It’s midnight in Australia: the bewitching hour, which somehow feels fitting for a chat with Angela Gheorghiu, the Romanian-born superstar soprano, whose nicknames include ‘Draculette’. Then the moment turns pumpkin-shaped. It’s the wrong phone number!

Frantically trying various combinations of the international code and the digits I’ve been given, I finally get through 10 minutes late: hardly ideal for any interview, but somewhat terrifying when it’s an opera diva with a reputation for being ‘difficult’ when she wants to be, and particularly since it’s been stressed that I must stick to my allocated time.

But I needn’t have worried. Answering the phone a world away in Bucharest, to talk about performing in Australia for the first time, Gheorghiu sounds reassuringly serene. “It’s OK. I’m at a house with a swimming pool and nice garden. I’m really in heaven, so it’s OK,” she says, her voice mellifluous and expressive, her heavy accent seductively attractive.

Long fêted as one of the most gifted, glamorous and outspoken sopranos of her generation – the last of the great divas, as some see her – Angela Gheorghiu grew up under Nicolae Ceausescu’s totalitarian dictatorship. However, the Communist regime was toppled during her final year at Bucharest’s Academy of...