According to Ailish Tynan, Despina is a feminist. This may not be the traditional view of the lively servant of Fiordiligi and Dorabella in Mozart’s Così fan tutte, but as Tynan describes her character, it makes sense. “She’s not storming the Houses of Parliament telling them we want the right to vote – but she is subversive. She’s a bit of an anarchist.”
The ebullient Irish soprano’s voice suits Despina excellently: light, bright and brilliant, yet without the hardness that can occasionally creep into coloratura singers’ tone. In Tynan you will find melting warmth and a 360-degree range of emotion pouring forth alongside the diamond-strong technique.
She is singing the role with English National Opera in February – fully staged at the London Coliseum and new semi-staged concert performance at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester. Although she has performed it in Italian several times, this is her first time in English and she is much enthused by Jeremy Sams’ translation, which has revolutionised her interpretation.
“It has really helped me feel that she is a strong woman with great views about how women should be moving forward in this world,” she says. “The Italian original gives you the lens of her being a maid, from a ‘lower class’ within the scheme of the opera, but this time you can see how clever she is. Though she might not have what we’d call book-learning, she’s certainly street-smart, and she knows a lot about how the world works.”
Phelim McDermott’s staging, co-produced with the Metropolitan Opera, New York, transposes the action to the 1950s, in the rather astonishing setting of the Coney Island fun fair. “They went the whole hog with this production in New York,” Tynan enthuses. “They had sword-swallowers and fire-eaters and people with snakes draped around their necks…”
That era gives Despina a special edge: “Women then were so reliant on men – for our money, for our place in the world, for everything – and so controlled by them. In 1950s America Despina would have been at the forefront of women saying, ‘We’ve had enough!’” You can understand why Fiordiligi and Dorabella might think such a thing after their respective fiancés have tricked them cruelly into betrayal; but Despina turning subversive puts the strange, painful story of Così fan tutte into a similar ballpark to Mozart and da Ponte’s earlier masterpiece, Le nozze di Figaro, in which the action is driven by a veritable ferment of upstairs-downstairs politics.
The first time we see Despina, she is coveting her employers’ jug of hot chocolate. We can hardly blame her. “But it’s not just about the hot chocolate,” Tynan says, with glee. “It’s about getting her fair share of what society should be offering her.” That is particularly relevant, she suggests, for today’s audiences: “There is really a big divide between people who have so little and people who have so much and I feel like there is a bubbling in society of people who are ready to explode with this. The chocolate is just a metaphor for Despina thinking that she’s as deserving of a lovely cup of hot chocolate out of a silver teapot as the ladies are.” She bursts out laughing: “There’s nobody better for this role than an Irish person! We’ve had centuries of thinking this in our heads.”
Tynan was born in Mullingar, County Westmeath, in 1975, the youngest of six siblings (“my eldest brother is 21 years older than me and was already away at Trinity College Dublin,” she relates). The family was not especially musical and Tynan came to opera relatively late, after initially planning to be a teacher. Having taken a joint degree in music and history, however, she went to study singing at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and from there to the opera course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. Here she was spotted and scooped up for what was at the time the Vilar Young Artists Programme at the Royal Opera House, then in just its second year. “That was really the making of me,” she says, “not only for the two years there, but also for the care they take of people after you leave. Even now I can still get some free coaching.”
A stint as a BBC New Generation Artist began to carry her on into an international career that soon traversed centuries of composition and a plethora of different styles, from Handel to Judith Weir, who wrote a song cycle for her, Nuits d’Afrique. Her Fauré album, with her usual pianist, Iain Burnside, is a joy from first note to last. She sang in Wigmore Hall’s recent day devoted to the music of Rebecca Clarke – “I’ve been singing Rebecca Clarke for years and was doing a lot of stuff by women composers long before it was fashionable,” she says.
In 2024 she was with ENO to sing the Governess in Britten’s The Turn of the Screw in Isabella Bywater’s acclaimed production, in which her interpretation was a tour-de-force. “To have that and Despina in close succession has been an amazing feeling,” Tynan says. “I really feel like a Londoner – I’ve lived here for 25 years, so to be part of ENO’s musical story too feels incredibly special for me, and I'm thrilled to be there. Everybody is working so hard, putting their heart and soul into it. If that weren’t the case, I don’t know where we’d be in opera now.”
Tynan and her husband, Keith McNicoll, bass trombone at the Royal Opera House, have an eight-year-old daughter, Daisy; seeing the paucity of music available in many schools now has made Tynan anxious to encourage initiatives such as ENO’s free tickets for the under-21s, and Grange Park Opera’s Primary Robins, which provides a weekly half-hour singing class for each school with which it works. She laments the lack of time, space and staff capacity that means not every school is able to take up the offers enabling children to connect with an artform that she says is anything but “elitist”.
“I’ve had Daisy sitting through full-length evening recitals at the Wigmore Hall, riveted,” she says. “You might think, ‘Oh, I can't bring a child to a recital of Schumann or Schubert songs’ – but you can. You can actually bring them to anything. I’ve done the schools’ matinée of The Magic Flute at the Royal Opera House; one of the cast always gets to go out and do a speech beforehand, and when I did it I revved them up so much that they went crazy at the end. There was a video – I put it on social media at the time and it went viral!
“People don't think that children are able to sit through an opera, and they don’t think that opera is accessible to everyone. But when you put on a video of the Royal Opera House packed with kids aged from eight up to 15, and they’re having an absolute ball, you realise this is for everyone. And with ENO, with these free tickets for under-21s, people need to get out and get them. Maybe I should be walking the dog wearing a sign saying ‘GET YOUR FREE UNDER-21s TICKETS FOR ENO’!”
Despite the amount of repertoire Tynan has devoured over the years, there are still roles she dreams of tackling: “My voice changed when I had my daughter – it became much richer,” she says. “Today I really feel I’m in my vocal prime and I would love to sing some meatier roles. I would love to do Blanche in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites and also Suor Angelica. And I would love to sing Mimi in La bohème again.
“Sometimes casting directors turn me down – you know why? They say I’m too short!” Tynan erupts with laughter. Can’t they just put her in heels? “Or take the tenor out of his!” Hopefully a wise casting director will simply listen to her towering voice instead.
Ailish Tynan sings in English National Opera’s Così fan tutte at the London Coliseum from 6th–21st February, and at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall on 27th–28th February.
See upcoming performances by Ailish Tynan and English National Opera.
This article was sponsored by English National Opera.
