Elsa Dreisig (Simon Fowler/Parlophone)

Elsa Dreisig is the sort of opera singer who finds it very hard to choose. ‘I want to sing everything,’ she confesses, ‘and since I started singing, it has sometimes caused a fight with my teachers. They would say, “This is not for you today.” And I would say, “No way! I am not going to wait.”’

This restless part of Dreisig’s personality came through loud and clear in 2018 on her striking album debut, ‘Miroir(s)’ – a runner-up in the recital category of the 2019 Gramophone Awards. Here she depicts operatic characters through the prism of contrasting portrayals by different composers: Manon as painted by both Puccini and Massenet; Shakespeare’s Juliet as captured by Gounod and by Daniel Steibelt (1765-1823). Most daringly for a soprano still in her twenties, she took on Salome in two guises: Massenet’s Salomé from the opera Hérodiade, and the final scene from Strauss’s opera, sung in the French version championed by Mary Garden. ‘Can any one voice encompass all these vocal demands?’ wondered Mark Pullinger (12/18), but he concluded that Dreisig had pulled off quite a feat.

‘In this business, these “rules” we have are not actually real. It’s first of all about interpretation. If we have a role in our heart and our belly, it’s good to give it a chance’

The French-Danish soprano’s athletic virtuosity and her reluctance to nail her colours to the mast is also the striking feature of her third and newest album, ‘Mozart x 3’. True, there’s only one composer on the bill: Mozart himself – but Dreisig has cast her net ambitiously wide. She tackles three roles from each of the Lorenzo da Ponte operas – which, for example, allows her to play all three victims of Don Giovanni – and then one role from each of the opere serie Idomeneo (Elettra), Lucio Silla (Cecilio) and La clemenza di Tito (Vitellia). Dreisig describes the project with colourful clarity. ‘Mozart is insane in my life,’ she says from her flat in Paris via Zoom, ‘so it had to be an insane album about him. Because otherwise it’s not representative enough of me.’

It’s not exactly a surprise to find a young singer – Dreisig is 30 – navigating her path through opera with the aid of Mozart. Rising artists are guided to Mozart’s roles to polish their techniques, hone their dramatic timing and learn how to wrap their tongues around all that fiddly recitative. Good, ‘sellable’ Mozart is a calling card for impresarios and agents, and rare is the vocal competition that doesn’t feature Mozart opera or concert arias. Yet if Mozart is a well-trodden path, Dreisig’s approach to it shows a striking freshness and freedom.

Le nozze di Figaro, Berlin Staatsoper, 2021: Dreisig as the Countess Almaviva (Matthias Baus/Staatsoper Unter der Linden)

Take Così fan tutte. Fiordiligi has become a talismanic part for Dreisig: her role debut was cancelled owing to the pandemic, only to be suddenly offered to her in a 2020 staging at the Salzburg Festival that was dreamt up within weeks as a Covid-feasible production – and which became a huge hit. Yet Fiordiligi’s flightier sister is also important to her. Dreisig has sung Dorabella’s arias at competitions, and on ‘Mozart x 3’ she’s as affectingly piqued in Dorabella’s ‘Smanie implacabili’ as she is affronted and vulnerable in Fiordiligi’s ‘Come scoglio’.

‘The role is part of my life,’ she says of Dorabella. ‘I’m not singing it “as a mezzo-soprano”. And when you look at the score of Così, Fiordiligi actually goes lower than Dorabella – though of course she’s higher in ensembles, sometimes incredibly high. But she has the lowest notes. Today we separate these roles for singers, but in Mozart’s time they were all given to the same singers. And this is something I want to show to the closed mind of our “business”, that these “rules” we have are not actually real. It’s first of all about interpretation. If we have a role in our heart and our belly, it’s good to give it a chance.’

‘Donna Elvira is always screaming, always angry. I see much more of a lost woman who is desperate to save a man’

She’s inspired by one trailblazing singer who has already demonstrated that categorising voice types can be pointless and who long since shrugged off criticism about her repertoire adventures. ‘Cecilia Bartoli has done that incredibly well in her career. Is she a mezzo? Is she a soprano? We’ve never been able to say. And she doesn’t care – that’s not the point. For her it’s about, “Is this character someone I want to sing?”’

