Soprano Nino Machaidze first drew widespread international notice in 2008 when she stepped into the leading female part of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette at the Salzburg Festival. Her stage experience centers chiefly on French- and Italian-language parts drawn from the nineteenth-century operatic canon.
Born in Tbilisi on March 8, 1983, Machaidze grew up with a mother who taught Georgian and a father who worked as an economist. At six she entered a youth program affiliated with the Tbilisi State Conservatory, beginning simultaneous instruction in voice and piano; several years later she added flute lessons to refine her breath support. By 2000 she had already secured engagements at the Georgian National Opera Theatre, performing Zerlina in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Rosina in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia. In 2005 she won a competition that funded study at the Theater Academy attached to La Scala in Milan. There her teachers included Luciana Serra, Leyla Gencer, and Luigi Alva, and she participated in master classes led by Mirella Freni and others. The same house soon offered her an early role, Najade in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos—one of the few German parts she has undertaken.
Her decisive career advance arrived in 2008 when she replaced the pregnant Anna Netrebko at Salzburg. During the late 2000s and 2010s Machaidze became a regular presence at La Scala, singing Marie in Donizetti’s La fille du régiment and Musetta in Puccini’s La bohème. She extended her résumé beyond Italy and Austria with 2009 debuts as Adina in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at both Los Angeles Opera and La Monnaie in Brussels. Sony Classical released her first recording, the recital album Romantic Arias, in 2011; that same season she made her Metropolitan Opera debut in a pair of performances of Verdi’s Rigoletto. She has continued to appear at major theaters into the 2020s while residing in Italy and preserving artistic links to Georgia, where she performed the national anthem during a parade celebrating the country’s centennial. A second Sony album, Arias & Scenes, appeared in 2013, and in 2023 she was featured as Giselda on a recording of Verdi’s I Lombardi issued by the Münchner Rundfunkorchester.
