Genevieve Roberts

August 21, 2025 6:45 am (Updated 7:45 am)

Opera soprano Danielle de Niese talks parenting in public, warding off tantrums and feeling superhuman in the face of juggling responsibilities

Danielle de Niese is a down to earth diva. She might be the UK’s coolest opera soprano, stunning audiences with her performances of Carmen in the Bizet opera, Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare and Hanna in The Merry Widow, but her role model is her mum.

“She worked full time through my whole childhood and I never felt she was gone because the quality of time she spent with me was so amazing,” she tells me. “I don’t have any memories of her not being around. I want to be like her. I don’t want to be that singer who’s like: ‘Darling, Mummy’s got to sing now. Someone else, do their homework with them.’ It’s not a mentality that I can relate to.”

I’m chatting to de Niese over FaceTime. The last time we met was at Glydebourne, in East Sussex, four years ago. Then, she’d just recovered from an ectopic pregnancy (when the fertilised egg implants outside of the womb), and had performed the opening night of Musetta in La Boheme, in what she described at the time as close to being an out-of-body experience, just hours after miscarrying. “I still remember all of that experience, she says. “I said to the nurse: since you said it wasn’t like the worst ectopic ever, then maybe I can sing the show?”

De Niese spoke to medics to make sure that performing would not put her at additional risk, and she was reassured by the Royal Opera House that “they had contingency plans in place” if she needed to pull out of the performance at any time.

“It was so quick and such a surprise. It was very ‘show must go on’, but it was Covid, so a very strange time: there was a cast bubble. I didn’t know if [my absence] would mean someone else would have to break their Covid bubble to replace me.”

Every working parent attempts the balance between parenthood and career. For de Niese, I sense she’s got a few more balls in the air. “It’s a big juggle, but I also find, as a woman and as a mum, there are times when the amount you can manage makes you feel slightly superhuman.

“When I’ve organised so many things, plus rehearsed, packed clothes and an extra set, and lo and behold, we needed those clothes. And I knew we would. Then I feel like She-Ra. I feel like I’m going to pull a sword out from behind my back and proclaim: ‘I have the power’. I amaze myself, and I feel most women will have had a moment when they’ve just gone: ‘Yes, I can manage this, I can do it.’ We are amazing. And now I understand why my mum always ate cold food.”

When she’s travelling for work, her family – husband Gus Christie and children Bacchus, 10 and Sheherazade, age four – either come along and watch from the wings, as they have for the past month while she’s been performing Carmen in Sydney. Or, as happened before school broke up, she choreographs cricket lifts and games of football for Bacchus while she’s away and he’s home with Gus.

“I went into full mum organisational mode with pick up and drop offs; I worked out carpools; I got on a Sussex thread and found gap year kids who might kick a ball with Bacchus when he’d get home but Gus was still entertaining,” the 46-year-old explains. “I felt like I was with him for that whole month, because I knew everything that was going on. I wanted to support Gus, and Gus is very hands-on as well.”

She believes her demeanour also helps. “I’m not a person who, when I feel under the cosh, starts popping like popcorn or snaps at people.” She is also very in love with her husband. “I’m good at airing any grievances or problems,” she says. “And Gus is wonderful at rising to those occasions. If we have anything to work out, we do. Our biggest challenge is having the chance to sit down with diaries.

“It’s so important to carve out time alone, to go for dinner, or go to a hotel for a night, especially when you have two kids like ours who are up, not asleep, and very articulate and love chatting.”

While de Niese might be down to earth, their beautiful home is anything but. For the public, its 12-acre grounds are home of the summer opera festival. The children are surrounded by creative performers. Glyndebourne employs 150 full-time staff but ten times that number of people work there across the year, whether as visiting artists or seasonal staff to help host the festival. Here, public and private life overlap.

I wonder what happens when her children have tantrums – a time when I really appreciate that I can take privacy in our own home for granted. “I have to balance allowing them to have those moments and feeling normal, which I think they really do in the house, and not being like: ‘Can you come inside the kitchen because there are people here?’

“If things escalate, I’ll be found in front of people saying: ‘Let’s think about how we talk.’ But I probably would say that anyway. As a singer, I’m less likely to shout. So I’ll clap and sort of go ‘right, right, right’. I can raise my voice, but I prefer not to do that. If they’re misbehaving at a party or something, I’ll say: ‘Come with Mama, we’re going into the playroom’, and we go into our private part [of the home], and then I would say, ‘We can’t behave like that’, or, ‘We don’t do that there’. But at the same time, I really would hate it if they felt like when we step out of our private areas, we’re in a show.”

She and Gus have explained the nuances of their semi-public life to the children, telling them: “We live here and everybody else works here. It means a lot to [people working here] to see the people who live here, and it means a lot to us to connect with the people who work here, because the thing we’re doing, we all do for joy.”

“[The children] have probably adapted a bit and learned, ‘Okay, we need to be nice if mummy and daddy are talking to somebody’. If we say: ‘Say hi,’ they’ll go ‘hello’, and be very well behaved. They never say: ‘No, I don’t want to’, so I’d like to think we’ve done a good job with that,” says de Niese.

De Niese has spent much of her life in the public gaze. She grew up in Melbourne and was nine years old when she won Australian television competition Young Talent Time and made her opera debut at 15. The following year, she won an Emmy and she made her Royal Opera House debut in 2009. Perhaps this helps her remain unfazed when she bumps into people during a private moment, such as making breakfast for the kids in her dressing gown.

“The night I gave birth to Bacchus, at 3.30 in the morning, I was heading to hospital, and when I was keeled over in the front hall, I ran into a wonderful pianist I’ve worked with, who was getting a cup of tea in the middle of the night. And he was like: ‘How are you?’ And I replied: ‘It’s happening right now.’”

I wonder if she thinks the magic of opera is rubbing off on her children. Bacchus had his debut acting performance in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “On the final night, I went to the wings and saw him looking really sad. And it was like looking at myself. I was that child who was always sad on the last show because it meant the end. The sense of community that the theatre gives you, the instant belonging, I saw Bacchus fall in love with that.”

Danielle de Niese is filming for Sky Arts this summer before returning to Melbourne in the role of Carmen for Opera Australia