In late January 2015, Australian soprano Siobhan Stagg was in Berlin preparing to board a flight to Zurich for an audition when her agent called.
“Do you know the Brahms German Requiem?” he asked. “And could you start singing it today with the Berlin Philharmonic?”
Stagg immediately said “yes” to both questions, gathered her luggage, and grabbed a cab to the Philharmonie concert hall, where the singer who had been due to perform had been taken ill.
“And, suddenly, I was rehearsing with the Berlin Phil and Christian Thielemann,” she says. “What I didn’t know, though, is at the end, after I sang he [Thielemann] looked over his shoulder slowly, and at the back of the hall, there were several figures in suits who I think were the executive team of the Phil. And he just gave them a very slow nod, like, ‘Yes, she’ll do’.”
Siobhan Stagg in her costume for the role of Susanna.Credit: Steven Siewert
Later that week, Stagg gave three performances to packed houses that included legendary tenor Placido Domingo and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
“It was so fast that I almost didn’t have time to get nervous,” she says. “I didn’t have any time for that. There was a task to be done, and I did it.”
Stagg’s Sliding Doors moment at Berlin airport helped catapult her to the top of the European circuit and engagements at major concert halls and opera houses there.
It’s been a long journey for Stagg from rural Victoria where she grew up the middle child of three to teacher parents, singing along to the pop songs of the day into an ice-cream cone “microphone”.
“Music was always something I loved, but I was led to believe it was a hobby,” she says. “I still can’t really believe that I do it as my profession now.”
An early key moment in her career came when Stagg was just 11 years old.
Siobhan Stagg will finally sing on the stage of the Joan Sutherland Theatre.Credit: Dylan Coker
“My grandfather had passed away in East Gippsland and all the extended family went there for the funeral,” she says. “I led the congregation, just totally untrained, in singing Amazing Grace. At the end of the wake a distant cousin slipped a hundred dollar note into my hand with a card that read, ‘This is for your first singing lessons, and please invite me when you sing at the Sydney Opera House’.”
Stagg took those singing lessons and thrived, going on to Melbourne University to study music, singing in the Trinity College Choir, which proved invaluable training.
“The repertoire changes every week,” she says. “So you have to get very fit at reading and singing what’s on the page.”
It was also in Melbourne that Stagg first saw an orchestra play live.
“It was the university student orchestra, and it was the first time I’d heard these instruments: a clarinet, a flute, a trumpet,” she says. “I probably would’ve heard them without realising in film scores, but I’d never seen them and identified that that’s the colour that I’m hearing. I was just blown away and I was like, ‘Wow, I’ve got a lot to catch up on’!”
After Melbourne, Stagg was selected for the Salzburg Festival Young Singers program and appointed a soloist at the Deutsche Oper Berlin where, she says, she “learned her craft”.
“I was six years as a principal soloist in Berlin,” she says. “My training up until then had been music, but not really any of the stagecraft that opera requires. In German houses you go through a huge volume of repertoire in a year. I was able to learn in a 12-month season probably 12 or 15 productions - small roles, medium roles, some big roles.”
Next week, Stagg will finally get to perform for the first time on the Joan Sutherland Theatre stage at the Sydney Opera House with Opera Australia.
Stagg will sing the role the servant Susanna in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, widely regarded as one of the most demanding in the soprano repertoire.
“Susanna is a role that I love,” she says. “I love playing her. She is a very relatable character, funny and sincere at the same time.”
“I love playing Susanna. She is a very relatable character, funny and sincere at the same time.”
Siobhan Stagg
And while this will be her first appearance on the Joan Sutherland Stage it is not her first time performing at the Sydney Opera House itself.
She sang in the Concert Hall there in 2016 alongside tenor Roberto Alagna. And it was then she was able to fulfil her part of the bargain to the distant relative who set her on the path to stardom all those years ago in East Gippsland.
“I was able to invite that cousin and thank her for changing my life,” says Stagg. “It was a beautiful full circle.”
The Marriage of Figaro opens at Sydney Opera House on July 31