Emmy Destinn 1 – Klein Svoboda Lucia (2026)

This first volume of a biographical trilogy presents Ema Destinnová not merely as an opera star, but as a thoughtful, questioning and deeply sensitive woman experiencing her era in all its beauty and cruelty. It follows her life and artistic journey from childhood and her family background through the pivotal Berlin period to her breakthrough on the world’s stages, including Covent Garden and Bayreuth, and her acceptance of an engagement at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Rather than offering a simple account of her successes, it portrays a woman who pays for her talent with inner tension, exhaustion and a constant search for meaning. Lucie Klein Svoboda draws on extensive research into verifiable sources, including correspondence, period newspapers and specialist literature, and combines it with literary storytelling firmly rooted in fact. Readers enter the backstage world of opera at the turn of the century, among composers, conductors and singers, as well as the broader aesthetic and sociological context of an age marked by censorship, national questions and the conflict between freedom and morality. Through roles such as Madame Butterfly, Pamina and Salome, Ema Destinnová reflects on her own experience, her relationship with power, faith and identity, and the price of art. This is not a novel, but a historical narrative of extraordinary inner intensity, showing the birth of a star not as a triumph but as a fragile process in which the voice becomes an instrument of personal and social defiance, while art remains the only space of true freedom.