The adverts for the Royal Opera’s latest revival of La fanciulla del West don’t give much space to the eponymous “Girl of the West” at all. Instead, top billing has gone to the swarthy Argentine tenor José Cura, who plays the dashing Dick Johnson in Puccini’s exotic romp, set in Gold Rush California. And yet it’s this bad-boy bandit’s pistol-waving lover, the fearless Minnie, whom I can’t wait to hear. For Eva-Maria Westbroek, the powerful Dutch soprano, says she has been dreaming of singing the part since she was 19.

“I bought the DVD of this [Covent Garden] production,” she says, “and every time when I was feeling blue I’d look at it and it would cheer me up. Now I feel like I’m living my young girl’s dream.”

Minnie is something of an oddball figure in Puccini’s usual role call of consumptive victims (she owns a saloon, she does Bible study, she ends up alive at the final curtain). But Westbroek defends her to the hilt against charges of implausibility. “She’s like Mother Teresa in the beginning, but human too, and when she’s in love, she’s totally in love. I love her purity, I love her sincerity. And I really relate to her insecurity.”

Pure escapism isn’t a problem for Westbroek anyway. She loves the detail of Piero Faggioni’s unfashionably picture-postcard production of Fanciulla, which dates back to 1977 (“so cute, and sweet and truthful”), and admits to some relief at not having to sing in a gritty “konzept” staging set in a car park. She would rather forget, for example, a production of Schreker’s little known shocker, Die Gezeichneten. “Beautiful — but it has this perverted story, and in the last act I ended up dead in a bloodbath being raped by the baritone. And it was just horrible.”

She saw the point of it, of course. “But music and theatre are there to lift your spirits and inspire your senses — to see pictures that you’ve never seen anywhere else and to get into somebody else’s life. And if it’s all too dark and black you can see that on the bus, you know? I want to be dazzled.”

You might already know about her triumphs. At Covent Garden we’ve seen this soprano sing the most passionate, thrilling and reckless Sieglinde you could imagine — for many the highlight of the Royal Opera’s Ring Cycle. Before that she was, in the words of this newspaper’s critic, “the perfect bored, loveless slut”, singing Shostakovich’s murderous Katerina Ismailova in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in a performance that simply didn’t put a foot wrong

But getting to the dazzling stage in Westbroek’s career hasn’t been easy. Growing up in a small village between Haarlem and Leiden (“very, very boring”), musical inspiration had come early. She had a lucky encounter in her teens with a faded Bulgarian diva, her first singing teacher, who gave her a copy of La traviata with Sutherland and Pavarotti that had her hooked. Music college in the Hague, though, was mostly a slog. “I felt like my voice was a horse out of control, galloping away with me always.”

That wasn’t surprising. At an age when most singers limit themselves to Mozart or Handel, Westbroek already had the lungs and temperament for much meatier repertoire. When she finally found a teacher who understood her voice (the tenor James McCray) she found herself singing Tosca at the age of 25, the prize for winning a prestigious competition in Rome.

But what came next, she admits, were “years of drought”, made all the more miserable by the growing achievements of her then boyfriend (now husband), the tenor Frank van Aken. Westbroek even found herself in a novelty Amsterdam restaurant as a singing waitress. “They kept me on even though I was a terrible waitress,” she laughs. “For a table of two I ordered 233 pastas and I’d be called to the manager, who gave me other jobs.”

Still, at least she was still singing. “It got me into a good place,” she says. “If you go on auditions all the time and it’s always ‘nein, danke’ it’s so depressing. There, people enjoyed my voice and that made me feel I shouldn’t stop.”

Eventually she turned a corner. “I went to Germany, I got an agent, and all of a sudden it all turned around.” She bagged a five-year stint at Stuttgart opera, singing all kinds of roles, in all kinds of languages (German, Italian, French Russian and Czech), and building up a formidable repertoire. The rape in the bloodbath was presumably less of a highlight.

Most importantly, the combination of the Stuttgart experience and drought years grounded her in a way that means that Westbroek is unlikely to go the way of her more heavily publicised colleagues and end up burning out on the international circuit. “There must be a lot of pressure, but I’m not one of those singers. I don’t have a career in CDs, and I’m not promoted in that way.”

Being married to another singer obviously helps (Van Aken makes his ROH debut in November in Strauss’s Elektra). “I think it works great — we know what we’re talking about; he knows me very well, he knows my voice very well. He comes to my rehearsals when he can, and I do for him.” The couple’s shared dream — and few smug marrieds can equal this — is to sing Tristan und Isolde together. And have children, too? “No thanks! I’d have to give this up and I love it too much. Or he would have to and he’s just as passionate as I am. But that’s fine.”

Apart from her other half, the singer who made the biggest impression on Westbroek was one Plácido Domingo. They met when she played Sieglinde in London to his Siegmund. “We were talking about his life and he said: ‘I don’t even want to think about whether I’m better than anybody at this, but I do think I love it more than anyone. That’s why I’ve come so far.’ Isn’t that wonderful?”

It’s a credo that Westbroek has taken to heart. She wants to love it all as much as possible, while it lasts. “A couple of years ago I was a singing waitress. Now I’m singing my dream role at Covent Garden. I’m not asking for anything else.”

La fanciulla del West opens on Sept 16 at the Royal Opera House (020-7304 4000)

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