Jessica Pratt: The Australian conquering world opera

Ahead of her Brisbane ‘homecoming’, superstar Jessica Pratt talks performance anxiety, homelessness, an unhinged bride – and living in Dame Joan’s shadow.

Jessica Pratt has performed her signature role – the dangerously unhinged bride, Lucia, from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor – more than 100 times.

In 2003, Jessica Pratt moved from Australia to Italy to study with Rome Opera conductor Gianluigi Gelmetti (who also conducted the Sydney Symphony Orchestra) and ­renowned singing teacher Renata Scotto. For a trainee opera singer in her early twenties, who had finished high school in Toowoomba, this was a critical career breakthrough.

Yet beneath the beckoning glamour of ­Europe’s gilded opera houses and voice lessons with revered teachers, the reality was often grim: money was so tight, Pratt often couch surfed at friends’ houses and apartments.

From her rural home outside Florence, she recalls: “I had a partner at the time, and we would drive around looking for places to sleep.’’ At one point the-then emerging singer hired a campervan and stayed at a camp ground outside Rome, but this experiment didn’t last for long.

She explains: “Unfortunately, the first morning I woke up there, somebody tried to rob me so I was like, ‘I’m gonna go back to my friends’ couches’.’’ Pratt describes these lean years with a philosophical, “that’s just how it was” tone, rather than any sense of ­­self­-pity.

Two decades on, the British-born, Australian-raised soprano is a bona fide superstar: she is regarded as one of the world’s leading interpreters of technically demanding, vocally acrobatic bel canto roles and is currently being booked five years in advance. The New York Times has described her as a soprano “of gleaming sound, free and easy high notes … and lyrical grace” and she has performed at opera’s most prestigious houses, including Teatro alla Scala (La Scala), the Staatsoper Hamburg, the Metropolitan Opera and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. She has also collaborated with eminent conductors including Carlo Rizzi, Sir Colin Davis and Zubha Mehta.

Pratt has performed her signature role – the dangerously unhinged bride, Lucia, from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor – more than 100 times. Joan Sutherland was also acclaimed for this role, so European and Australian media like to compare Pratt to La Stupenda. However, she reveals during this phone interview she is uncomfortable with the comparison. “It’s not that I don’t like to be compared to her,’’ Pratt says. “For me, she’s an idol. I just feel like all singers are individuals.’’

The 44-year-old singer has clearly secured her place in the firmament of globetrotting opera stars, yet her feet seem firmly planted on solid ground. When asked to identify the performance that thrust her career into higher gear after those periods of being skint and homeless, she says there wasn’t one. “I don’t think there was any actual career breakthrough,’’ she says. “People, especially young singers, think that there’s going to be some moment where it all works out and it really doesn’t. It’s just a lot of smaller moments that build up.’’

She made her Italian debut in 2007, portraying Lucia in a Como theatre, and “I remember in the beginning jumping in and thinking ‘Oh, this is it – I just saved a show in Zurich, or I just saved a show in Bologna.’ But it was just another job. Gradually, over time, you build up a name and you build up a reputation. So now, I’m ­always booked five years in advance and that gives stability.’’

The 44-year-old singer has clearly secured her place in the firmament of globetrotting opera stars, yet her feet seem firmly planted on solid ground.

Pratt will embark on a kind of homecoming in April, when she makes her debut for Opera Queensland in a concert version of Lucia di Lammermoor, and as part of a bel canto festival that will include a long lunch and opera-inspired menu designed by Maggie Beer. On the menu will be a dessert – La Dolce Jessica – that Beer has created to honour Pratt. “I can say it’s very, very tasty,’’ says the singer. “It’s like a trifle, a kind of mix of all the different things of my life that she put together. Macadamias for Australia; amaretto for Italy.’’

The soprano graduated from Toowoomba State High school in the mid-1990s, and she reflects that her Opera Queensland shows are “really a homecoming, because I think when you go through your high school years, you make friendships and memories that last’’. Although she is now based in Italy, she says “I have very strong memories of Brisbane being a sort of home town. My father, mother, sister and nieces all live in Brisbane, so it’s super important and great to be able to spend time with them. And to have my nieces come to the show.’’

She is drawn to the character of Lucia di Lammermoor – who is forced into a marriage she doesn’t want, to save her family’s fortune – because “she’s a fascinating character. There were a number of operas written on the subject of women going crazy, because at the time, early to mid-1800s, women were pushing for independence and the vote.

“There was this popular theme of a woman who, when she lost the man, went mad and when the man came back, she came back to herself.’’ She chuckles wryly and adds: “It was an exploration of what an independent woman would be, by men. But Lucia is actually the first of this group of mentally feeble women who goes completely mad, she doesn’t come back to herself.’’

Lucia is famous for her mad scene, in which she appears in a bloodstained white gown, having stabbed the husband she doesn’t love on their wedding night. Pratt reflects that “what sends her mad is a (frustrated) sense of independence in a patriarchal world where she has no option. She can’t choose her own destiny, be in charge of who she falls in love with, who she marries.’’

