Opera singer Danielle de Niese: from Young Talent Time to top soprano

A Young Talent Time winner at the age of nine, Danielle de Niese has gone on to become one of the world’s leading opera sopranos. Jane Wheatley

Danielle de Niese. Photo: Tina Hillier / Telegraph Media Group Limited 2016

It is a summer evening in England and soprano Danielle de Niese is playing Rosina in The Barber of Seville, a girl on the brink of womanhood, eager for romance and railing at the constraints imposed by her crusty guardian. As the tropes of comic opera play out – the plots, disguises and smuggled letters – de Niese is centre stage: coquettish charmer one minute, sassy schemer the next; stamping, pouting and flouncing among the men who each have a stake in her marriage prospects.
At curtain call, she bows to applause from a packed audience, blows kisses to the conductor, beckons the director from the wings; at once both star and host of the show. Half an hour later, she has changed her costume for a cocktail dress and is at the champagne bar with her handsome husband, greeting guests and bestowing her trademark dazzling smile.

Sarah Connolly as Giulio Cesare and Danielle de Niese as Cleopatra in Handel’s opera Giulio Cesare. Photo: Robbie Jack / Corbis

The Danielle de Niese story has the hallmarks of a fairy tale: the infant prodigy with perfect pitch who would become an international opera star; the child who sang and danced her way to first place in every eisteddfod going and, aged nine, won Australia’s Young Talent Time, taking home $5000 and a baby grand piano.
When she was 10, her parents moved the family to California so she could have the classical voice tuition not easily available in Australia for one so young.

Five years later, she made her professional debut with the Los Angeles Opera in a new work by librettist Richard Sparks: “We needed a child’s voice that could carry a full-length operatic role,” he says. “Dani was a slip of a girl, just shy of her 15th birthday, but she couldn’t have been more charming and confident.”

Matinees were put on for schools: “There was a scene where her character is reunited with her boyfriend and they kiss,” recalls Sparks. “Well, 3000 hormonal high-school kids screamed the roof off. It was pandemonium and we decided we’d better lose the kiss for the remaining performances.” De Niese, he says, was quite clearly a star in the making: “I told her I expected tickets for Glyndebourne in 10 years’ time.”

Raised in the Melbourne suburb of Glen Waverley and studying in Los Angeles, the young de Niese had probably never heard of England’s posh country opera house tucked beneath the Sussex Downs. But Sparks was spot on: 10 years later, almost to the day, she was enchanting the gowned and black-tied audiences of Glyndebourne Festival Opera as a seductive Cleopatra in David McVicar’s production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare. Her bravura turn as “an all-singing, all-dancing sex bomb” was the most electrifying debut the genteel festival had seen for years, noted The Times.

Within a year she was dating Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s chairman and owner Gus Christie; the couple married in 2009 and de Niese was installed as lady of the 500-year-old manor house. In June last year, in between singing engagements, she gave birth to their first child, a son called Bacchus. Exotically beautiful, she has designers clamouring to dress her – Vivienne Westwood is a favourite – and to lend her their expensive jewellery.

Did her life feel like a fairy tale, I asked when we first met in 2012. “Lots of people think I’ve been handed everything on a plate,” she said then, “but I don’t speak too much about the roles I didn’t get, the unfair reviews, the times I spent weeping in my mom’s lap.”

Any negative reviews, unfair or not, have focused on her singing; everything else – acting, dancing and sex appeal – has critics reaching for superlatives. “She lights up the show,” wrote one. “Her singing will never impress purists,” said another, “but has there been an opera singer who moves as she does, or who dazzles with such pizazz?”
On a hot August afternoon, I meet de Niese again in the vast Organ Room at Glyndebourne. She looks fabulous: long, glossy dark hair, vertiginous stiletto heels, her curvaceous figure, fuller since motherhood, encased in a stunning mustard frock. It’s quite some outfit for a weekday afternoon. “We have guests later,” she explains, settling herself in an armchair and peeling open a muesli bar. “No time for lunch.”

The Glyndebourne season runs from May to the end of August, and if the 37-year-old de Niese is not singing elsewhere she is on point duty here. Opera is an expensive business: ticket sales, pricey as they are, don’t cover it, so there’s a good deal of entertaining of patrons and potential donors. “I have a whole second job here supporting my husband; it is a massive juggle,” concedes de Niese. “There are drinks parties after each show, house parties for all the openings and I’m often performing as well, of course.”

Her singing will never impress purists, but has there been an opera singer who moves as she does, or who dazzles with such pizazz?

Opera critic

Does she feel obliged to sing at Glyndebourne every year? “No, I’m thrilled to be asked because I love it, but I remember turning down La Bohème in 2012 because I was preparing to go on tour with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and I didn’t want to be singing in a different part of my range. Gus was sad, but I had to consider what was right for my voice and my career.”

A singer’s voice goes on maturing into her 40s and even 50s: de Niese stuck to Mozart and Handel in her early years, nailed the role of Adina in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amour in her early 30s and has Massenet’s weightier Manon in her sights. But her light lyric soprano – a voice with a light, bright timbre that rises above the orchestra – may never match the power and dramatic intensity required for the big bel canto roles. “There is no reason why she shouldn’t move from Susanna to the Countess in Figaro,” Neil Fisher, the music critic of The Times, told me, “but Verdi – with its big orchestration requiring greater singing power – would be a bit of a stretch.” I ask de Niese if she can imagine one day singing Puccini’s Tosca, a similarly “big” role. “Part of me fantasises about it,” she admits. “I joke about it to my teacher and he says, ‘No, you’re not going to do that.’
“
De Niese is stepmother to four boys from her husband’s first marriage, and I remind her that when we met the first time, I’d asked her if she planned to have a family of her own. She laughed then and said she hadn’t got to the point of scheduling babies. Even so, when the time came there was only a very small window of opportunity: her 2015 schedule included a season of two Ravel operas at Glyndebourne and the world premiere of a new work with the Lyric Opera of Chicago. “I said to Gus, ‘Let’s give it a whirl, but if I don’t get pregnant now then we’ll have to wait ’til 2017 because there’s no way I’m giving up the Ravel or the premiere.’ ” Her big, kohl-rimmed eyes widen: “But then I got pregnant straight away!”

