Freddie De Tommaso: It’s me to you. And the air, the vibrations.
- Lucy Cheung
- 7 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Umberto Giordano’s opera Marina, written 138 years ago, was rediscovered during the pandemic and finally given its world premiere at Milan’s Teatro Dal Verme in February this year. The premiere recording, starring tenor Freddie De Tommaso and soprano Eleonora Buratto, was released by Decca Classics at the end of July, allowing listeners to hear the earliest work of the composer who would later write Andrea Chénier.
With British and Italian heritage, De Tommaso is one of the lyric tenors to have risen rapidly through the international opera world in recent years. Shortly before the release of Marina, I met him for a drink at the bar of the Royal Opera House in London. That evening, he was due back on stage to sing Rodolfo in Puccini’s La bohème. A year earlier, I had watched him at the same theatre opposite Anna Netrebko in the new production of Tosca.
De Tommaso has a warm, supple voice, but his characterisation is just as striking. His Rodolfo was young, sensitive and slightly awkward in his sincerity; his Cavaradossi was passionate and deeply affecting. When we met, he told me that he had already had experience as an actor as a child. From the age of five or six, he sang in his school choir, played the piano, and later joined the chapel choir and school orchestra.
At around 11, his mother took him to Glyndebourne to see Puccini’s one-act opera Gianni Schicchi. He had already heard its famous aria O mio babbino caro many times on the radio and in his father’s Italian restaurant. “Then hearing that in the context of the opera world, it was very exciting,” he recalled. Looking back, he says it was probably in the choir, as a young boy, that he “caught the bug for singing”.
Many of the roles he sings are tragic, and he says the challenge is to find a balance between emotional immersion and the demands of singing. “Obviously, if you go too deep into it, then it can affect your singing. And obviously that’s not good. But also, if you don’t go deep enough, you don’t give an interesting performance.” Experience helps. The more often he sings a role, the more it becomes part of his body; once the singing is secure, he can go further into the character.
Take Rodolfo. When he first sang the role in 2022, his attention was largely on the singing itself. He has now performed it at least 50 times. “The singing is, you know, it’s completely taken for granted, basically.” That gives him more freedom in rehearsal to develop his relationships with Mimì, Marcello and the other characters, and to find more layers in the role.
Marina was a very different experience. There was no established performance tradition and no recording to refer to, so De Tommaso had to look to Giordano’s later works, including Andrea Chénier and Fedora, for clues to the young composer’s musical language. “In its musical style, it is thoroughly verismo,” he says. Giordano was only about 21 when he wrote it, yet already seemed to have “his sound and his style well in his hands”.
De Tommaso plays Giorgio, a wounded Serbian soldier, whom he sees as somewhat similar to Cavaradossi in Tosca: “a heroic romantic character”. Much of the music is lyrical, he says, but there are also more forceful dramatic passages, giving the role something in common with the poet and revolutionary of Andrea Chénier.
To learn the role, he gave the full score to his London coach Jonathan Papp, who made him a learning track by playing the orchestral part as well as his vocal line. “Then, yeah, we just studied and coached it.” Without an established tradition to follow, the singers had to make their own decisions. “To a point, you can kind of really put your own individual stamp on it.”
At around 55 minutes, Marina is short enough to make an appealing double bill, and De Tommaso would love to see it on stage. He thinks it would work particularly well with Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana. The two operas were submitted to the same Sonzogno competition in 1888: Cavalleria rusticana won, while Marina came sixth. One went on to become a staple of the verismo repertoire; the other disappeared for almost 140 years.
Talking about Italian opera inevitably brings him back to Puccini. “He really understood human nature,” he says. “For romance, for love, he really had it.” He also points to aggression, recalling the second act of Tosca, particularly the confrontation between Tosca and Scarpia. Puccini, he says, understood human emotion and was able to translate it into sound, “possibly better than anyone else”.
His own voice, meanwhile, has changed considerably since 2022. “The voice is the muscle. It changes with time and with maturity.” His voice now feels more dramatic to him, ready for heavier repertoire. He still enjoys singing lyrical roles such as Rodolfo, but is looking ahead to larger Verdi and Puccini roles.
Born and raised in England, De Tommaso can sound, on stage, unmistakably Italian. Away from the stage, however, he is distinctly English: he likes going to the pub, playing golf and watching rugby. He describes himself as “very much a half-and-half kind of person”. His musical identity feels more Italian, while his everyday life retains what he sees as his Englishness.
He also feels strongly about opera’s place in contemporary culture. Over the past few decades, he says, opera in Britain has become increasingly removed from the mainstream. He sometimes uses social media to introduce opera to younger audiences, but he knows it is a difficult line to walk. “We know that we must do that sort of thing, but also we don’t want to appear cringe.”
“There’s so much choice for people,” he says. “There’s Netflix, there’s Amazon Prime, there’s Disney, all this stuff to take people’s attention away.” Opera has to fight for its own space: “Yes, I am still here. I’m still important. You must come.” If opera were to disappear simply because people did not know about it, he says, “it would be a tragedy”.
I ask him why he feels so strongly about bringing opera to more people. “Because it is the only way that a human being can sense, literally sense in their body, the vibrations created by another human being.” There is nothing between the singer and the listener: “There’s no piano or violin or whatever. There is no microphone, nothing electric. Nothing.”
“It’s me to you. And the air, the vibrations.” For De Tommaso, that direct physical connection is what makes opera so special — and what allows it to move people so strongly.
A sound you never get tired of
I really like the sound of a match striking. That, like, you know, the— and then as it catches. That’s the sound I really like.
The last piece of music that moved you to tears
The end of Suor Angelica.
Something audiences often get wrong about opera singers
That we’re not normal people. We are just completely normal, run-of-the-mill, normal people. And I think they think sometimes that we are, I don’t know, not normal. Bits of it can be glamorous, but a lot of it is travelling by yourself, staying in hotels or Airbnbs, just by yourself with your suitcase. It’s hard. You’re away from your family and loved ones a lot. It’s not all glamorous and fun all the time.
Your idea of perfect happiness
Peace. Peace, tranquillity.
Your most marked characteristic
Oh, I don’t know. Cheerful, I would like to say. I would like that to be the case.
What are you worst at?
Ignoring other people’s opinions.
The quality you most value in a person
Kindness.
The musicians who mean the most to you
Well, that’s a really hard question. My wife is a musician, so my wife and several of my best friends are musicians. So, yeah, my loved ones, I would say.
The thing you wish people noticed the most
Hard work.
The most incredible thing that has ever happened to you
The most incredible, the best thing that happened to me? My daughter.
Your advice to a young singer
Get good at singing and then do competitions. That’s how you do it these days.
Freddie De Tommaso
In 2018, De Tommaso won the Viñas International Singing Competition, receiving the Plácido Domingo Tenor Prize and the Verdi Prize, before joining the Opera Studio of the Bavarian State Opera. In 2021, at 28, he stepped in at short notice as Cavaradossi in Tosca at the Royal Opera House, an appearance that opened the door to international recognition. He has since appeared at the Metropolitan Opera, Teatro alla Scala, the Vienna State Opera and the Paris Opera, and is now one of the most closely watched young tenors of his generation.
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