They Couldn’t Have Fired The Costumer?

In one of the more bizarre stories to come out of the UK’s Royal Opera House in recent years, acclaimed soprano Deborah Voigt has apparently been fired from an upcoming production of Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos for being too large to fit into the dress the costumer had designed for the role. There’s no denying that Voigt is a large woman, but she is also quite a well-known woman who has made Ariadne her signature role over the course of a very distinguished career. But the casting director at the Royal Opera insists that the producer’s vision for the production simply precluded Ms. Voigt’s participation, and further added that, in his opinion, many singers use their profession as “an excuse to eat too much.”