When I asked superstar soprano Danielle de Niese about her next singing engagement, I wasn’t expecting her to answer that it would be in Davos, opening the World Economic Forum. Apparently that’s where she's at now – being invited to inspire and encourage the world’s leaders to sort everything out with nothing but her considerable charisma and that famously crystalline voice.
Before that singularly exclusive gig though, a much wider audience will get the chance to experience her stunning performance as Hanna, the titular Merry Widow in Franz Lehár’s giddy opera, when Glyndebourne’s critically acclaimed production is shown on BBC Four on Christmas Day.
If you’re not sure that opera is for you, she says when we meet, “then The Merry Widow would be your perfect entry point. Because there's so many bangers in it that you don't realise you know.”
She trills the first four notes of The Merry Widow Waltz and I see what she means (I guarantee that 12 seconds in you’ll go ‘Ohhh, it’s that one’).
“So you're watching something you actually already know, you're just seeing it in context. But the other thing is that the Merry Widow is more like a musical in terms of singing, dancing, theatre, cabaret. People tend to come for the waltzes and the can-can and then get sucked in by the love story.”
This silly, riotous piece, about two former lovers who might just have the chance to rekindle what they thought they’d lost, is also perfect Christmas viewing, she says. As far as opera goes, “it's a bit like Love, Actually, in the sense that it's our Christmas cracker. It's our Nutcracker, it's that thing you want to see, and you could see it every year. Such a feelgood piece.”
It helps that De Niese is probably one of the most recognisable opera singers in Britain – mainly due to her refreshing lack of snobbery about her art form. Her Davos gig is a collaboration with the Norwegian pop singer Ane Brun; she appeared as the bohemian Giulietta in Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s West End revival of his musical Aspects of Love and was a judge on the TV show Popstar to Operastar. She got a bit of flak for that in her own industry, but mostly she’s managed to navigate the piranha-infested waters of opera just at the notoriously choppy point where they meet the mainstream.
Growing up in Melbourne with her Sri Lankan parents and her brother Andrew (now a doctor of pharmacy, living in Beverly Hills), she was a born performer. “When I was a kid, I loved Saturdays, because I could get up and I would do eight to nine, ballet; nine to ten, jazz; ten to 11, tap; 11 to 12, break; 12 to one, drama; singing lesson in the afternoon,” she says. “I loved it.”
It helped that she was effectively a prodigy, a fact that she accepts without false modesty. “The teachers were always encouraging me, reporting back to my parents. And when you're a kid, if you love something and you do it well, and everyone says so, you want to do it.”
In 1988, she became the youngest winner of the Australian TV talent competition, Young Talent Time (a bit like a junior BGT), with a medley of Whitney Houston songs. She was nine. She won an Emmy at 16, after the family moved to LA, for her hosting role on the TV show LA Kids.
But it was opera that she really fell for, and her Metropolitan Opera debut in New York only four years later cemented her reputation, singing the small but significant role of Barbarina amid an all-star cast who acknowledged her as one of them without question.
She’s since soared, playing major roles in many productions (including being upgraded to Suzannah in that same production of Figaro) and receiving the accolade, from the New York Times, of “opera’s coolest soprano”.
She’s also now opera royalty – since 2008 she’s been married to Gus Christie, grandson of Glyndebourne Festival founder John Christie, and its chairman, which at the very least makes travelling to rehearsals easier, when she’s singing there.
The couple met at Glyndebourne when she sang the role of Cleopatra in Handel’s Giulio Cesare there in 2005; they still live in the magnificent estate house and have two children, Bacchus and Sheherazade (“after Bacchus, we felt like we couldn't call our daughter, like, Jane, but now she has this 11 letter name. I tried to get her a personalised dressing gown and every company I went to had a ten letter maximum!”)
Most people haven’t been to Glyndebourne (the tickets are expensive and it’s a faff to get to without a car) but De Niese is adamant that opera is for everyone. She is exasperated by the last government’s swingeing cuts to the arts, which meant not only that English National Opera has been thrown into chaos by the arbitrary demand that it moves to a new city, but also that Glyndebourne has had to curb its national touring programme, thereby withdrawing from the regions that levelling up was supposed to enrich, and removing a tried and tested development route for young singers at the early stages of their emergence.
She is pleased, she says, that the Arts Council has thrown some support behind grassroots organisations, but the overall “knock on effects will be, for example, that young singers, if they have no landing pad in London like the ENO to sing [at], and they're not, maybe ready for Covent Garden yet, they might end up going over to Europe, where they can have a steady salary and don't have to take a job at a coffee shop or something in order to supplement their income. We lose our British talent.
“By taking the funding away from these two organisations, for example, it's like taking the middle rungs out of a ladder. It’s just really short sighted; it doesn't make sense. It is taking blood away from the vital organs of the body to feed the limbs,” she says. “It's quite a delicate environment, the classical world. It's an ecosystem; we all need each other. So we can't remove certain core things from the biome, as it were.”
For her part, she’s got a busy year ahead, with a few dates in Hamburg in the spring as Alice Ford in Verdi’s Falstaff, and a major engagement in the summer playing her first ever Carmen at the Sydney Opera House, a role that, as a straight up soprano, she never thought she’d play. But the body changes, she says, particularly after children, and so her instrument has developed the necessary richness to do justice to Bizet’s astonishing music.
She’s looking forward to doing the work to find out who her Carmen will be. “I think it's possible for her to be both powerful and magnetic and also fall into a toxic connection that is like magnets, both repelling and attractive at the same time. That's the thing I want to look at.”
She refuses, she says, “to operate in clichés. We are in a multimedia age where an opera is right alongside a film. So we have to be as good as a film, and as believable as a film. As soon as I find it unbelievable, I check out, and if I'm checking out, then so is a new audience.”
But she also believes that opera has a superpower. “It is the last, raw vocal experience where you hear the voice, unfiltered, unmanaged, un-auto-tuned. There's no disputing whether someone else doctored it or it was somehow manufactured in any way. That's one of our great strengths, I think.
“So we're not gonna go away. We're not gonna shrivel up and say, okay, if people don't support us, we'll just slink off into the background. We will thrive, as opera always has.”
The Merry Widow is on BBC Four at 8pm on Christmas Day and on demand on iPlayer
