Watch Danielle de Niese
perform
Anyone who attended the first night of Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto at
Glyndebourne, three summers ago, witnessed perhaps the most spectacular
casting success in the swanky “opera-with-picnics” festival’s recent history.
All but unknown in this country, the American soprano Danielle de Niese
brought almost everyone in the audience to their feet with her slinky,
slender, all-singing-and-dancing Cleopatra. Handel’s “immortal sex-kitten” –
in the scholar Winton Dean’s unforgettable phrase – had found a dazzling new
protagonist.
If a star was born that night in July 2005, it didn’t appear out of nowhere.
De Niese got the lead female role in David McVicar’s production only as a
late replacement, but she was well prepared. In 2001, in Amsterdam, I had
seen her first Cleopatra with the Nether-lands Opera and, a year later, in
Nicholas Hytner’s lavish production, her Paris Opéra debut. However, her
Glyndebourne Cleopatra – filmed for DVD and seen at the Proms in 2005,
reprised in 2006, and shipped to the Lyric Opera of Chicago last November –
put her on the map and launched her international career. Record companies
took notice, and she made her first solo album for Decca, of Handel arias,
last year. It is released on May 12, less than a week before she opens in
her second Glyndebourne role, as Monteverdi’s upwardly mobile courtesan in
The Coronation of Poppea.
When we met at the Lyric Opera of Chicago last autumn, De Niese seemed a
whirlwind of breathless, college-girl enthusiasm, scarcely able to believe
her good luck, even though she has been in show business since her teens and
made her Metropolitan Opera debut at 19, as Barbarina in The Marriage of
Figaro, alongside Bryn Terfel, Cecilia Bartoli and Renée Fleming.
Given De Niese’s success in the McVicar Julius Caesar, I was surprised to
learn the director initially had doubts about her.
“I suppose he thought, ‘I’m gonna have someone turning up late – I was singing
Tytania in [Britten’s] A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Chicago – and I’ve never
worked with her.’ But Bill Christie told him, ‘You’re gonna like this girl,’
so David took a chance. They had set up three hours to block my first scene
and, in one hour, we were done, because I was very quick to learn. The
dances evolved as we worked on the show, and it turned into something that
suited the piece.” That De Niese is an instinctive stage animal must have
been evident from an early age. She was born in Australia in 1980, to
English-speaking parents who had emigrated from Sri Lanka. Later, the De
Nieses (the name is Dutch in origin) moved to Los Angeles, where she was
cast in children’s roles at the LA Opera. As a freshman at New York’s Mannes
music college, she landed the leading role of Susanna in Figaro. Within a
short time, she was auditioning for the Met’s Young Artists Programme and
the tiny, but noticeable, role of Barbarina.
“I remember my agent calling and saying, ‘Well, they are really interested in
you for Barbarina, but they don’t know whether you are ready for the Young
Artists Programme,’ which both of us found hilarious. I was ready to go on
stage at the Met, but not for the programme. But I got the part. And I was
working with Jonathan Miller. I love him.”
De Niese then made the wise decision to continue her studies in Europe, to
learn French in Paris and German in Vienna. Yet things didn’t go to plan.
“My Vienna trip got cut short because I was asked to be in Hannibal, the
movie [the sequel to The Silence of the Lambs]. There’s a pivotal scene
where Hannibal goes to the opera. They had a big close-up of me – which was
so cool. At the time, I didn’t want to go around boasting that I was in a
movie, so when my colleagues went to see it, they had a surprise: ‘Oh, my
God, that’s Danielle de Niese.’ ” At Glyndebourne next month, she returns as
another seductress from ancient history. Poppea is another of her
calling-card roles: I saw her in a 2005 Lyons production, conducted by
William Christie, and again last year, in a revival of Pierre Audi’s
Nether-lands production in Amsterdam. She first sang it four years ago, with
Chicago Opera Theatre, in a modern-dress staging by the American director
Diane Paulus.
She doesn’t want to give too much away about Robert Carsen’s “timeless” new
production, but she has clearly rethought the part in collaboration with the
Canadian director. The Coronation of Poppea is often staged as a parable of
the triumph of naked lust and ambition, but De Niese thinks it is a more
subtle and many-layered psychological drama. None of the characters is
entirely good or evil; nothing is black and white.
“What’s really interesting about the Poppea-Nero relationship is that he is
slightly insecure. He is desperate to be an independent thinker. Poppea
knows exactly how to exploit that. She pumps him up and gives him energy
through her emotional support. That’s what makes their relationship so
attractive. Yes, it is about sex and ambition, but there’s a certain
interdependence. There is an alluring power in Nero, which is, of course,
attractive. It’s like, ‘Well, I’ve fallen for this guy and he’s great in
bed, and everything is peachy, and he also happens to be emperor of Rome.’
So it’s win, win, win, for Poppea.”
Next season, there is more Handel, when she makes her Covent Garden debut as
the female lead in his enchanting but dark pastoral, Acis and Galatea, while
Vienna will see her as Ginevra, the wrongly maligned and unjustly punished
heroine of Ariodante. In the future, she is looking forward to her first
staged Semeles – another McVicar production in Paris – and another Poppea
(and McVicar staging) in Agrippina for her Barcelona debut in 2013. That
seems a long way off, but she now has her disc as a marker.
“It took me about seven months to decide what to put on it. I asked Decca if I
could have two hours so I wouldn’t have to leave stuff out. I wanted the
strongest melodies, but also things that were stimulating for the orchestra,
so I looked for arias that had instrumental solos. The orchestra is Les Arts
Floris-sants and Bill Christie, which is a real luxury for me. It was
difficult to choose only two arias from Semele – and only two of Cleopatra’s
– but I settled on Endless Pleasure and Myself I Shall Adore.”
De Niese exudes great enthusiasm for her work and the breathless pace of her
burgeoning career. I get a weary smile and a sigh, however, when I ask about
her relationship with Glyndebourne’s chairman, Gus Christie, with whom she
has been romantically linked. The former wildlife film-maker is following in
the footsteps of his grandfather, John Christie, who fell for the soprano
Audrey Mildmay and, like Citizen Kane, built an opera house for her.
“We’re together, yes,” she says, although she travels a lot internationally
now. On the bonus DVD to Glyndebourne’s 2005 Giulio Cesare, they are filmed
chatting about Handel’s opera in the garden of the country house. “Well, it
was supposed to be a relaxed conversation, and our getting together later
was a surprising turn of events.”
So, is she going to be Glyndebourne’s next châtelaine, I
ask?
“Oh, my God, noooo. Well, who knows? Everyone here seems to be having a great
time speculating about that. I’m here this season, and I’ll be back next
season for Giulio Cesare. I love Glyndebourne.”
When will we see her in some of her Mozart roles?
“Well, that’s a possibility. We’ll see. I’m not sure. Nothing is fixed. I’m
expanding my Mozart repertoire, and then I am looking at a couple of
Donizetti comic roles. That’s the next step in what is a healthy – cautious
– development of my voice.”
De Niese is as bright as she is beautiful. Hers is a small voice, but it’s a
perfect fit for Glyndebourne. Audiences there will be smacking their lips at
the prospect of seeing De Niese in as many operas as she cares to appear in,
for seasons to come.
Watch Danielle de Niese perform at timesonline.co.uk/ opera
