Most happy endings in professional opera are built on a miserable amount of work. In May, after five weeks of rehearsal at the Glyndebourne Opera House on the Sussex downs of southeast England, the young American soprano Danielle de Niese was preparing to transform herself into Cleopatra — or at least an operatic impression of the great queen as envisioned in the director David McVicar’s audacious production of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare”.
De Niese’s debut here four years ago in the same production — she was 25 and was booked at the last minute to replace a singer who got sick — was hailed as a perfect match of part and artist. The silvery voice. The ravishing looks. The breathtaking ability to sync saucy Bollywood choreography with Baroque arias. One British critic even suggested that de Niese managed the minor miracle of putting “the sex into Sussex.”
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| image: proboards.com |
An hour before the 4:05 p.m. curtain, de Niese was sitting in Dressing Room 7, reviewing notes she’d scribbled on the script: “Scene 2 — enunciate the ‘S’ in di sesto.” In order to loosen up her facial muscles, she’d clamped a pencil in her mouth like the bit of a bridle.
“I’m a little nervous,” she said with a temporary lisp. “I’ve had success in this role, but now I feel I have to do better than what I’ve done in the past.”
She was just a month beyond her 30th birthday. She had slept until noon. Her parents, who live in New Jersey and who have not missed an opening night in the 15 years that de Niese has been singing professionally, had finally arrived, stopping over after a trip to Egypt.
“We’ll do wigs at 3:30, and then at 3:50 it’s time for me to get Zen,” de Niese said, removing the pencil. She inserted her iPod ear buds and began to bounce on the gray carpet to songs by Beyoncé. De Niese’s fiancé, Glyndebourne’s 45-year-old executive chairman, Gus Christie, came by wearing an elegant tux and an air of imperturbable calm, borne, in all likelihood, of his nine years’ experience running the opera festival his grandparents started in 1934.
Danielle de Niese, who will now be performing in the Metropolitan Opera production of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” in New York, epitomizes a new generation of opera stars who have the full complement of stage skills to go with their exceptional vocal gifts. “Young artists are getting trained much better now,” says Gregory B. Keller, who is overseeing the Met production of “Figaro” and was assistant director when it was originally mounted in the fall of 1998 by Jonathan Miller, with an Olympian cast that included Renée Fleming, Cecilia Bartoli and Bryn Terfel. Playing Barbarina in that production was a 19-year-old Danielle de Niese, too young to toast her Met debut with a glass of Champagne. Of age now, de Niese returns this time as Susanna, the longest role in the soprano repertory.
“Danni is such a beautiful singer, she’s got the entire package,” Keller told me. “She moves beautifully. She has an extremely pure and clear sound. I think she’s top of the class.”
It also doesn’t hurt she’s gorgeous, with coppery skin, dark lacquered eyes and a presence that shimmers like heat off hot tar. In her Jimmy Choo heels (she travels with 20 to 30 pairs of shoes), jewel-studded Bulgari shades and outsize “La Dolce Vita” sun hats, it’s a wonder opera-company general managers with seats to fill aren’t baking her cupcakes, too. Gillian Brierley, head of communications at Glyndebourne, recalls a sex-in-Sussex moment in July 2005 when de Niese came rolling out of a carpet in Cleopatra and Cesare’s legendary cute meet. “Every man in the house was watching her,” Brierley remembers. “You could see their eyes following her back and forth across the stage — it was like Wimbledon.”
Praised for her “phenomenal musicality,” her “sweet gleaming soprano,” de Niese is still coming into the full measure of her instrument. She has managed her career shrewdly, careful not to push her lyric soprano into repertory it’s not ready for. It’s unlikely she’ll ever sing Wagner, or the heavier dramatic soprano roles of Puccini like Tosca or Butterfly. Having delved deeply into Handel, where singers have the freedom to improvise trills and other coloratura ornamentation as they like, she’s following a natural progression into Mozart.
De Niese was a performing prodigy almost from the moment she was born, April 11, 1979, in Melbourne, Australia. Her parents, who call her Danni, were Sri Lankan Burghers steeped in European culture. Both had immigrated to Australia as teenagers. Her father, Chris, now a bank vice president, is part Dutch; her mother, Beverly, a manager at a Swiss company, has Scottish blood. A second child, Andrew, now a pharmacist in California, was born 23 months after Danni.
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In 1988, at age 9, de Niese entered a national talent-show competition called Young Talent Time, which had an “American Idol”-like hold on Australian audiences. In the finals she sang a Whitney Houston medley. She was the youngest winner in the contest’s history, taking home $5,000 and a Yamaha baby-grand piano. Her fame spread in regional singing competitions known as eisteddfods, where she often finished ahead of much older contestants. “I was doing them completely for fun, but I kept winning every category,” she recalled.
Her parents moved to Los Angeles in 1990 largely to help Danni fulfil her talent. She received a full scholarship to the Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica and attended the Colburn School of Performing Arts. At 11 she was spotted by producers of a weekly arts TV showcase for teenagers called “L.A. Kids”; she was eventually invited to be a regular guest host and, at 16, won an Emmy.
A year earlier, she made her debut with the Los Angeles Opera. In the spring of 1997, a couple of weeks before her 18th birthday, she flew to New York and was hired to learn the role of Eponine in “Les Misérables”. Her mother had arranged a half-hour appointment for her with the noted vocal teacher Ruth Falcon, whom de Niese ended up working with for much of the next decade, and who got her an audition at the Mannes College of Music in Manhattan, where she enrolled in the fall of 1997.
But her career was breaking too fast for her to keep up with her studies. Her role as Susanna in a Mannes production of “Figaro” led to an invitation in the late winter of 1998 to audition for the Met’s coming production of the opera, and for a place in its prestigious Lindemann Young Artist Development Programme; she was the youngest singer ever accepted. She mastered French and Italian after summers abroad in immersion study, and when she finished the Young Artists programme in 2001, there was no looking back. She was already engaged to sing Nanetta in Verdi’s “Falstaff” with the Sante Fe Opera that summer and to make her European debut in the fall in Amsterdam, plumbing the depths of Cleopatra.
They liked their happy endings in the 18th century: “Giulio Cesare” concludes with no inkling of the woe in store for the young queen and her older man. When the curtain came down just before 10 p.m. on a May evening at the start of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s 75th year, there was a 10-minute ovation, with choruses of “Bravo!” over crescendos of thunder as giddy Brits drummed the theater’s wooden floor with their feet. With the rest of the cast, de Niese stood on the stage blowing kisses and beaming.
Afterward there was a party in the large book-lined living room of the Glyndebourne manor, a house suffused with the history of the Christie family, whose lineage goes back to Handel’s time and beyond and would soon incorporate her name. While Christie was overseeing the rest of the Festival and Glyndebourne’s coming annual fall tour and education programs, de Niese would be flying to New York to visit her parents and friends, then heading to Europe to give a series of Mozart concerts. And then back to New York for her dates at the Met. The couple had an intermission of a day picked out in December for a wedding.
- Courtesy New York Times |
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