This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Stars have been falling out of opera like apples in late summer. Jonas Kaufmann, a serial drop-out, now has a second career as a festival manager. Anna Netrebko is blacklisted for past Putin affinities. Vittorio Grigolo was fired for harassment. Roberto Alagna is over 60. Renée Fleming is 65. The box office has almost run out of lights.

With one singular exception: Lise Davidsen commands the art in a way no dramatic soprano has done since Birgit Nilsson and, before her, Kirsten Flagstad. That all three are Nordic may be more than coincidence, but hold that thought. Davidsen, 37 years old and six foot two, is the shining star on whom the opera world has hinged its future.

The Metropolitan Opera is casting a Wagner Ring around her. This season she can be seen as Tosca in Berlin, New York and Vienna; Senta in Oslo; Isolde in Munich; Fidelio in New York; Siegelinde at Covent Garden and the Marschallin in Vienna’s Der Rosenkavalier. Every other opera house and festival is having to wait its turn.

Davidsen has lately added Jenufa and — dangerously — Salome to her power-pack. She has also taken on two scary Verdis — Leonora in Forza del Destino, and the Lady in Macbeth for the Met. It has reached the point where, if Lise Davidsen sneezes, the opera world shuts down.

“Hands up at the back if you can’t hear me,” she’ll chirp at recital. No risk of that. The instant response when Lise Davidsen starts to sing is shock at the sheer volume. The second is a gasp at the limpid beauty of her sound. And that’s just the music. Over the course of a recital, it’s her personality that captivates, as much as the voice.

When we met this summer at the BBC, she arrived by public transport, without minders, asserting a freedom rare amongst opera’s prized assets. Hailing from a Norwegian province with 98 people per square kilometre, where everyone knows everyone else, she enjoys the indifference of central London.

But Stokke remains home, and she’s building a house there to live in when she marries her British fiancé, a producer of TV food programmes.

I wonder how it feels from within to produce such an arresting sound. “Very grateful and honoured that I can make people feel that way,” she replies. “Shocked indeed, but very happy. My fiancé says, I wish you could be in the hall and hear yourself.” Lise gives a quick giggle, a signal that she is comfortable in our conversation, and open to confide more.

As a girl, she excelled at sports, handball especially. She was fiercely competitive, getting red-carded by referees. Her father was an electrician, her mother a care home nurse. When she took up singing, they sought a state loan to pay for her education.

Turned down on audition by the national academy in Oslo (which she won’t let them forget), she transferred to Bergen, where they trained her as a Bach-and-Handel contralto. Taking advice, she tried a teacher in Copenhagen, Susanna Eken, who talked to students of the psyche and the soma, the importance of heredity and environment in forming an opera voice.

“I sang an aria from the St Matthew Passion of Bach,” Lise relates. “And then she talked. She talked about things I wasn’t good at, the way I looked, the way I presented myself. I left and I cried and I cried and I cried. Next day, I had another session and I cried and I cried and I cried. I called my Mum and she said, maybe this is not for you. Two weeks later I went back to Susanna and asked her to be my teacher. And then I went to see a shrink, as well.”

This unprompted confession gives a clue to Lise Davidsen’s magnetic attraction. On stage, as in life, she holds nothing back. With the darkest of characters, she finds a degree of empathy. She loves Salome, for instance, as a misunderstood child in a tough family, a loner, obsessed with the beauty of Jochanaan.

She finds an added level of self-confidence in each role she takes on. “You can’t sing and say you’re sorry for who you are,” she says. She trains these days with the mental coach of the Norwegian Olympic team, adding sports psychology and recovery patterns to her routines.

Winning five competitions in 2015 turned her from a singer who pleaded for a break to one who was begged for her autograph. She struggled to adjust. There were times she just wanted to go home and help out in a care home, “which is really interesting work”. But the enforced silence of Covid reinforced her sense of mission. There was no more turning back.

What Lise Davidsen brings to opera, and what makes her dominant, is a blend of constant self-examination, informed by two decades of unsparing preparation. In common with other Nordic legends, she takes no shortcuts.

The work ethic is formidable and the rewards — five-digit nightly fees, endless applause — are secondary. It helps that many of the biggest roles she sings are set amongst raging seas and cruel winters.

She has, like Flagstad and Nilsson, both feet planted firmly apart on ancestral ground. One imagines her chopping logs for a fire for the family to gather around at Christmas. Her house in Stokke is being built by her brother.

She mentions, in passing, that she paid off her student loan only a couple of years ago. Rooted in reality, she is not susceptible to temptation or hyperbole. Lise Davidsen is the last big star that opera can claim. Cherish her, whilst we can.