In April 2022, Dreisig will twice tackle three Mozart roles in one week as part of a specially devised da Ponte cycle at the Berlin Staatsoper, where her five-year stint as part of the ensemble ends this coming summer. I’m tempted to call this the operatic answer to the Olympic triathlon, for it’s quite a feat of endurance: Fiordiligi on Thursday, Countess Almaviva on Saturday and Donna Elvira on Sunday, the last – just to raise the stakes even higher – a role debut. It is ‘unknown land’, she concedes. ‘But if I get rational about it, I get scared. So it has to stay as something “un-normal”. I won’t do this every month, but I have accepted the challenge because it’s Daniel Barenboim and because it’s the Staatsoper Berlin, “my house” – those things give me the courage to do it, but I think it’s a little bit an act of faith.’ It may help (or it may not) that director Vincent Huguet has a Concept, with a capital C, about the three operas. ‘Fiordiligi, the Contessa and Elvira are the same woman. Fiordiligi is 20 years old, the Contessa 30 and Elvira 40.’

Dreisig as Massenet’s Manon in 2021 at the Hamburg Staatsoper: she adores the role and is disappointed at having performed it in only two productions so far (Brinkhoff-Moegenburg)

Although Dreisig has enjoyed playing at dressing up for the new album (a photoshoot captures her in different guises inspired by the different women she’s singing), the performances themselves suggest that she’s less interested in big dramatic contrasts than in painting similarly credible, sympathetic women. Or in the case of Cherubino, a rather soppy teenage boy. Dreisig’s timbre is routinely described as having a bright, warm quality – Geoff Brown (The Times) described her as having ‘a smile in her voice’ in her London performances of Beethoven’s Christ on the Mount of Olives with Sir Simon Rattle. It’s this lively, honest quality that really imbues ‘Mozart x 3’.

Aided on the recording by some very swift speeds set by conductor Louis Langrée, Dreisig’s Countess in The Marriage of Figaro definitely doesn’t wallow in misery – her ‘Dove Sono’ is determinedly unsentimental, a snapshot of a youthful, loving bride forced into uneasy introspection. Travel over to Don Giovanni for a limpidly affecting rendition of Donna Elvira’s ‘Mi tradì’. Elvira’s great scene is normally a platform for a ferocious lament, but that’s emphatically not what Dreisig wanted.

‘It’s why I’m happy with this experience of Mozart arias – trying to give a personality to a character that has been lost a little bit with tradition. Elvira is always screaming, always angry. I see much more of a lost woman who is desperate to save a man.’ With that man being Don Giovanni, she hasn’t much of a chance, I venture. ‘Of course, it doesn’t succeed. She’s losing her self-respect because she loves a man who doesn’t respect her. So it’s more this feeling of being ashamed: “What am I right now? I tried to save a man who is not worth saving. I love him and he doesn’t love me in return. What does that say about me?”’

‘Hopefully it won’t be long before I do the role of Mélisande, because it really makes sense for me to do it now’

From the recitative, ‘In quali eccessi’, to the aria proper, the usual emotional journey charted by your average Elvira is a crescendo of emotion, Elvira working herself up into something that you might call hysteria. If anything, Dreisig goes in the opposite direction. ‘In the aria itself, she loses strength,’ she explains. ‘She’s not becoming more and more angered, she’s realising, “My goodness, I am not doing the right thing.” It’s more intimate.’ Can she relate to the role? ‘I feel she is a very modern woman,’ Dreisig agrees. ‘She has that syndrome – I see it in my entourage, my friends, people who are so desperate to save another person. But when someone doesn’t want to be saved, it’s completely useless.’

Just as radical to my mind is another startling take on a very different heroine, this one from the opera seria section. Vitellia’s ‘Non più di fiori’ from La clemenza di Tito is the pivotal lament by the scheming Roman princess when, essentially, her plans go up in smoke because she realises her beloved Sesto’s head is on the block. She decides to admit her guilt to the emperor instead. There is usually a lot of scenery-chewing at this point as Project Vitellia goes down in flames, her emotional volatility ultimately undoing her wily machinations.

Dreisig flips this around entirely. ‘This one I really wanted to do in another way,’ she explains. ‘She’s a very pragmatic woman – the kind of person who has shut off everything emotional. She wants power, she wants to be in politics. She’s not sacrificing herself for “love”, she has no choice. She knows that if she confesses now, then she’ll get some good lawyers who could get her only one or two years in prison. So I didn’t want to do crazy things, with her thinking, “Oh, I am guilty, I did something horrible, I have to confess.” I don’t see her like that. So the recitative, the low notes – I didn’t want to do them in a way that’s too creepy.’ She admits the result is unconventional. ‘It’s a little bit against tradition. The conductor, Louis Langrée, who I love, and really was such an ally on the album … he wanted to do it a little more crazy, and I said, “No, no, no – I am not going to make her crazy, or make her too hysterical.”’

It’s not the first time Dreisig has stood her ground in the studio. She had to insist on including the final scene from Strauss’s Salome on ‘Miroir(s)’ despite eyebrows being raised over the suitability of the music. ‘I don’t bend,’ she says simply, translating into French for good measure: ‘Je ne plie pas!’

