The superstar soprano saving opera

In a draughty Victorian arts centre in south London, Danielle de Niese is finessing the timing of an almost-kiss. In this scene from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, the teenage Cherubino is trying to pluck up courage to kiss his godmother, the Countess. De Niese is encouraging her young performers to make the moment last. As a superstar soprano, she has sung this opera herself countless times. Now she is tackling it from the other side: this is her debut as a director.

De Niese, 47, could scarcely have a stronger pedigree. She made her debut at the Met in New York aged only 19 (coincidentally, in Figaro, singing the role of Barbarina); a whirlwind rise to fame followed. She is a stage animal from tip to toe, bringing together bell-like clarity of sound with super-trouper charisma, and versatile enough to turn her voice box to anything from Handel to Weill to Andrew Lloyd Webber.

All voices change with the years, and hers has deepened and extended so that her recent Carmen for Australian Opera – a role normally sung by a mezzo-soprano – drew many plaudits. She was born in Australia to parents of Sri Lankan and Dutch heritage, grew up in Los Angeles and now lives in the UK.

On seeing a soprano becoming a director, however, some fans might wonder if she is thinking of winding down her singing. De Niese knocks that one straight on the head. “I’m not a singer who has been sitting around hankering after directing,” she says, “and I’m not about to hang up my singing boots. This opportunity came about really by chance.”

The opportunity was offered to her by the touring opera company Wild Arts, launched just four years ago by the conductor and cellist Orlando Jopling. It has made a swift impact, staging small-scale but high-quality versions of audience favourites that can travel to locations heftier productions rarely reach.

When Wild Arts asked de Niese if she would be interested in directing, she says, the idea threw her for a minute: “I went away to think about it. I so wasn’t expecting this, but what would I lose from trying it?” New opportunities of any type are inherently risky: “You don’t often get them as you become a more seasoned singer, unless you have a role debut. That involves a certain amount of calculated risk; you won’t take it unless you feel you could do it right. Whereas this is a total leap into the unknown. The learning curve has been absolutely wild, but also fascinating and exciting.”

In the studio, de Niese – seemingly tireless, fired up and bubbling over – forensically questions almost every word of the action. “This is how I work on my own roles,” she remarks. Habits, sometimes senseless ones, often form in the interpretation of famous works like Figaro, and she’s keen to eliminate those preconceptions. The process is intense; it’s also deeply convincing, at least from my corner of the studio beside the blowy heater.

For instance, the rift between the philandering Count and the lonely Countess is often assumed to have gone on for years – but what if it hasn’t? What if it is relatively new? And when Susanna dances with her bridegroom Figaro and the predatory Count, who has designs on her, her attitude needs to fit her personality: “She is not someone who would just play along and smile,” de Niese says. “She would not want to lie to her husband.”

Having been on the other side of all this has its advantages. “I think I’m a good colleague for the singers,” says de Niese. “I’ve been them. I’ve been in the room my whole life, making things. Here I’ve enjoyed creating a theatrical story that I can sculpt away at, detail by detail.”

Still, not everything in the opera world is straightforward for directors who are women. Despite a growing handful of outstanding figures such as Deborah Warner, Mariame Clément and Annabel Arden, the gender balance is still heavily skewed, and last year Katie Mitchell announced that she intends to stop working in opera, blaming the widespread misogyny she says she has encountered.

“I have probably worked with more male directors than female ones,” de Niese acknowledges. “I haven’t found yet that a male director has been trapped in the male gaze, however, because so much about directing is observational. As an actor and performer, which most directors are or were, you file away so much information.

“I do wonder whether some female directors feel it’s still difficult to be the woman in the room,” she adds. “That being said, I worked with Annabel Arden, who is a beautiful, supportive person and can absolutely take charge of a room. Every director that I’ve worked with has very much their own style. The way in which I’m going about it is totally my own. It’s how I am as an artist.”

Perhaps there is an advantage in cutting her directorial teeth with a small company, rather than a big national theatre, where extra spotlight would mean extra pressure. The Wild Arts Figaro is small, audience-friendly and portable. It has no chorus – some of the principals take on those episodes – and has an orchestra of only 10 players, conducted by Jopling. The English translation is by Jopling and de Niese themselves and is still being tweaked as the rehearsal goes along.

In recent years, Arts Council England (ACE) has critically slashed the touring budgets of companies such as Welsh National Opera and Glyndebourne (the latter is de Niese’s home, as her husband, Gus Christie, is its hereditary proprietor). Far from “levelling up”, these cuts have left locations across the country as operatic deserts. Now “fringe opera” seems to be filling the gap as the artform’s gateway drug.

Performed up close in cut-down versions, operas like Figaro can be intimate, immediate and inspiring. Yet most of the big 19th-century classics – which audiences do still want, to judge by the big opera houses’ ubiquitous reliance on things like Carmen and La Traviata – need full orchestras, choruses and established stars to make their ultimate impact. De Niese insists that both ends of the spectrum are essential, indeed inextricably related.

“It’s incredibly important to have grassroots opera that is accessible for people in a multitude of locations,” she says. “I’ve never felt a frustration towards ACE for funding smaller groups in opera – I think it’s absolutely amazing. It’s just that when singers come into a company atmosphere like this, they’re going to learn and grow a lot. After that, they are ready for some of the bigger stages.

“But what if those intermediary companies aren’t around any more?” she continues. “It’s important to cross-pollinate between our grassroots opera and our bigger companies. That’s how we grow our artists. If we take those middle companies away, it’s like removing the middle rungs of a ladder. The Royal Opera House, the Met and La Scala Milan all await you at the top, but without the middle rungs you can’t get there.”

A case in point is English National Opera, which is still managing to do superb work and starting to make the most of its new second base in Manchester; few would disagree, though, that the cuts have left it a shadow of its former self. De Niese, who starred there recently in Kurt Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, is outraged by its cavalier treatment. “ENO is one of the greatest companies in the world and they’ve had some severe financial blows due to the ACE. I will hold their hand in the trenches till I die.”

Looking at the bigger picture, though, she remains optimistic. “I don’t feel that opera is fighting to survive. Loads of different changes have happened in the evolution of classical music, and we’re still here. We’re responding to the cultural, societal needs of the time with an evolving musical style. We’ve already done it. We’ve survived.”

Her Figaro opens this week, then hits the road, aiming to reach a new generation of audiences with the marvels of Mozart. Perhaps it really is, for the moment, the keeper of the flame.

‘The Marriage of Figaro’, directed by Danielle de Niese for Wild Arts, opens on 5 June at The Wild Arts Summer Opera Festival, Layer Marney Tower, Essex, then tours the UK until 27 September.