiere of Jake Heggie's The End of the Affair. The delicate, personal way in which she speaks about the tragic heroines of her repertory gives a good indication of why such words as "incandescent" and "mystical" pop up frequently in discussions about Barker.

"Kata, like a lot of the Puccini heroines, actually goes through a journey, ending up with her death at the end. But she makes the choice to confess to Kabanicha and to Tichon about her affair," says Barker. "Sarah's metaphorical position is of the same spirituality. She is someone who is searching for her spirituality and finds it in the end. She sticks by the pact she makes with God no matter what. They are both extremely strong characters--they make choices and stick to those choices."

Barker identifies with the ascetic determination in the characters of Kata and Sarah. To give Act II of Kata dose of earnest emotion, Barker says she drew on a painful event at the Spoleto Festival fifteen years earlier. "At one point in the scene, I am sitting with Kabanicha at the dining table, like a lamb to the slaughter, and she is just sticking the knife in and turning it. While rehearsing, I remembered this time when I was singing an afternoon recital at the Spoleto Festival, and we went to M/oh with Gian Carlo Menotti. There was a full table of people, and he just turned to me and started annihilating me in front of everybody. He was in a particularly crotchety mood. And I remember sitting there, fighting back the tears, trying not to cry and welling up with anger, but not being able to express it. Everybody stopped and just focused on me. It was a horrible moment." Barker says that the persecutions of both Sarah and Kata, whether motivated by love or hate or a mixture, aren't much different from the bruises that one gets in her profession.

Based on Graham Greene's 1951 novel, Heggie's Opera follows the spiritual metamorphosis of Barker's character, Sarah, the adulterous wife of a nebbishy civil servant, Henry (to be played by Coleman-Wright). During the 1944 blitz on London, Sarah abruptly and without explanation ends an affair with writer Maurice Bendrix, following a violent bombing. The jilted Bendrix is left with little more than unanswered questions and a sentiment for Sarah that dithers between love and hate. Eighteen months later, the chance arises for him to find out Sarah's reason for leaving: amid the everyday tragedy of a depressed and ramshackle postwar England, Sarah has found the impetus for a newfound spirituality in a pact that she made with God. The cost severs her from those she loves.

Barker says the influence of her father, a minister, allowed her to understand the character of Sarah particularly well. "My spirituality is ...