We talk in more detail about the remarkable production of Così fan tutte that was born in the strange summer of 2020. Although it is captured on DVD by Erato (Pullinger, again reviewing for Gramophone, acclaimed Dreisig’s ‘pearly top notes and rock-solid technique’, 6/21), what the video recording can’t convey – I was at the first night – is the sense of heightened emotion, on stage and off, that this ‘emergency’ show generated after months of cancellations and empty auditoriums (at the time of writing, Austria is now depressingly entering another lockdown).

Dreisig describes being with the cast and Christof Loy, the director, on a sort of nuage (a cloud), both because it was such a happy time and because they were in a ‘bubble’, floating above the rest of the city. ‘We were working every day, then we went out. It was only us together and it was strict. But together we had no boundaries – in performance we were able to touch each other, really react to each other. It’s one of my richest memories.’

Yet she treasures the production as much for the deep dive into Mozart and the dissection of Così as for the circumstances of the performance. ‘Christof and I had the feeling that we were completely in the core of the piece. We had an empty stage. There was no added “story”, just what was written in the text.’

There will, of course, be more Fiordiligis in Dreisig’s career with different facets, ‘But one thing that will never change is that I will never do a Fiordiligi who is scared of boys. You know that kind of Fiordiligi, where you think, “Have you ever lived before? Have you ever seen a man before?” She is full of contradictions: she says something and then she does something else, then she punishes herself – but that’s not weakness, it’s complexity. I can add stuff: I can do her more funny, more weird, more traditional, more modern. But this complexity, for me the truth of that person, I will never take away. And I learnt that with Christof.’ The Salzburg Così affirmed for her that, ‘In the kind of opera I like, you don’t need big costumes, big staging. It’s fun when it’s busy on stage and you have thousands of things to do, but it’s not where I draw the most emotion.’

Elsa Dreisig (Simon Fowler/Parlophone)

Perhaps this reflective response to the theatrical ‘business’ of opera is a consequence of growing up as a self-confessed ‘stage brat’. The daughter of Danish opera singer Inge Dreisig and the French singer, conductor and director Gilles Ramade, she was brought up (mostly) in France. Her parents met on stage (‘There is nothing exceptional about being an opera singer in my family’), and she says that as a child the theatre was her real home. ‘I was always asking to go there with my mother, to be backstage, in the make-up area, in the costumes department. I always loved to find the secret door, the one that goes from the audience to backstage.’

At first she had her sights set on straight acting, but was accepted instead for a singing course. The path from there was remarkably stress-free – after far fewer years than usual, she enrolled at the Conservatoire National Supérieur in Paris, and from there swiftly joined the opera studio at the Berlin Staatsoper, later graduating to the ensemble proper. ‘It has never been a struggle,’ she says, shrugging in her most Gallic way. But perhaps it’s the more prudent Dane in her that is not sure whether perhaps it wasn’t all a bit too fast, too seamless. ‘I did precisely what I had to do. But sometimes I have this feeling that I jumped some steps – that I need to go back to the basics.’

At the same time, she has a very long list of challenging repertoire on the wish list. She has just been singing Donizetti’s Anna Bolena in Geneva, and is fascinated (and rather humbled) by the bel canto style: ‘I want to serve this tradition as well as possible.’ She adores Massenet’s Manon and is frustrated to have performed the role in only two productions. She’s also eager to get other French parts under her belt: ‘Marguerite (in Faust), Juliette (in Roméo et Juliette) and, a little further off, Massenet’s Thaïs and Charpentier’s Louise.’ How about Mélisande? ‘Of course! Hopefully it won’t take long, because it really makes sense for me to do it now.’

Most startlingly, she lets slip that she will build on her experience with Strauss’s Salome with the complete role, in German, at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in July. ‘We will do a special version that Strauss wrote for Dresden.’ In this 1929 edition of the score (only recently made available), Dreisig says the scoring is lighter to accommodate a more lyrical soprano. Veils may not be thrown to the winds (that depends on the director), but perhaps caution has been.

Talk of Debussy, Donizetti, Gounod and Strauss has taken us far from The Marriage of Figaro or Così fan tutte. But if Dreisig is hungry to explore many more roles and styles, she is also adamant that Mozart will be a constant. Indeed, it calms her nerves now to know that she will be coming back to his heroines again and again, always improving, finessing. ‘These are roles that you grow with. I know they are going to stay with me and I don’t feel I have to prove anything in them today, because they are part of the path.’

This article originally appeared in the January 2022 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue – subscribe today