Everyone asks me, ‘Are you on Facebook? Do you have a thousand friends?’” the eminent mezzo-soprano said recently in her apartment near Lincoln Center. “I do not. I’m not interested in being friends with people I don’t know in real life. I’ve gotten criticism for it. I got a comment on my Web site, someone saying, ‘You’re so ungrateful.’ But I’m not your friend; I’m an artist. I’m grateful for your support, but just because you came to see me sing does not give you a window into my private life.”
Ms. Graham’s apartment, with its comfortable couches and slightly crooked prints on the walls, has a quality unusual among the homes of people who travel a great deal: It seems like a place where someone actually lives, a real apartment. And Ms. Graham, with her Ugg boots and tights, her friendly laugh and disarming candor, seems like a real person.
She is precisely the kind of warm, engaging, mom-next-door presence that opera loves these days, but she doesn’t always follow the script. Ms. Graham doesn’t write a blog, and while her publicists set her up on Twitter, she often forgets she has it. This is, needless to say, far from the party line circa 2011 in the opera world, which tends to pin its hopes for continued relevance on the obsessive adoption of social media.
continue reading via The Diva’s Future: Susan Graham Is at the Top, But Where Else To Go? | The New York Observer
Photo: Dario Acosta
