The Lebanese-born Canadian soprano Joyce El-Khoury has emerged as a leading interpreter of bel canto opera, maintaining an active calendar that mixes familiar works with rarer titles and has taken her from Canadian stages to companies throughout the United States and onward to Korea.
She entered the world around 1982 in Lebanon within a Christian household; her paternal grandfather regularly sang in village churches. At the age of six she relocated with her family to Canada, arriving fluent in Arabic and French yet without English, an experience that exposed her to childhood bullying. School and church choirs first drew her to singing, though a severe bout of stage fright prompted a temporary withdrawal; three years later she compelled herself to return, at which point she resolved to pursue a vocal career and commenced lessons.
El-Khoury initially enrolled at the University of Ottawa with plans to study medicine or nursing, but parental encouragement led her to audition successfully for the music program despite an inability to read notation at the time. She advanced to the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia, where Bill Schuman guided her training, and later earned admission to the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program. A decisive opportunity arrived in 2010 at Lorin Maazel’s Castleton Festival in Virginia: engaged for Lauretta in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, she substituted on opening night as Suor Angelica. Impressed, Maazel became a significant mentor, and she had already secured first prize in the Mario Lanza Vocal Competition along with additional honors.
Subsequent engagements brought leading parts at smaller theaters and supporting roles at larger ones, among them Frasquita in Bizet’s Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera. She assumed Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata at multiple venues, including the Dutch National Opera, and cultivated a specialty in early-nineteenth-century bel canto, recording Donizetti’s rarely heard Les Martyrs for the Opera Rara label in 2015. Two years later the same imprint released her recital disc Écho, devoted to little-known arias. By the close of the decade she was appearing in major European houses, performing Violetta at the Royal Opera House and the Glyndebourne Festival in 2017 and taking the role of Musetta at Madrid’s Teatro Real during the 2018–2019 season. In 2019 she participated in an Audite recording of Liszt’s unfinished opera Sardanapolo.
