Danielle de Niese: from prodigy to star

Her Glyndebourne debut came in 2005, when she was brought in at short notice to appear in David McVicar’s staging of Handel’s Giulio Cesare. That performance brought her instant international fame as the all-singing, all-dancing heroine of an immensely successful production still part of the Glyndebourne repertory. It also brought her into contact with the festival’s executive chairman, Gus Christie, whom she later married and with whom she has two children, raised while continuing with her international career.

As well as her very considerable experience in opera – at the world’s very best addresses – De Niese is an artist who, from the beginning, was interested in musicals as well. In recent years, she has played the dual role of Aldonza and Dulcinea in a West End revival of Man of La Mancha in 2019 and Giulietta in Aspects of Love in 2023.

“I spend a lot of time telling people that, contrary to what they might believe, opera and musical theatre are very close to being the same,” she says. “People who are not in opera imagine that it’s this different world.”

“We, too, are a dynamic industry working to story-tell theatrically as much as we are looking to show a great vocal performance. There’s a difference in that your voice can get you places in opera even if you might not be the greatest actor or not have the greatest stage presence – there’s still room for an amazing, once-in-a-generation voice; even if they don’t have all the ingredients, they’ve got one of the key ones for a particular role or a particular repertoire,” she explains.

“For me, the greatest thing about opera is that it was colour-blind before any other industry. We don’t cast based on what you look like, we don’t cast based on your skin colour.”

Across her three-decade career, she has become one of opera’s most in-demand stars. So, when she is offered a new role from the classical repertoire, what makes her decide: ‘Yes, I’ll do this one’?

“Well, a lot of what I’m looking for is whether I’m vocally in the right space for that role,” she explains. “There have been times when a certain offer came a little early, and I said no. Some of those nos have been painful, because they’re enticing me and they say the most amazing things.

“But because I made my debut at the New York Metropolitan at the age of 19, I’ve been growing up in front of everybody. I’ve not had the luxury of being wrapped in cotton wool until [people think]: ‘She’s ready.’ And when is the voice ever ready? Because it’s always changing and developing.”

She gives as an example the role of Adina in Donizetti’s comedy L’Elisir d’Amore (The Love Potion), with its scintillating coloratura writing. “That was one I’d been offered previously in other houses and at that time it was four, five or six years in advance [of the planned production]. And I just remember going: ‘Yes, but it’s only 2006, and I don’t really know what my voice is going to be like in 2012.’ It’s a gamble that singers are asked to take.”

‘I spend a lot of time telling people that, contrary to what they might believe, opera and musical theatre are very close to being the same’

Sometimes the voice may have changed by the time the contract rolls along. “But with that Elisir, I had said no to, I think, three other ones, and then it got to around 2011 and I sang it at Glyndebourne and then other places and everything was hunky-dory.”

She also points out that the internet age has made singers ‘trying out’ roles away from the limelight impossible. “There used to be stories about people who went, say, to Australia to try things out, but that can’t happen any more. Everybody can just look it up and see how someone’s first Carmen went in Australia.” This brings us neatly to an iconic role she added to her repertoire very recently, in an Opera Australia production launched in Sydney in 2025.

“For 10 years, people said to me: ‘You were born to do Carmen.’ I said: ‘I’m not Carmen. I wish I were, but I’m a soprano and it’s in the lower mezzo range.’ But eventually, I thought: ‘Everybody’s going on about this. Why don’t I sing the Habanera in concert and just see what it feels like?’ And I was totally struck to discover that encapsulated in that aria is a lot of Carmen’s whole story.

“I realised that I needed to sing it with the voice I have now. I started to make some sounds in my middle to lower range. People said: ‘We don’t recognise that, even from musical theatre.’ Some of the sounds I am able to make with today’s voice just have a kind of core and a centre to them that is different [to my opera sound].”

Approaching the character, the first thing she did was to read Prosper Mérimée’s original 1845 novella. “The thing that surprised me the most – and this is not to denigrate any Carmen that came before me – was that I found so much depth in the novel that I didn’t always recognise as being depicted in a theatrical retelling of it,” she says.

“When people do Carmen, they do sexy and they do enigma. But in the novel, Carmen is wide-eyed about things, she’s curious, she’s very in touch with people, she’s instantly able to key into somebody.

‘There have been times when a certain offer came a little early, and I said no’

“I knew what to do, how to bring that out, and I felt her also to be warm, not in the way that I, Danielle, am warm, but in a ‘reach-out-and-grab-the-world-around-you’ kind of way; so I was hugely intrigued. I also liked the idea of having two complex characters [in the piece] rather than one abuser and one libertine.

“This is the thing that I love about Carmen but which also speaks to my whole intention in opera. I just really believe. I have not yet seen anything in opera that I hadn’t thought was believable – although sometimes, if it’s not well executed theatrically, then we haven’t done our job.” 

