In the early 1990s, a short girl with an enormous voice burst onto the Met stage, forcing audiences to sit up and take notice. Her visceral interpretations of roles such as Aida and even the Third Norn (her 1990 debut) quickly earned her a following among operagoers who hoped they were witnessing the birth of a major new dramatic soprano. At that time, Andrea Gruber’s potential seemed limitless. Then she disappeared for six years.

She’s back now, having earned rave reviews as Abigaille and Turandot (which she tackles again this month). As Abigaille, stalking wildly about the stage in her dominatrix drag, she moves and sings with the intensity of a caged tiger. Her approach to the vocal line is equally fearless: full-bodied and thrilling at both ends of her wide range. While respecting Verdi’s often-intricate ornamented vocal line, she weeps, whispers and bellows, singing with the kind of passion and commitment that Italian divas used to project a century ago during the verismo era.

Gruber is willing to speak frankly about the reasons for her prolonged absence from the Met. “After an Aida performance in 1995, Joe Volpe bought me out of my contract, because I was so high I couldn’t function,” she says. “It took me another year and a half to finally get sober. I’ve had a huge drug problem most of my life. I’ve been sober now for eight years. Feel free to print that. Honestly, I’d rather talk about that stuff than singing. I hate listening to singers talk about singing. It’s what I do, and I love it, but it’s not what my life is about.”

Let’s go to the Starbucks around the corner,” says Gruber, as she exits the elevator into the lobby of her Manhattan apartment building. We find a sidewalk table, where we are the target of a stream of friendly interruptions from Gruber’s neighborhood pals, who have clearly missed her the past few months that she’s been on the road.

Gruber’s roots are here on the Upper West Side. This is where she was born and raised, the daughter of two history professors. During a 2002 interview for the website of the Arena di Verona, she mentioned that one of the reasons she connects strongly with Nabucco’s Abigaille is the character’s “unrequited love for her father.” When pressed to elaborate on that point, she becomes uncharacteristically reticent. At first unsure how to respond, she finally answers, “Out of respect for him, I’d prefer not to discuss our relationship. Right now I don’t really have a relationship with him. He used to come to the opera a lot and visit me backstage, but … he doesn’t anymore.”

Gruber’s emotional troubles began when she was very young, and she sought refuge from them in drugs early on. “I started getting high when I was about eleven. When I was twelve, I was thrown out of school in New York and was sent to boarding school in Vermont. I was a very troubled child. Discipline problems. I started doing cocaine, heroin, LSD, alcohol — all of it. I was running around with people who carried guns. I first went into rehab when I was nineteen. I went to Phoenix House and became an inpatient right here on West Seventy-fourth Street. It’s like boot camp — they kind of try to beat you down into sobriety there and then want you to go out and be a role model. That wasn’t the best approach for me. When I got to the Met two years after that, I felt like the biggest fraud in the world. I had no real sense of myself. So the drugs came back.”

This time, it wasn’t heroin or cocaine. “I discovered painkillers. I could take a hundred Percoset in a day. I shot morphine for years, in huge quantities. When I was in the Young Artist Program, the Met actually paid for my second rehab, six years after my first one at Phoenix House.” Only twenty-five days after that second rehab ended, she was scheduled to sing Aida onstage at the Met. “I was not psychologically equipped to do that. I was trying to save my life.”

The next thing she knew, she had a sinus infection, and the doctors were prescribing Tylenol with codeine. “I remember looking at myself in my bathroom mirror and saying, ‘Is this a slip? Because I’m legitimately sick, and this has been prescribed by a doctor.’ But I can’t take drugs like that safely. You’ve got to be hyper-vigilant. I took those drugs, and things spiraled out of control from there. I may have had a voice at that time, but I had no technique. And when you take enough drugs, you’re completely numb. You can’t breathe properly. I wound up pushing so hard on my throat that my cords would swell, and I had to take cortisone to get the swelling down. So there I was with no technique, and I was stoned out of my gourd, and they were shooting me up with cortisone. One day I’d be in great shape, and things would work, and the next day I couldn’t phone it in. Try having a career when one day you’re phenomenal and the next you’re not hirable — you can’t be put on the stage.”

