Free agency is everything to Carmen. Everything else is subordinated. Can you relate to that at all?
Carmen’s liberty is all about her being brutally honest, if you ask me – honest to herself as well as to others. She follows her gut feeling, like: »I can do this, I want this, and I don’t want that«. I can relate very well to her, even though there I had a learning curve before I toughened up. You waste so much time trying to please everyone, until you realise that not being yourself doesn’t do anyone any favours. I’d say that along with the lovely music it’s Carmen’s quest for freedom that has helped make this opera such an evergreen. We’d all like to be more like her.

Carmen’s freedom contains an element of unscrupulousness. She toys with men. Is she capable of true love?
I wouldn’t say she toys with them – and if she does string them along a little, then only with their own compliance. She is fully honest and always says straight out what she wants. If they go along with it, that’s their decision, so yes, I do think that she has a capacity for love. I’d even say she’s ultra-sincere and devoted. And because her feelings are more intense, they burn out quicker than other people’s. She wants to live her life at full throttle, without compromises. We’re so used to thinking stuff through nowadays that her intensity seems odd and maybe slightly underhand. Which might be what makes her fascinating.

Carmen lives by her own rules. Does that mean she’s a feminist?
Yes and no. Obviously she’s not at all the self-sacrificing type. She ploughs her own furrow and is not under anyone’s thumb or influence. Back in the day, that was unusual and people would have been scandalised. The way I read her, though, Carmen’s only doing it for herself; she’s making her stand in her own interests, not the interests of a particular group. In that sense, it’s self-centred. She may show concern for others, her friends for instance, but she’s the leader. In the end she takes the decision.

Isn’t that a rather lonely position to take?
Liberty and loneliness are very much bedfellows for Carmen. She has major intimacy issues. I’m not sure if she’d ever have been able to find someone who accepted her for who she is, someone who protected her without clipping her wings. That actually makes her quite modern. I know so many fine, attractive, independent women who are alone because men are scared of them and seem to think that strong women don’t need anyone. Totally wrong. At the end of the day we all need someone who’s there for us.

Where would you say Carmen’s extreme independence of spirit comes from?
Difficult one. We’re given none of her backstory or what she’s been through. Maybe there was some abuse or some other formative event, who knows? One thing’s for sure: she doesn’t rely on anyone.

Men are entranced by how free Carmen is but don’t know how to deal with it. The situation culminates in femicide, with her lover killing her because she intends to dump him. Where do you stand on this aspect of the opera, which is as relevant now as it was then?
There’s no set way of reading the death of Carmen. Sometimes I think she had a death wish, fully aware that she couldn’t go on living with her emotions as intense as they were. Then there are times when I take her murder to be a reflection of Don José’s extreme frailty, the way he confuses love with ownership and can’t deal with her liberty and honesty. He wants to fully possess and control her, and when he realises he can’t, he kills her. It’s terribly sad. And it’s still going on today, tragically.

In the upcoming season you’ll be appearing as Carmen in Munich, Berlin, New York and London. What’s your connection to the character?
Carmen is hugely significant for me. I’ve been involved with the role for my entire career. My debut in London was in 2017 as Carmen in Bizet’s LA TRAGÉDIE DE CARMEN and later I sang Mercédès in CARMEN. The following year I was the Royal Opera House’s youngest ever Carmen and the production was live-streamed around the world; it gave me my breakthrough. I’ve gone in other directions since then and haven’t sung Carmen for two years, so it’s lovely to be kind of rediscovering the role at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. That’s the great thing about Carmen: it’s so rich and complex that you’re always finding new things.