'Rising soprano glad to be singing Wagner'

Quad-City Times

30 September 2015

Heidi Melton approached her first Richard Wagner opera with the caution of nearing a wild animal. "I had always thought that I couldn't look at it or touch it because everybody had said, 'It's a voice-ruiner, don't do it till you're 50,'" Melton, 33, said.

But in 2007, while she was in a young opera artist program in San Francisco, she got a last-minute call to replace a diva who would not be available for the first few weeks of a production of Wagner's "Tannhäuser."

"It just fit," the soprano said in a phone interview from San Francisco. "I thought, 'Hey, this might be something.'"