After vocal setbacks, a powerful new voice for Goerke

Christine Goerke almost walked away from opera, right in the middle of her career. She’d been singing lyric soprano roles by Mozart and Handel, to great acclaim, and then suddenly, for no reason she could figure out, everything stopped working.

“I couldn’t get the vocal support I needed,” she recalled during a recent interview. “My throat felt tight. I was suddenly scared — I just couldn’t control what was going on.”

What was going on, as it turned out, was that her voice had gotten larger and more powerful than it had ever been, and done so about a decade before that kind of shift usually happens. Suddenly, it was as if she was trying to steer a forklift using bicycle handles.