That was when she was bought out of her Met contract. It didn’t stop her drug use immediately; that continued for another year and a half. “Nothing meant anything to me anymore. I wanted to die, but I couldn’t kill myself. I am truly the luckiest person in the world that the mechanism of my voice didn’t give out. I did no damage to it, which is just a miracle.”

Gruber finally joined a twelve-step program, which she continues to this day. During recovery, she ballooned until her weight was somewhere north of 300 pounds. “I was scheduled to sing Elisabetta in Don Carlo at Salzburg in 1998,” she says. “And the director, Herbert Wernicke, fired me, because I was too fat.” Three years later, she decided to have gastric bypass surgery. “And I’ve decided to go public about it. I lost 130 pounds. Now I eat whatever I want — I’m not obsessed with food anymore. I was lucky, because I was fat, but I was healthy. The weight came off, I didn’t suffer from any sickness, I healed well. It was the greatest thing I ever did. I did it because after September 11, I watched people die and deal with life-and-death matters. And it occurred to me that there were huge chunks of my time that were being eaten up with shame and physical disgust with who I was. I didn’t want to waste another second of the little time I had left with something that I could get help with. I didn’t care if I sang again — it wasn’t about that. It was about having a life that was as unburdened as possible.”

Gruber kept the surgery a secret from her vocal coach, soprano Ruth Falcon, until after it had taken place. “Since then, Ruth’s been amazed at how much more in touch I’ve become with my body, because there isn’t so much fat between me and my mechanism. I can finally feel what I’m doing. I can actually feel the muscles working in a way I never did before — I can isolate points in my body that I never could. And I love the fact that I can climb those stairs in Turandot, and run up the stairs on that Nabucco set.”

September 11, 2001, brought other enormous changes in Gruber’s outlook. In part, it accounts for the success she’s had with her new favorite role — Minnie in La Fanciulla del West, which she sang to great acclaim in Seattle last spring. “That role is more ‘me’ than anything else I will ever sing. She’s big and kind of awkward, and she’s a big sister to all of these guys. She has a huge capacity for understanding, and she’s extremely strong yet extremely vulnerable at the same time. I live right next door to the fire station, the 25th Ladder company, and these guys have been like my family for twelve years. I lost seven of them — seven friends of mine — on September 11. Eight now, because one of them just died with lung disease from what he inhaled on that date. Guys with hugely diseased lungs from 2001 are turning up left and right. I wound up spending three weeks in the fire station, day and night, just doing whatever they needed me to do.

“It wasn’t until I started working on Minnie that I ‘got it’ and recognized the parallels. When she starts saying at the end, ‘I helped you write your first letter to send to Santo Domingo, I took care of you when you were up all night delirious, dreaming about your sister Maude….’ I had experiences like that, and I understood it. And I always do whatever I can for my guys in the fire department. You know, Joe Volpe donated seventy-five tickets for the guys to come see me in Turandot. Gave the tickets to them outright. He doesn’t talk about that sort of thing, but he did it.”

And just how did Gruber find her way back into the Met fold after all those years following her dismissal? “Consistency,” she answers. “Putting one foot in front of the other, being willing to put my ego aside. I had to be willing to come back and cover Guleghina and sing two performances of Nabucco. I needed to not be singing full-time for the first six years of my sobriety. I needed to get a solid base of who I am as a human being and how I have to live my life. Joe Volpe came backstage to see me after that first Nabucco, and I said, ‘I just want to thank you for firing me. Because if you hadn’t, I might never have survived.’”

She takes much of her interpretive style from the pop giants who shaped her youth. Tops among them is Janis Joplin. “I think that her phrasing, her sense of musicianship, her connection to text and to the sense of the music, were extraordinary. You want to know who I think has the greatest vocal technique of any pop singer? Tina Turner. I saw this woman in concert sing for two hours, every single note in tune, dancing, singing, breathing — that kind of precision was amazing. And Aretha Franklin — my God!”

When Gruber talks about her revitalized career, her joy is almost palpable. “I never get over being in awe of the gift of this business,” she insists. “I never want to get nonchalant about how amazing this is. I sing at the Metropolitan Opera! People pay money to hear me sing! What do I have to complain about?” As proof of her conviction, she proudly unveils a tattoo emblazoned across her lower back: the first measures, music and text, of “In questa reggia.” 

ERIC MYERS is the author of three books. His writing has also appeared in Playbill, Time Out New York and The New York Times.