“It takes so many elements. It’s not just the director or the singer; everybody has to be on that page,” she says. “You have every opportunity as a performer to bring the audience with you, but you can never let go. I’ll never, ever leave my story, even if I’m suffering, even if I’ve got a hair in my mouth – which happened a lot as Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare. I can’t do that. That’s what makes me live for the art form.”
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Danielle de Niese: digging below the surface

Audiences in the UK will get their chance to make up their own minds about De Niese’s Carmen next year: she will sing the role again in a Glyndebourne staging.

De Niese’s performances are always individual and highly thought through in overview and in detail – there are moments or individual scenes in which she has spotted new potential in the words or the music that bring renewed depth to the character. Even her appearances in a standard role such as Musetta in Puccini’s La Bohème in Richard Jones’ staging for the Royal Opera were unforgettable.

“I think that’s a bit of a signature for me – not so much the role but the idea that I can take something that people know and slightly sand it down and resurface it...What happens in the really famous roles is that singers can, without realising it, fall into the tread of how it was always done, and off they go.” In La Bohème, for example, she worked with Jones to tweak her character’s actions and motives in one of the arias to better serve a line she was grappling with. “It allowed me to go: ‘Now, this character can work.’”

She adds: “My heart’s on my sleeve when I say this: I believe in the possibility of opera. Every plot is real. Every moment is real. There are lots of different ways in which you can tell these stories, but I love telling those stories in a real way, especially in a role that everyone knows.

“I’m not in the headspace of: ‘Well, let me look at every other singer’s interpretation and I’ll do the opposite, and then I will be special.’ It’s not that. Often I don’t look at anything and I just kind of go: ‘What’s there?’ Sometimes colleagues ask me how I find things and actually my answer is always the same – I just take what’s there.”
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Q&A Danielle de Niese

What was your first theatrical job? 

I played the child lead role of the Vengeance (a little rebel fighting alongside the adult revolutionaries) in a musical called The Vengeance based on Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities at the National Theatre in Melbourne, Australia.

What was your first non-theatrical job?

At the age of 17, my mum told me I would do a summer job at my high school answering phones at the reception at summer camp. She wanted me to do a desk job and put in the hours, so that I would always appreciate how fortunate I was to be able to follow my passion into a career and to never, ever take that for granted.

What do you wish someone had told you starting out? 

It’s hard to think of something. Nothing would have changed my mind about entering into opera.

Who or what is your greatest influence?

My mother is the most amazing guiding light, she was my greatest role model and still is today. 

What is your advice for auditions?

In the middle of an unnatural situation where the pressure is on... try to hold on to the qualities that make you uniquely you as an artist. And be yourself.

If you hadn’t been an opera singer, what would you have done? 

Olympic gold medallist figure skater/ice dancer, like Oksana Baiul, or perhaps a trial lawyer.

Do you have any theatrical superstitions or rituals?

I have various little things my family have given me that I always have nearby. I also have some incredibly lucky bent nails that I found on stage at the Metropolitan Opera, when I became the youngest in history to debut there [at 19 years old]. My biggest ritual is making sure I have time for my warm-up. Other than that, I am very easy and relaxed backstage.
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Alongside singing some of opera’s best-known parts, De Niese has also created significant roles in newly commissioned operas from Roxane Coss in Peruvian composer Jimmy López’s Bel Canto at Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2015 to the title role in Eurydice, by US composer Matthew Aucoin, at Los Angeles Opera in 2020.

How collaborative can you be working with a living composer as opposed to, say, Puccini? “Sometimes, a portion of the work has been written before I am asked to take part, and you can hear that, because once they know where my voice lives most happily, the tailor-made aspect of the writing is evident,” she says, citing her upcoming performance in an opera by Jake Heggie called The Judgment of Paris, premiering in July at Festival Napa Valley in California.

Danielle de Niese: directorial debut

Also on the horizon is De Niese’s directorial debut, in which she will have to bring a new skill set to an opera she knows well: Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, which tours England this summer. “It’s hugely exciting. When I was first contacted by [the producer] Wild Arts I thought I was going to be asked to recommend somebody, so I was thrilled to be asked to direct it myself.

“We did an interview for the Wild Arts patrons and started to break things down. In it, I said Figaro was a perfect piece, so it’s quite difficult to muck it up; and right away the conductor Orlando Jopling said he thought it was really easy to muck it up,” she laughs.

“Actually, we were both right. I meant that if you do a stock Figaro, the music will still leave the audience in delirium. But it’s easy to make a forgettable staging, so I’m looking for the right context in which to present complex relationships. I have no idea how it’s going to go, but we do have a good story, and at least I can say that I like to tell good stories – so I hope I will.”