Caballé: Beyond Music (Euroarts, 2003)

Caballé: Beyond Music is a wonderful introduction to Barcelona born Diva Montserrat Caballé. This film explores her life on and off the stage with performance clips ranging from 1965 to 2002, interviews with her contemporaries, friends and family and candid home footage.

I found Caballé charming and vivacious. She exudes a fiery personality and a great deal of humor. I enjoyed her reminiscences of her childhood; the opera house in Barcelona is stunning. Actually this film is a great way to see a number of opera houses. In each setting Caballé talks about her experiences in that particular city.

There are a number of opera greats interviewed and I loved hearing about her collaboration with Queen's Freddie Mercury. A Queen band member had me laughing out loud when he describes Freddie’s initial instinct to tone his act down when on stage with her. Then his astonishment at what it was like to actually share the stage with Montserrat Caballé: “I mean she’s an opera singer, she was up there next to him like a bloody volcano!”

For the first time I had a sense of the power of an operatic pianissimo. Caballé’s controlled quiet singing is utterly gripping.