Dame in the Dales

The woman who has just thrilled audiences and critics alike in her role as the imperious Countess in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades for Opera North in Leeds ushers me into her living room, waving at her mobile phone as she hastily explains she is trying to sort out a terrible mix-up over dates, before disappearing. As I sit there waiting for her I wonder, perhaps, if I am about to meet a real diva.

But when Dame Josephine returns, moments later, looking relaxed and elegant in jeans, problem sorted – she has managed to reschedule an opera master class she was taking in Cardiff – it soon becomes clear that nothing could be further from the truth.

I discover that Dame Josephine, one of the worlds leading singing actresses, renowned for her vibrant, flexible soprano and unusual intensity on stage, is warm, welcoming and refreshingly down-to-earth. At 71, although she easily looks a good ten years younger, her life is pretty hectic.

She made her operatic debut in 1964 and, since then, has performed worldwide. Recently, she has enjoyed starring roles with the English National Opera, and she remains, after nearly 50 years in the business, at the top of her game. But it is here, in her mid-17th century five-bedroom stone cottage in the Dales, that she truly relaxes. Although born in Yorkshire, she grew up in London and this is her bolthole.

Modest and self-effacing, Dame Josephine appears genuinely surprised when I mention how terrific her reviews have been for her recent portrayal of the Countess in the Queen of Spades. She hasn’t read many of them.

I tell her how the Independent on Sunday, for example, says her character dominates the opera, the orchestra igniting when she is centre stage. And one or two of the papers can’t resist marvelling at the fact that, despite the fact she is over 70, her voice and figure remain intact.

Dame Josephine takes it all in her stride. When she is here, she immerses herself in the countryside and nature. She loves gardening and walking, often up to 20 miles at a time. “I love tootling off in the morning with a bar of chocolate and a bottle of water and coming back at night. There are such wonderful walks,” she says.

Although now based in Devon, where, on top of everything else, she breeds Arabian horses, she spends at least one week every month in her Dales cottage, driving more than five hours in her Honda Civic to get here. Although she was offered a flat in the centre of Leeds during the Queen of Spades run, she insisted on driving back to her bolthole every night.

“It takes her an hour to get here from Leeds. The drive is quite long, but I love it. Depending on the weather, the landscape has a different beauty every day,” she says. “You arrive back and the silence and magic of the fells is extraordinary. The light is amazing, whether the valley is full of mist or the sun is shining. Sometimes it looks as if everywhere is touched with velvet.”

She and her husband, opera director Ande Anderson, bought a cottage in this quiet village just before he died in 1996. She has been on her own now for 15 years.

“It’s a very pretty little village and it has a special position, right in the middle of the National Park. Everybody who lives in it cares about the area. And there isn’t a car park, so the only people who come here tend to be walkers, who are lovely,” she says.

She and Ande, who was from South Shields, had been happily married for 30 years. “After his death, I found it impossible to cope with the cottage we had bought together without him, so I sold it and bought this one.”

She didnt bother getting a survey done, since the solidly-built cottage, she reasoned, had stood up for hundreds of years and was likely to stand for a few more. She moved in six months after Ande died.

“This place been a major solace for me ever since. I poured a lot of love into it and found that therapeutic. The cottage takes you in its arms a bit,” she says.

Dame Josephine loves the huge fireplace with wood burning stove and original features including a beehive oven, complete with wrought iron cooking implements, ornate plasterwork and mullioned windows. “There is not a single plastic window in the place and, although the cottages are small, they have these baronial inglenooks,” she says.

She lowered the attic floor, converting it to add two cosy bedrooms, and opened up the living space and put an electric Aga in. She also scoured salvage yards for stone and a period dog grate to restore the fireplace in the sitting room.

There are framed photographs of Ande on the upstairs landing, taken when she first met him, at the London Opera Centre. “I worked with him a few times – he was terribly hard on me,” she laughs. “He was the sweetest loveliest man, but I think he thought the rest of the cast would think I was being favoured.”

After he died, she remained busy. “I was working all the time, because I had commitments. But it was very tough,” she says.

“Now it’s just love of the job. I am a born performer.”

When she is in the Dales, she feels she has returned to her roots. I’m a good Northern lass at heart,” she says. Dame Josephine was born in Sheffield and the family moved to London when she was eight. She still has cousins in Leeds and Otley. “I have an emotional contact with the area, a sense of belonging, I know where I am here.”

Despite no-one in the family having a musical background, Dame Josephine decided she was going to be an opera singer aged just 17, having seen the Barber of Seville on a school trip to France. ”I decided, just like that, I don’t really know where it came from,” she says.

Her father, who worked for a weighing scales company and her mother, a housewife, supported her. “My parents were used to me being fairly outrageous. I could be a bit of a drama queen. I think they were just glad I wanted to do something,” she says.

After training at the London Opera Centre, she shot to fame in La Traviata at the English National Opera in the early seventies. During her long career, working with the greatest conductors, there have been many highlights, including being invited to Salzburg by Herbert von Karajan to sing the title role in Tosca with Pavarotti.

She is as enthusiastic about her work now as when she started, directing her first opera, Tosca, in Dorset, in the summer. When working in Barcelona recently, she says, it struck her just how happy she is, doing what she is doing after so many years and still loving it: “How did I know that this was what I should do at 17?”

Despite constantly being in demand all over the world, she loves returning to work with Opera North. “It’s a wonderful company, easily my favourite,” she says.

She recalls the time when she had just moved in to her cottage and was pulling down all the ivy from the walls when two walkers stopped to chat. Dame Josephine was filthy and sweaty, covered in bits of stone and muck and surrounded by chaos. After they had talked for a bit, one of the walkers commented: “Do you know you have got a double? You look just like Dame Josephine Barstow, she’s an opera singer, sings at Opera North sometimes.”

She laughs: “I had to tell them that this wild, bedraggled person standing in front of them was the same woman.”