Born in Prairie Village, Kansas, on February 13, 1969, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato—whose professional surname derives from her first husband—grew up as the daughter of an architect and a music teacher. After studying music education at Wichita State University with the intention of teaching high school, she shifted her focus toward opera following a televised production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and a university staging of Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus. Upon receiving her degree in 1992, she trained at Philadelphia’s Academy of Vocal Arts and joined the Santa Fe Opera’s Apprentice Singer program in 1995. Young-artist residencies at the Houston Grand Opera, where she made her recording debut in 1997 as Michael Daugherty’s Jackie O, and at the San Francisco Opera brought her several awards even as she rebuilt her vocal technique after a period of crisis. Her professional stage debut arrived in 1999 at Houston in Tod Machover’s Resurrection, after which engagements followed in rapid succession: La Scala in 2000 as Angelina in Rossini’s La cenerentola, the Opéra Bastille in 2001 as Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia, and Glyndebourne in 2003 as the Fox in Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen. A 2004 Virgin Classics release paired her with soprano Patrizia Ciofi for the Handel duets album Amor e gelosia.
DiDonato has returned repeatedly to Handel’s operas, releasing the solo recital Furore under Christophe Rousset in 2009, while her Rossini portrayals have ranged from buoyant comedy to roles of greater dramatic weight. She first appeared at the Metropolitan Opera during the 2005–2006 season as Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro and has since been a frequent presence there. Contemporary repertoire has also figured prominently; she has recorded Jake Heggie’s vocal and operatic works on multiple occasions. In 2009 she sustained a broken fibula mid-performance of Il barbiere di Siviglia yet completed the evening and subsequent shows from a wheelchair. The 2012 recital album Diva Divo earned her a Grammy Award for Best Classical Vocal Performance. Her recorded output has continued to expand in range, embracing tango and jazz inflections on the 2019 collection Songplay—including a passage in which she evoked the sound of a college freshman voice student—and reimagining Schubert’s Die Winterreise, D. 911, from the woman’s viewpoint in 2021. A 2023 Erato recording featured her in Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette and Cléopâtre, by which point her discography exceeded one hundred albums.
