We’ve all done it. You meet a smooth-talking love-bomber. You fall head over heels. You agree to meet him (and crucially, you do not tell your Dad. He’s so protective. He’d only worry). Too late, you find out your man’s not quite who he said he was, and his intentions are worse. But he’s a powerful man, and you don’t know any better. Am I right ladies?

Nadine Sierra knows this story well – from the stage at least. This September the American soprano, one of the art’s most dazzling rising stars, returns to a signature role, Rigoletto’s sheltered innocent, Gilda, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Though it’s a tragic tale, it’s a happy return for Sierra – she made her debut there as Gilda, nearly a decade ago.

‘She means a lot to me,’ Sierra tells me when we meet in west London, her in the off-duty superstar uniform of black yoga pants and a chic black sweater embroidered with little stars, hair back and just a faint smudge of lippy.

‘When I was around her age – she’s probably what, like 15, 16 – I was very much like her. I was very naive and innocent, and definitely had these preconceived notions of what falling in love is like, and who to fall in love with, having obviously no experience and no inkling of what evils lie in the world, and that certain people do hold darkness within themselves.’

Nadine Sierra in Deborah Warner’s Lucia di Lammermoor at the Royal Opera, April 2024 (Clive Barda)

Her view is that Verdi’s Duke of Mantua ‘is a narcissist of some type. And that being her first experience, and her last as well, it’s heartbreaking. I understand her so well, falling in love very young.’ Sierra’s own first ‘big relationship was when I was 18,’ she says. ‘I was very pure and very sweet. And I fell in love with someone thinking they were one way and then I found out they were another. So it’s having those sort of harsh realities of life but needing them, in a way, to grow.’

Ten years down the line from her debut (and recently single) Sierra thinks she still has ‘some of that innocence or that naiveté. I do have those Gilda moments – “Here we go again,” you know. But she’s so precious to me, that character, that opera – it’s brought me so much. Every time I play her, every time I get to experience that opera, something beautiful happens in my life. She’s like a good luck charm for me. I never feel she’s that “routine” role. She’s ever-evolving in my mind.’

Bartlett Sher’s production, making its own Met debut, shifts the opera’s action from 16th-century Mantua to Weimar-era Germany – a place of decadence and political ferment, where complacency and abuse of power are blindly driving a nation to a cliff edge over which the far right is waiting, armed to the teeth with hate.

Verdi’s tale is based on Victor Hugo’s controversial play, Le roi s’amuse (which had been banned in France) and Gilda’s innocence is ultimately left to the mercy of an entitled, sexually incontinent, morally bankrupt power player. Frankly it all feels a bit on the nose right now.

We meet in summer, before President Biden’s withdrawal from the electoral race and Kamala Harris’ emergence as the meme queen of the political moment. Still, Rigoletto opens two months before US voters finally go to the polls, and I wonder how it feels to be playing this piece in New York amid, well, see above.

‘I think what Bart wanted to bring out was the sense of feeling imprisoned in your own environment, and always having to feel on edge about what’s going on around you,’ she says. ‘Of walking on eggshells.’

She’s about to go to Paris, she tells me. Again, they are mid-electoral process when we speak, and nobody can yet foresee the narrow escape in store. ‘They’re going through it. This country already went through their own elections. I know that Germany is going through a lot of stuff. And of course, now we have two wars going on.’

Sierra says the biggest problem with the opera business is ‘a certain level of snobbery’ (Marion Parez)

When she opens up social media, she says, ‘there’s a lot of negative energy. When I think of how I grew up in the late Eighties and Nineties, and then I think about kids today, what they’re going through, these new generations, it feels very hopeless. I feel like there’s one side that wants to gain control of that hopelessness, and there’s another side that’s very much trying to break free from that control. And that dynamic is playing out not just among adults, but even with kids, as young as she is’ – she indicates a young girl of about six, quietly sitting with her mother at the next table.

‘It feels really weird,’ Sierra says, sounding momentarily defeated. ‘That now, from all that we’ve learned in our human history, in 2024, having gone through a pandemic and isolation from each other and all these different things [from] where you think growth would happen, we’re in a place of real darkness.’

Darkness though is the meat and drink of so much opera, I suggest, particularly for women. Sierra’s 2022 album, Made for Opera, focused very deliberately on three – Verdi’s Violetta, Donizetti’s Lucia and Gounod’s Juliette – who are denied their right to choose their own destinies by patriarchal norms and whims.

That’s true, she agrees, ‘but a lot of these composers have made these women the heroines of their operas. They’ve highlighted the fact that all these terrible things are happening to them, but they get the most beautiful music. They’re really the star of the show, and their stories are being told – at least that’s my understanding – in that way to give the audience a lesson that these are things that shouldn’t be repeated. And they’re still happening.’

The way she tries to highlight that in performance, she says, is by ‘making it as believable as possible. It’s putting my own pain, my own suffering from very similar events in my life, and bringing them out so that it doesn’t just feel like an opera, but like “Wow, like, these things do still happen to people”. So it’s not trying to make opera just pretty, but putting a lot more truth into what’s been played.’

