Gabi Sadeh, who was the opera singer of Israel’s Ha-Ha’iteda and was crowned Europe’s Singer of the Year 18 years ago, was asked what it does to him when he looks back at the glorious career he had, his answer is summed up in a surprising word: “Nothing”.
“My theory is that when you have an experience, you experience it fully in its time,” he says. “When it ends, I move on to other things. With all due respect to my career, which arranged my life to a certain extent and was great, even if some Uzbek singer blew garlic in my face that she ate before a performance. It’s all over, and I don’t look back at all. I’m living the present, which for me is also the future, what’s more, my dreams as an opera singer have come true.”
Sade, 70, the son of opera singers, grew up in Bucharest. According to him, the unforgettable experience of his childhood was when, at the age of 6, he watched the opera “Carmen” by Bizet with his parents. There, he said, he was stunned by Carmen’s murder. “I had to go backstage to check if she was alive,” he says. At that time, he still did not dream of becoming an opera singer, “something to be expected for a boy who in the morning would hear his parents yelling at him in operatic voices”, according to him. “I played the cello, after my parents decided that the instrument suited me as a fat and small child”.
At the age of 12, he immigrated to Israel with his mother, Amalia, and his older sister, the actress Sandra Sade, who is two years older than him, while his father stayed another year in Romania. “As a family that belonged to Bucharest’s aristocracy, we had an amazing transition from the luxurious villa to the Bat Yam crossing, which seemed to me like the Wild West,” he recalls. “While my mother and sister did not stop crying because of the conditions there, I was happy there among the dunes and the Jebels.”
After two years, they moved to Givat Aliya in Jaffa, where he was active in the “Hashomer Hatzair” movement. Later he sold the cello and bought a guitar instead, with which he began to perform pop songs and was discovered on the radio program “Tshoot Rashonoth” and in Shmuel Shay’s interview evenings. These were a springboard for him to join the Armored Forces band. “They kind of oppressed me there,” he recalls. “‘Turn off the microphone, he covers the others,’ they would say about me.”
When he was released from the army, he tried his luck in industry. “It didn’t go so well for me as a soloist,” he admits. His attempts to join a group were also unsuccessful. Then he was offered to form a duo with Dorit Fen, a member of the Nahal band, who later became his wife and is known today as the fashion designer Dorit Sade. In the meantime Sade sang in commercials and appeared in children’s shows. He also studied at Tel Aviv University for a bachelor’s degree in social sciences and continued at the Music Academy. His plans changed when the great singer Raphael Aryeh came to teach at the academy. “You’re going to the opera,” he interrupted when he heard Sde sing. “Aryeh was quite an old fashioned, but he gave me the first push,” notes Sde.
Sandra Sade (Photo: Guy Hecht)After four years of studying at the “Guildhall School of Music” in London, Sde returned to his country and played Freddie, Eliza Doolittle’s lover, in the third production of the musical “My Fair Lady” alongside Rita, from there he went on to portray the character of Don Basilio in the opera “Marriage of Figueroa” by Mozart , and later starred in a variety of leading roles on opera stages in Israel and abroad. In the new Israeli opera, of which he was a pioneer, Sade starred, among others, in “The Rise and Fall of the Mahogany City” by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill; in “La Boheme” by Puccini; In “Faust” by Charles Gounod; in “Samson and Delilah” by Camus Saint-Saëns; in “Hoffman Stories” by Jacques Oppenbach; in “Alpha and Omega” by Gil Shohat; in “Journey to the End of the Thousand” by AB Yehoshua and Yosef Bardanashvili and more.
Hello Hello
Throughout his career, Sde was supposed to share the lead role in the Barcelona production of the opera “Pick Dam” by Tchaikovsky, with the famous Spanish opera singer Plácido Domingo. “Shalom-Shalom” and “Romanian Kebab”, says Sade. “But then he got sick and I actually appeared in his place.”
He also crossed paths with Luciano Pavarotti, the famous Italian tenor singer. “Luciano Pavarotti taught me when he came to Israel to perform and conduct a workshop here,” he says. “‘Singing opera is like football,’ he told me. Every time I made a sound, he would kick me where I was sitting to get more energy out of me In singing. Pavarotti was a charming man, but his excessive love of spaghetti finished him. With my own eyes I saw him destroy a huge plate before a performance.”
When did you decide to get off the stage?
“When I performed in Stuttgart in the opera ‘Tristan and Isolde’ by Wagner. This opera lasted six hours, something crazy. I might have been fine there vocally, but I felt that my body was not built for such massive masses, especially not to sing eternally long arias that seemed to never end. Although the crowd applauded me there, even enthusiastically, I realized it was time to slow down. A tenor in opera, when he crosses 60 – either he moves to baritone, as happened to Plácido Domingo, or he stays with his tenor in secondary character roles of elders and servants. I did try, but then every role I was offered didn’t come close to Verdi’s Othello. I realized that it was better to close Basta in terms of an international career and settle for other performances. You can stay in the profession and grow old in it with dignity without running around in the world.”
How did you deal with the loss of stardom?
“No problem, because I had no self-worship. I was never giddy with the fame that my international career brought me. More than once, when the audience cheered me at the end of a show, all I wanted was to go home! However, I didn’t completely disengage from the stage. I continue to perform with the singer Keren Hadar and under the musical direction of the musician Amri Rivlin in the show ‘La Scala on the Champs Elysees’, where I have the opportunity to leave the operatic repertoire a bit. Even when I rarely perform, I make sure to do a vocal warm-up every day. Once a singer, always a singer.”
the great enemy
As part of the life routine of an opera singer, Sde is careful of spicy foods, abstains from drinking alcohol and before performances he does not eat dairy foods and eggplants, which cause heartburn. “Viruses are the greatest enemy of an opera star,” he says. “The worst was on flights. To protect myself from viruses, I would put on a surgical mask, and this was before the Corona period. Even on the longest flights, I avoided eating for fear that some virus would enter me.”
His children are the singer Mika Sade and the musician Uri Sade, who lives in London. “I get a lot of pleasure from both of them, but the one who continues me in the musical direction is Alma Moshunov, the daughter of my sister, Sandra Sade, and Moni Moshunov,” he notes. ?’, she once asked. So we tried and she got a truly operatic voice. Now she’s doing well in Berlin.”
About his sister Sandra Sade’s acting career, he says: “I always knew she had star genes. When Moni (Moshonov) and I pass by her on the street, they don’t pay attention to us and pounce on her with hugs and kisses and requests for autographs.”
Today, according to him, he helps his wife Dorit in her fashion studio. “She’s my boss there, which means I’ve moved behind the scenes,” he says. “Besides, I treat people using the Dianetics method, through which I free them from negative charges. The most fun I have is being ‘Grandpa Gabi,’ as my grandson, Adam, calls me, A little will be 4 years old. It really suits me. In my nature I love children.”