Danielle de Niese (born 1980, Melbourne, Austl.) is an Australian-born American opera singer, noted especially for her performances of repertoire from the Baroque and Classical periods.
De Niese studied music as a child in Australia, and when she was 10 years old, the family moved to Los Angeles. There she continued studies in music as well as in dance, and as a teenager she was the host of a television program that featured young performers, for which she won an Emmy Award in 1996. She made her opera debut in Los Angeles at age 15, becoming the third generation in her family to perform professionally. In 1997 she entered the Mannes music school in New York City, and the following year she became the youngest person ever to be admitted to the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program of the Metropolitan Opera. When de Niese was only 19, she made her Metropolitan debut as Barbarina in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro; this was quickly followed by appearances there in Maurice Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges. After engagements with other American companies, she made her European debut in 2001, singing in the Netherlands and then in France and Italy. At the Glyndebourne (Eng.) Festival Opera in 2005, she was called upon at the last minute to sing (and dance) the role of Cleopatra in a new production of George Frideric Handel’s Giulio Cesare; her performance won international acclaim. Subsequent engagements in major opera houses and with prominent orchestras in Europe and the United States followed. In addition, she made appearances on Broadway and in several motion pictures, including the award-winning Hannibal (2001).
De Niese’s relatively small voice was especially suited to works from the 17th and 18th centuries, and at a time when early music performances had a newfound popularity, she was in great demand. In addition to performing several works of Handel, she starred in various Baroque operas, such as Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les Indes galantes, Christoph Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, and Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea. De Niese also sang in Mozart’s Così fan tutte and a number of other Classical operas. Venturing into later periods, de Niese performed leading roles in Giacomo Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi and Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff, as well as in Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Her first solo CD, Handel Arias (2007), in 2008 was named the debut recording of the year by the Académie du Disque Lyrique in Paris.