That album, her second, was personal in other ways. Sierra’s devotion to opera was influenced by her grandmother, a woman born into an aristocratic Portuguese family whose own dream of being an opera singer was thwarted by her family’s insistence that she had one role – that of wife and mother.

‘You’re supposed to procreate,’ Sierra says. ‘Be a wife, be good to the family. That’s your duty to your entire lineage, and my grandmother, because of that, she never got the chance to focus on any of her passions, any of her dreams and any of her creativity, and it’s creativity from a human being that’s been lost. And there’s so many of us. It’s lost, it’s gone.’

Getting to the top, Sierra says, requires sacrifice (Clive Barda)

Her grandmother’s experience gave Sierra’s own mother, a bank-teller, the determination to do right by her daughters (Sierra is the second of three – Stephanie, the eldest, is a model, Melanie, the younger, is in musical theatre). ‘My mom was the leader of allowing us girls to live out our passions, because she learned a valuable lesson from her mother’s experience of how not to bring up girls.’

Still, Sierra had to work at it. ‘She really held me accountable, because she knew that it takes a lot of work and dedication and training. And so we made a pact, even though I was so young [Sierra was six when she fell in love with opera, after watching a videotape of La bohème] that I would practise every single day for an hour, I would have my lessons once a week, and all of my extra activities outside of school would be dedicated to learning music and participating in community theatre and learning about the stage in general. And I held my end of the pact, because I wanted it so badly.’

Her grandmother died when Sierra was 18, but witnessed the start of her granddaughter’s meteoric rise. ‘She was really shocked at how that creativity could blossom, and how fast,’ Sierra says. ‘From the time I was 14 to 18, I was already in the opera business. I was already working and making debuts and very much solidifying myself as a budding opera singer.’

She clearly takes it very seriously. ‘I still have to work super hard, I don’t feel like even now that I’ve “made it”, I feel like I have so much more that I have to do. I don’t take my career for granted. I know that it can very easily be taken away from me.’

Her work ethic comes from her parents (her Puerto Rican-Italian father is a firefighter). ‘My parents have definitely experienced the American dream – very much self-made, working super hard, dedicating their lives to their children getting better,’ though she questions whether they could do it now. ‘I feel that that time is very much past us.’

But she very much buys into the notion of hard work being the key – and not everyone does, she thinks. ‘That part of the American dream, I think, is still very relevant and alive. People have to embrace that, especially the younger generation. I don’t want them to feel like they don’t have to work for it. You still have to sacrifice; you still have to go through some level of pain to earn your place. That’s the yin and yang of life, it’s not all about the stars and rainbows.’

The reason we’re able to meet in person is that the night before she sang to a crowd of thousands of rain-soaked punters at BST Hyde Park, alongside the singer Andrea Bocelli.

‘I love singing with Andrea,’ she says. ‘I’ve been working with him now, I think, eight years. He’s lovely, treats me with so much respect, and with joy. He’s really a beautiful colleague. And it was a very good crowd. Everybody was in the rain and didn’t care and had their umbrellas. I think that’s very UK.’

Bocelli is without doubt one of opera’s biggest stars, fame-wise, but is viewed by many in the business as a bit of a substandard cheesemonger. Sierra gives this very short shrift.

‘The biggest problem with opera, as a business – not as an art form, as a business – is that there’s a certain level of snobbery. For instance, when I work with Andrea, I’ve received some criticism from some of my peers or people who run opera companies, putting it down, and saying, “Why would you?”

‘Andrea is celebrating his 30th career anniversary this year,’ she continues. ‘And every programme I’ve done with Andrea, for eight years, the entire first half is completely dedicated to opera. That’s the only repertoire he shows in the first hour, hour-and-a-half. And so many people in his audience have probably never even stepped into an opera house. They’re experiencing something from him that my business is not giving to the people. So you can put Andrea down as much as you want, but what are you doing to give opera to the rest of the world?’

She finds it frustrating, she says, particularly in the US: ‘We have so many philanthropists for opera, right? And it’s like, why don’t we try to donate their money into productions that are a little bit different from what we’re showing in the opera houses? Why don’t we put on this concert I did in Hyde Park? Why don’t we do those things? Why is that not an option?

‘I mean, if I were a billionaire or multi-millionaire, and I wanted to give to opera, that would be the first thing I would think of – why don’t we produce something big so that many different people can actually come, either for free or make it affordable?’

She thinks the business is sort of stuck. ‘There’s this lie that they tell themselves that if it’s not this way, opera will not be taken seriously. By whom? Who are those people? I mean, there are more people who know nothing about opera today than there are people who do know about it. So I think people have to get away from this lie, and maybe even try to produce the things that Andrea does to reach all people from all walks of life.’

When she looks out on to that sodden audience, she says, ‘I don’t see just predominantly white, very wealthy people. [They’re] from all walks of life. The business of opera needs to put their creativity together and their imagination, and do the same if they want opera to flourish as an art form and not just stay where it’s been. It’s not a good business model. It’s really not.’

This year, the Met, next year, the Superbowl? It could happen. ON

Rigoletto is at the Metropolitan Opera in New York from 30 September to 24 January. metopera.org

This article originally appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Opera Now. Never miss an issue – subscribe today