By Ben Jureidini
11 February 2026

She was The Met’s youngest debutante, and has gone on to conquer the worlds of film and musical theatre alike. But Danielle de Niese is still surprising herself – and singing along to Ariana Grande in the shower

When you are one of the most famous opera singers in the world, even London’s most loved restaurants can be out to get you. For Danielle de Niese, evening plans are a minefield. Has the noise level at the Garrick Club reached a level where she has to raise her voice, thus risking fatigue ahead of a show? ‘I shouldn’t be here…’ she thinks. Should a post-performance dinner at J Sheekey turn into a night on the town, well, ‘you’ve got to get out!’ she laughs. Even as she floats into the bar of the London Coliseum, she is on heightened alert for the sound of AC and its horribly drying effect on the vocal cords.

Back home at Glyndebourne, the legendary country manor and opera house where she has served as chatelaine since marrying the Executive Chairman Gus Christie in 2009, the environment is far more comfortable for de Niese’s much-lauded instrument. ‘The house is toasty, we have a wood chip boiler, because my husband is a real conservationist,’ she explains over a cup of honey-laden tea. ‘He always says the house has never been so toasty and points me like: “I married an opera singer who hates to walk through the cold,” which is true! I hate that!’ Such are the conversations, one imagines, had behind the scenes when regulars at the Glyndebourne Festival (think: Annika Purdey, the Countess of Chichester, and the Duke of Richmond) make their way back to de Niese’s house for drinks after watching her sing (in 2024, the soprano led a production of The Merry Widow in her back garden).

But for a performer like Danielle de Niese, the world is pretty much your back garden. She is as welcome at The Met as she is at the Royal Opera House, a guest of honour on stages from Chicago to Bavaria. Next week, she will star in the English National Opera’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at the Coliseum. Kurt Weill’s 1930 opera, with a libretto by Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann, is a strange beast. De Niese plays Jenny Smith, a sex worker who tries to find her fortune in Mahagonny, a decadent city of pleasure where indulgence comes at great cost, both financial and spiritual.

‘It’s a totally gripping piece of dark, dark theatre,’ she explains of the opera. ‘It’s about what happens if you can get everything you want, and we’re seeing that play out in the media right now. We’re seeing what happens when people with power, money and influence set up these parameters that allow them to flourish within a vortex. I’d love to come out and meet the public after the show and talk to them about it. If you live inside parameters that only show you that what you do is right and good and allowed and celebrated, is there ever a tipping point at which you think: “Have I done too much?”’

It means that fans of de Niese’s (and there are many) will finally get a chance to hear her rendition of the opera’s famous ‘Alabama Song’, which was covered by the likes of David Bowie and The Doors. The lyrics – ‘show me the way to the next whiskey bar, oh don’t ask why / For if we don’t find the next whiskey bar, I tell you we must die,’ crop up throughout Mahagonny, veering from hungry and hypnotic to a kind of ritualistic prayer. ‘It sounds new and original, but feels like a song you always knew,’ de Niese explains, ‘some songs, arias, even musical theatre songs kind of transcend their genre, and I think that’s what the “Alabama Song”did.’

It is such an obvious pairing of singer and song that it comes as a surprise that de Niese has not yet taken on Weill and Brecht’s script. Those in the know certainly thought so. ‘Other people in the business, like Opera Impresarios, have pinpointed it for me as the perfect vehicle,’ she says, her voice making air quotes around ‘Impresarios’. ‘Weill in particular requires great acting and a great sense of text and theatre. I think, over the years, I’ve become known as someone who prioritises and values that and places it in high, high, high regard, alongside the singing.’

When she gets the chance, de Niese is an avid theatregoer, mentioning Carey Mulligan and Bill Nighy’s performances in Skylight as a particular inspiration for her own style of performance. ‘There’s room in opera for the odd amazing voice, what they call the old “park and bark”, where you can come out, put out a great honking voice, and that’s enough,’ she says, ‘But I come to the theatre to be told a story and to have an escape. I never sing without emoting and performing and feeling and conveying.’

Indeed, much like the ‘Alabama Song’, de Niese refuses to be confined by something as reductive as genre conventions. A vocal Renaissance woman, she not only reigns supreme in the world of opera but has also conquered musical theatre (singing Giulietta in the West End revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Aspects of Love in 2023), and even the small screen, making a cameo in Ridley Scott’s 2001 film Hannibal, and recording an intimate rendition of Jean Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine in 2022. Not for nothing did The New York Times label her ‘Opera’s coolest soprano’ way back in 2008: few prima donnas reach such levels of mainstream success.

‘I wonder if the reason that people still love to mention it is that they don’t believe that opera and cool belong in the same sentence,’ she says of the title. ‘It slightly embodies the yin yang that I am.’ De Niese’s shower singing playlist is not limited to Mozart and Handel (though these no doubt echo through the hallways of Glyndebourne). Recently, she’s been listening to Ariana Grande’s ‘I Wish I Hated You’ and ‘Mystery of Love’ from the Call Me By Your Name soundtrack, hardly the cheeriest of ditties, but a far cry from Consumption-ridden heroines of Baroque’s best-known operas. As is Jenny Smith (‘I wear this big, JLo in Hustles-style coat, it’s really sassy.’) This modern taste can be handy for pre-show preparation, too: ‘Actually, it was a fantastic conductor, a mentor to me called James Levine, who told me that he had told Placido that the best way to warm up is just to hum along to your favourite song and not just –’ here, she breaks into a mock operatic belt, still remarkable in its fullness and ferocity, ‘– try to sing!’

To this day, de Niese’s voice is still evolving. The voice that she is bringing to ‘Alabama Song’ is a different beast to the voice that marked her out as a generational performer when she won Young Talent Time in her home nation of Australia at the age of nine with a Whitney Houston medley, and different still to when she became the Met’s youngest ever debutante in The Marriage of Figaro ten years later (after bagging an Emmy for hosting LA Kids). During her magisterial run in Carmen last year, de Niese discovered colours and textures to her voice that she had never heard before.

‘I think you need to be ready to meet your vocal destiny, and be open to the idea that it might not be where you started,’ de Niese says of her instrument. ‘I started so young, I’ve been so unusually young at every milestone I’ve ever hit. So, where most people would have been wrapped up in cotton and Conservatoire and then in a professional studies program and a master’s program and then an apprentice program, I was already in my freshman year of university debuting at the Met.’

All of this to say: ‘I’ve grown up in front of the public ear and eye, and that’s meant that my voice has had more of a public evolution.’ Where might Danielle de Niese’s destiny lead her next? She’s always had her eye on Evita, but there’s no need to get Lord Lloyd Webber on the phone; Danni probably has him on speed dial.

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny runs at the London Coliseum from 16-20 February. Visit https://www.eno.org/events/rise-and-fall-of-the-city-of-mahagonny/ for more details.

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Danielle makes her directing debut in June with The Marriage of Figaro, touring across the UK with Wild Arts, visit: https://wildarts.org.uk/the-marriage-of-figaro for more details.