Natalya Romaniw interview: 'Puccini has been good to me!'

Returning at the Royal Opera House to the title role of Puccini's Tosca, she is also working with the Royal Opera on Mark-Anthony Turnage's new opera, Festen, before going home to 13-month-old Tedi, who was living the musical life even before he was born.

She was pregnant with Tedi while singing the title role of Richard Strauss's opera Ariadne auf Naxos at Garsington Opera in summer 2023. Now, after a day's work on two separate productions at Covent Garden she sits down with a picture book of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker. Tedi presses the buttons that make the musical extracts play, and sways from foot to foot.

Natalya Romaniw in the title role of Iolanta at Opera Holland Park. Photo: Ali Wright

It's a far cry from her overwhelming performance in Tchaikovsky's Iolanta, which she performed at Opera Holland Park in 2019 with tenor David Butt Philip, garnering five-star reviews. Iolanta is blind, but no one at the royal palace of her upbringing must tell her this truth. And yet she suspects that there is something missing in her life.

Romaniw plays another woman grappling with a situation outside her control when she sings Tosca, a towering role that she has not only performed before at Covent Garden, to great acclaim, but with which she made her Royal Opera debut in 2022, even though it is one of the best-known and most demanding roles in the repertoire. As a student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, she saw this same superb production, directed by Jonathan Kent, and now she sings opposite the singer she watched then, still playing the role of manipulative chief of police Scarpia – her countryman, Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel.

Natalya's 2022 Covent Garden debut, in Tosca, with Erwin Schrott as Scarpia. Photo: Clive Barda

In Tosca, the great Act 2 showdown between opera singer Floria Tosca and scheming, lustful Scarpia is one of the greatest scenes in all opera. Scarpia has captured Tosca's lover, an artist who is a political dissident, and has him tortured, within her hearing, so that she will give herself to him in exchange for a his freedom and a safe passage out of the area. But as Scarpia bears down on her, she spots one last chance to save her virtue.

Before this critical moment comes the famous aria 'Vissi d'arte' – (I lived for art). 'Tosca is like a caged animal,' explains Natalya, 'and there's a sense that there is no escape. Every time something happens between her and Scarpia she is looking for a way out. She's constantly trying to win back the upper hand.

'I've seen a lot of singers play Tosca, and I feel quite inspired by those divas who came before me.' Her spectacular costume (recently taken in by wardrobe – 'I've lost 20kg!”) has its own role to play here, a long, swishing train and silver heels contributing to Tosca's haughty glamour. But the moment when 'Vissi d'arte' breaks a long-held silence is a moment when Tosca's though processes tip over from internal to external expression: 'I've lived for my art. I've lived for my music. Why is this happening to me?'

Tosca (Natalya Romaniw) visits her painter lover, Cavaradossi, at work in church. Photo: Clive Barda

With Bryn Terfel as her Scarpia on this occasion, she has a link with the original production of 2006. 'Bryn can say, of a stage direction, “Jonathan used to want this”...' I feel completely supported by him.' The off-stage friendship goes deep – Terfel's wife, the harpist Hannah Stone, is Natalya's great friend, and even little Tedi has a link. His middle names are Arthur Bryn...

In complete contrast to Tosca, set in 1800 Rome, Turnage's Festen takes us into the diseased heart of a modern family meeting for a celebration dinner. Based on Thomas Vinterberg's 1998 film of the same name, the opera will capture an evening unravelling as secrets come out. 'I'm really happy with my character, because she is different from anything I've ever done before. There's something really special about being the first person to create a role.'

'Helena is one of the “safe” characters and very disturbed by what's happening. She's also the one with the black boyfriend, which, within this opera, is not totally accepted. She knows how to find a letter, hidden in the bathroom, and later on she's the one who has the momentous task of reading out the letter, which is very graphic, at the dinner party. No one know whether to quite believe it or not.

Tenor Thomas Atkins and Natalya Romaniw in Katya Kabanova at Grange Park Opera

'All the ambiguity carries on in the short last Act 3. The next morning everyone just says “Hello. Hello…” – it's another day.'

Natalya's real-life family is much less complex. Partner Peter, an Oxford music graduate, works in finance, and his two teenage daughters love newcomer Tedi. Her mother, who declared she liked the off-stage chorus best when she heard her daughter sing Tatyana, in Russian, in Eugene Onegin at Garsington Opera, is still 'keeping it real'. But her Ukrainian-born grandfather, now dead, who taught Natalya his national songs in her childhood, 'would have been up in arms' at his country's present plight. Some distance relatives are still in Ukraine.

The singer's early experience of a Slavic language surely helped her remarkable gift for singing in Czech, as she has done in Katya Kabanova at Grange Park Opera, and in both Dvorak's Rusalka and Smetana's The Bartered Bride at Garsington.

Natalya Romaniw joined in the circus scenes in Garsington Opera's The Bartered Bride

Home is Maze Hill, from where Natalya can run in Greenwich Park, for 'the peace that you get from being on your own, Nature, and the endorphins' – and she also goes to the gym. Small wonder she was able to hold her own with circus artists in The Bartered Bride. But even with this impressive number of appearances, at 37 she has her eyes on new roles. 'Puccini has been very favourable to me, as well as Tchaikovsky and Janacek, but I can't box myself in.

'I'd like to sing Verdi – Desdemona in Otello, Aida…. One day Il Trovatore.' Perhaps little Tedi will be in the audience by then. 'He's changed my life. He's very much changed the balance of it. Everything before I met Peter was about singing. And now there's a different dimension to me that's opened up, and that has informed my singing.'