Feminists are critical of how many opera heroines end up dead or insane, but Pratt agrees Lucia di Lammermoor can be read as a critique of forced marriage. “Absolutely, it is. Donizetti suffered a lot from mental health (problems). He’s one of the best people that have described mental health issues, and I think that’s because he went through it. It’s not silly. It’s very real and very true and honest the way he writes it, and he had a lot of sympathy for the ­character.’’

After living and performing for two decades in Europe, Pratt has a hybrid Australian-Italian accent. With luxuriantly rolling Rs and elongated As, her answers tumble forth in a fast-flowing stream. She has toured to 80 cities, inhabiting characters ranging from Cleopatra and Juliette to Amina from Bellini’s La Sonnambula (The Sleepwalker) and Elvira from The Puritans.

In Brisbane, in addition to Lucia, she will perform arias and scenes from several Bellini operas alongside tenors Rosario La Spina and Carlos Barcenas under the baton of conductor Richard Mills.

Patrick Nolan, Opera Queensland chief executive and artistic director, says Pratt “is part of a lineage of phenomenal Australian singers from Nellie Melba to Joan Sutherland that have enchanted audiences in the greatest opera houses around the world, singing bel canto repertoire. This alone is something to celebrate, and as Jessica has never sung in a leading role in Brisbane before, I thought it was important we gave Brisbane audiences the opportunity to see her perform.’’

Like Sutherland, Pratt has become a celebrity in Italy and Spain, where operas are regularly televised. “People watch opera more often here, so they know my face a little bit,’’ she says. If she is heading towards an opera house, strangers often approach her for a chat. “People are very nice,’’ she says. “They tell me about what they liked; it’s not like I am mobbed.”

As for those Sutherland comparisons, Pratt elaborates that “because I come from Australia and I sing a similar repertoire to her, in Italy certainly and the rest of the world, that does come up a lot. But it would be the same if I was a big Italian guy, a tenor being compared to Pavarotti. People know those names because those were the great singers of the (20th) century. So it’s a natural thing for people to try and figure out who people are by what they know.

“Sutherland had a very big voice. I don’t have the same voice as her. Obviously I don’t have the same life experience as her. We are two very different people (even though) I love Sutherland.’’

Pratt performs in roughly 10 productions per year. “I just work constantly,’’ she says. “I’m usually travelling around 11 months of the year.’’ Last year, she performed in Paris, Florence, Spain, Frankfurt, Sydney and Melbourne, among other engagements.

When we speak in March, she is starring in the Mozart opera The Abduction from the Seraglio, at La Scala. She says: “At the moment I’m having a wonderful time because I’m working in Milan, which is only a three-hour drive from my house. So every week I get to come home for the weekend.’’

Spending most of the year touring can be lonely but she regularly tours with her Italian husband, Riccardo, who has his own IT company. “I don’t feel so lonely because in every city I know somebody and I have been on the road virtually 20 years. And not only that, the repertoire I sing is very specialised. So in every production there’s always one or two people that I’ve already sung with before, so it’s a small group of people that end up travelling around and hanging out together. That’s a bonus.’’

She still studies with two teachers – American singing coach Kamal Kahn and her dad, Phil Pratt, a former tenor turned music teacher, who encouraged her to play the trumpet as a child before she later took up singing. “He has always taught me so I just keep working with him,’’ she says.

A winner of the Australian Singing Competition and the Vienna State Opera Award, in 2023, she pulled off a rare feat, singing all four female leads (including a cruel courtesan and wind-up doll) in the Tales of Hoffmann for Opera Australia. In the same year, for the Sydney Opera House’s 50th birthday celebrations, she performed a solo concert of mad scenes, which was promoted as a “mind-blowing evening of opera’s cliff hangers’’.

Despite the jet lag, she would, if anything, like to perform more regularly in Australia. “I don’t mind the jet lag at all. I’m perfectly used to it,’’ she says. “I love working in Australia because I can see my family.’’

The artist who likes to lift weights, tend her garden and study languages in her limited free time doesn’t find it intimidating to perform in Europe’s grand opera houses. Still, as her fame has grown, so has the burden of expectation. “The first jobs I had weren’t in these big houses, they were in smaller houses,” she says. “I was just so excited to be singing and to be part of the production, I didn’t really feel very nervous. I have more of that now than I had in the past … The more the expectations build on my performances, the more I get anxious.’’

She reveals that the night before a performance, “I’ll be very anxious, I can’t really go out or function very well socially.’’

She adds candidly: “I don’t particularly like my job before I go on stage.’’ After a performance, “I’m very tired. But then the day passes, and you’ve done the show and you go, ‘Oh it wasn’t that bad’.’’

She says this with a small, knowing laugh. It’s the laugh of a singer who is dedicated to her art form, while recognising how much it takes out of her.

Does she find the rush of performing addictive? Ever the realist, Pratt replies: “No, I don’t find that, but I have seen that in my colleagues – they like that part of it. For me, I like the feeling of being together. You get the sensation that the whole audience is one, and there might be a silence within the music and you can feel everybody holding their breath together. That feeling of being united with so many people, that’s a big rush.’’

Jessica Pratt will perform at QPAC, Brisbane, with Opera Queensland on April 20, 24 and 27.