Within three weeks of the birth she was trotting across the lawn from her house to the Glyndebourne rehearsal rooms each day. “It was a double bill,” she says. “I was playing a saucy minx in L’Heure Espagnole, and a child in L’enfant et Les Sortilèges. Look, I’ll show you.” She hands me her phone and here is a picture of a boy-child in ankle socks and shorts with cropped hair: “People didn’t believe it was me!” No wonder: the transformation of voluptuous, post-pregnancy diva to chubby urchin is extraordinary. “It was one of my biggest pride moments,” she says. “I wanted to do both roles because I wanted that Meryl Streep moment where I show people what I’m made of.”
By December of that year she was opening in Chicago in Bel Canto, an opera based on the Ann Patchett novel of the same name in which she played a famous opera diva taken hostage with her audience during a concert. “It was very relevant to current events,” she says. “The Bataclan Theatre massacre in Paris happened while we were rehearsing. It was awful. Truly, it made it all the more real and raw. There was lots of crying.”
De Niese is a born performer and spectacularly filmogenic in an age when it matters. Earlier this year, she invited a film crew to document her preparation for the role of Rosina. She was filmed doing vocal exercises with a pen clamped between her teeth, puffing on the treadmill in designer gym wear and frowning over her score propped up on the handlebars. “You have to be brave,” she says, “allowing people to hear you warming up when you sound awful.”
She compares a singer’s voice to an athlete’s body: “There is always something that needs work and always more hours you could spend studying. But if I decide to hang out with Bacchus rather than practise or go on the treadmill, then that’s fine; I don’t agonise. I had so much nurturing from my parents. Both of them worked full-time, but I never remember them not being there – never, never, never – because the time they spent with me and my brother was full-on, quality time. So I make every second with Bacchus count.”

Her parents Chris and Beverly, descended from Sri Lankan burgher stock, had both emigrated to Australia as teenagers. “My mum sang with me right from the start,” says de Niese. “She came to every voice lesson with me and my dad drove us everywhere.” In the US, Beverly continued to manage her daughter’s education, though de Niese has always said she wasn’t pushed: “I was the one pushing the practice.” She studied with the best teachers, immersed herself in French and Italian and was the youngest singer ever accepted onto the New York Metropolitan Opera’s young artists program, making her debut with the Met as Barbarina in The Marriage of Figaro at the unprecedented age of 19.

Once established and travelling all over the world, de Niese would phone her parents every day: “They come to all my premieres,” she told me once. “My mom gets off the plane, exhausted, and sits in the dark auditorium making notes; my dad videos all my concerts so we can go through them afterwards.” Does this still happen? “For sure,” she says. “My mom is my ears. Like, I’ll be talking to her and she’ll say, ‘There was just this one note: I think you could cover it just a little bit more,’ and it’s like a lightening-bolt moment. Then I’ll talk to my voice teacher and he’ll say, ‘The E on that note,’ and I’m like, ‘My mom just picked up on exactly that thing.’ “
For Chris and Beverly, as immigrants to Australia comfortably settled with home and good jobs in Melbourne, it must have been quite an upheaval to move the family to the US. She nods: “I think they definitely felt that: they left their families behind and there was just the four of us, but they did it wholeheartedly and my grandmother visited every year.”

The family will go back home for a good stretch when de Niese makes her debut with Opera Australia in 2017. What has taken her so long? “People are always saying that,” she says. “Both sides have been working on it for so many years, but it’s a long way and all the stars have to align. Now it will finally happen and I’m so happy: I am that Commonwealth girl, it’s part of my identity and I hope Australians will consider me one of them.”
She will be playing Hannah in The Merry Widow and thinks her voice has matured to just the right timbre for her debut in the role. Lyndon Terracini, artistic director of Opera Australia, agrees: “It is absolutely the right time for her to be doing it,” he says on the phone from Sydney. “She is in the best form of her life and for her to do The Merry Widow for the first time in her home town will be great. You need to sing well, but also to have life experience, sophistication, some wit and cheekiness – and the widow needs to be stunningly beautiful, which, of course, Danielle is.”

Graeme Murphy, former head of the Sydney Dance Company, will direct Lehar’s operetta, set in The Great Gatsby era; so, plenty of dancing for de Niese? “Oh,
I hope so,” she says. “Gus and I did a lot of dancing when we were courting and I do love it.”

We walk out into the still-warm sunshine where the first guests for tonight’s performance are arriving with their baskets and fold-up chairs and bottles of chilled champagne to drink on the smooth lawns. There is a stream running into woods where de Niese walks her Portuguese water dog Caesar. Is he still around? “Oh yes,” she exclaims, “but now we have Norma the bulldog, too. She is currently pregnant with at least two puppies, possibly 10! She’s so great, she has her own Instagram account. Wait, I’ll show you.” She stops to scroll down her phone: “Now where is she? Oh never mind, I’ll send you a picture.” With that she embraces me warmly and walks off towards home, heels clicking on the stone terrace, turning heads as she goes.

The Merry Widow opens at the Melbourne Arts Centre on November 15, 2017; opera.org.au