Opera singer Lise Davidsen: ‘I was in survival mode’

It was 2015 and the Royal Opera House was packed. Operalia is arguably the world’s biggest competition for aspiring opera singers and its policy of holding its finals in a different city each year had brought it to London for the first time. The air was electric with anticipation.

As there are more places in an Operalia final than most other competitions, there was a long queue of singers. About halfway through, a South Korean soprano took up a quarter of an hour singing the entire mad scene from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. Then out strode a tall, confident soprano from Norway. Her choice, “Dich, teure Halle” from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, lasts barely four minutes, but a short blast of her full-throated, commanding singing and the competition was over. “That’s the winner,” people whispered excitedly. “Tell the rest to go home.”

Lise Davidsen had arrived and the opera world took notice. “My aunt thought the singer before me was going to win because she sang for so long,” says Davidsen, looking back at the experience with some amusement. “I had to explain to her that’s not how it works.” The jury did not need to hear any more and awarded her first prize.

Since then her career has gone off like a rocket. Voices like hers come round once in a generation, and her international appearances already include Beethoven’s Fidelio in London, a post-Covid reopening concert at La Scala and Sieglinde in Wagner’s Die Walküre at Bayreuth. At the Metropolitan Opera, where big voices are paramount, Davidsen sings in three productions this season alone.

She concedes that this was one of those periods when you only understand what you have done after the event. “I can see now how absurd it was to travel from a random opera house in Germany to Covent Garden,” she says. “People used to tell me how calm I looked, but I was burning up underneath. Ask my partner at the time and my family. I would phone home crying, frustrated and scared, but then I had to go to work and do my best.

“From the competition through to the pandemic I was in survival mode, working for my next performance and with no energy to do anything else. Catching Covid and the time off during lockdown have taught me it is OK to relax a bit and even enjoy my career.”

We are speaking the day after she has taken part in a charity concert in Romania. Davidsen’s agent is Romanian and lost her mother to cancer last year, so this performance was to raise funds for cancer care in the country. Her fellow performer at the event was tenor Freddie De Tommaso, and they will be joining forces again at the Barbican later this month. The climax of Davidsen’s Artist Spotlight series includes that duo recital with De Tommaso, a film called Lise featuring her in three Strauss roles, a concert with Klaus Mäkelä and the Oslo Philharmonic and a vocal masterclass for students of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.

“I am a bit scared of that,” she says, “because this is my first public masterclass . . . I hope we can meet on equal terms in the sense that I will say what I think, and if they go home and decide what I said was useless, they should not think about it any more.”

The lesson they probably want to learn most is how she came out of her own training with a voice that was so large. If there is a secret, she says she does not know it, though there are some fairly obvious pointers — “I am tall and have large lung muscles, so there must be something in that,” she says. But she is also a firm believer in training, saying the more dramatic opera repertoire is “like preparing for a marathon”.

Having a mighty operatic voice is a rare gift, but it comes with the downside that managements tend to want big-voiced singers only for Wagner. Davidsen is fortunate that she enjoys singing German operas, Wagner and Strauss especially.

“The more time I spend with those roles, the more I like them,” she says, “but my agent still has to inform people that maybe Lise can also do something else, like Verdi, Puccini or a song recital.” She is scheduled to appear in Verdi’s Don Carlo at Covent Garden next year, then Puccini’s Il tabarro in Spain; more Italian operas such as La forza del destino, Macbeth and possibly Tosca are coming over the horizon.

At 35, Davidsen has already achieved a great deal. What ambitions, musical or otherwise, still remain? “I have given up trying to run a marathon, so let’s set that aside,” she says. “A teacher said to me once, ‘If you can’t come up with anything else you want to do, you should become a musician.’ At the time I thought that was a horrible thing to say, but of course what she meant was that you have to want a career as a musician more than anything else.” It is clear that Davidsen wants just that.

Lise Davidsen’s Artist Spotlight runs May 30-June 3 at the Barbican, barbican.org.uk