A FORMER Nottingham midwife is topping the bill at the home of Wagner's opera this summer.
World-renowned opera singer Catherine Foster has landed a principal role as Brünnhilde in German composer Wagner's opera, Der Ring des Nibelungen, at this year's exclusive Bayreuth Festival.
Ms Foster was a midwife at Nottingham's City Hospital until leaving to pursue professional singing in her late twenties and has since created a successful opera career in Europe.
Ms Foster said: "In 1993, I was looking after a couple who had just come on to the labour suite and as we were chatting I found out that the husband was quite a figure in the amateur opera circuit of Nottingham.
"I said that I was interested in singing and was looking for a teacher at that time and he gave me some names that led me to Pamela Cook MBE."
Pamela Cook, who founded internationally-renowned Mansfield-based girls' choir Cantamus, encouraged Catherine into professional singing and she left midwifery in 1995 after securing a place at the Birmingham Conservatoire.
Catherine said: "I remember standing outside the door with my resignation in my hand and my heart in my mouth and even walked away once.
"Then I just thought – I can either go through life as a 'could have been' or I could give it a go and see where the experience took me."
Catherine "just sort of fell into" opera singing, adding: "When I first started learning to sing, I said I didn't want to be an opera singer and I never wanted to sing Wagner. It was pretty naïve of me really, to say I didn't like something I had never seen.
"Opera was originally written for the ordinary person, it's just people who have made it exclusive and highbrow and it's not – to see it and hear it live is incredible."
Catherine moved to Germany to pursue an opera career in 2001, and is now an established Wagnerian singer who has performed as Brünnhilde across Europe, recording performances to DVD, Blu-Ray and CD.
Brünnhilde appears in three of the four operas which make up er Ring des Nibelungen, commonly known as the Ring Cycle.
The operas are around 18 hours long in their entirety and are based loosely on characters from Norse sagas and epic German poem Nibelungenlied.
Ms Foster said: "I'm very happy that I've done quite a few Ring Cycles before and that I have got experience because Bayreuth is a lot of pressure.
"I have been singing this repertoire since 2007 and I learn something every single time I do this; I find something else in the music, something else in the lines – I'm never bored with it."
Catherine is now in full rehearsals in Bayreuth, the home of Wagner's self-designed opera house, the Festspielhaus, dedicated solely to Wagner's works.
Festival tickets can take ten years to obtain, but two lucky attendees at this year's performances will be Catherine's parents Alan and Josephine Foster, of Wilford.
Mrs Foster admitted neither she nor her husband had been interested in opera before Catherine's move to operatic singing, but said: "We're very proud, and she has worked extremely hard and she deserves the success she is enjoying.
"This operatic singing is a gift to her."
