Voice, silence, and the ethics of listening
The internationally acclaimed soprano reflects on voice, silence, and how lived experience reshapes the way we listen to La Traviata — not through analysis, but through attention.
Ermonela Jaho is one of today’s most compelling operatic artists, renowned not for vocal display alone, but for the emotional truth and moral clarity she brings to the stage. Born in Albania and now celebrated internationally, she is especially admired for her portrayals of women whose inner lives unfold in music more truthfully than in words — characters shaped by love, loss, endurance, and choice rather than triumph. Whether singing Verdi, Puccini, or other composers of the Italian repertoire, Jaho is recognised for performances that feel inward, unsentimental, and deeply human. She is an artist whose authority lies not in grandeur, but in listening.
I first met Ermonela Jaho at the Barbican, after her performance of Puccini’s La rondine with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in December 2025. On the programme she was listed simply as Magda de Civry. On stage, she was luminous, inward, unsparing. Offstage, what struck me most was something quieter: her generosity. There was no sense of distance or self-importance, no residue of performance once the music had ended. She was attentive, open, deeply present — listening not as a courtesy, but as a way of inhabiting the world.
Listening, I would later realise, is not only central to Jaho’s artistry; it is her ethic. It shapes how she approaches technique and emotion, how she enters and leaves a role, how she listens to an orchestra, a colleague, a silence. It also shapes how she understands Violetta — not as an operatic symbol or a moral abstraction, but as a woman whose truth survives precisely because the music listens where society refuses to.
Before opera: communal sound
Long before opera entered her life, music arrived through the voice of her mother.
“My first encounter with music came through folk traditional songs,” Jaho recalls. “My mother used to sing, and family gatherings were always filled with Albanian folk polyphonic music.”
Opera was not part of her early environment. Her father worked in the military, and there was no classical music background at home. What surrounded her instead was communal sound — music shared between people rather than performed for them.
“When I was five or six years old, I began imitating well-known Albanian pop singers,” she says. “I sang instinctively, all the time.”
It was her father who noticed how completely she came alive when she sang.
“He saw how happy and fulfilled I was when I sang, and he registered me at the Children’s Centre.”
From the age of six until fourteen, singing was constant.
“I sang at festivals, family occasions, television and radio programmes, and live performances with other children. I loved singing deeply.”
That love gradually gave way to curiosity.
“I wanted to understand music more fully — how to read it, how it is structured, how to play an instrument.”
Technique, emotion, and freedom
Many listeners speak of the emotional honesty of your performances — an honesty that seems rooted in attention rather than display. How do you balance emotional truth with the technical discipline required to sing at the highest level?
“For me, emotional truth and technical discipline are not opposites — they depend on each other. Technique is what allows emotion to be free. If I am worried about breath, balance, or survival, I cannot tell the truth of the moment. When the technique is deeply internalised, it becomes invisible, and then emotion can flow without fear. I don’t add emotion; I allow it to pass through a body and voice that are prepared to receive it.”
Vulnerability and self-care
You are often associated with roles of great vulnerability and intensity. What draws you to these characters, and how do you care for yourself emotionally when inhabiting them repeatedly?
“I am drawn to vulnerable characters because they live without armour. They feel everything, and they dare to feel it fully — even when it costs them. That kind of openness is frightening and beautiful. To protect myself, I try to enter and leave the character consciously. I give everything on stage, but after the curtain falls, I return to silence, to family, to breath. Over the years, I’ve learned that self-care is not indulgence — it is respect for the soul.”
Living with the voice
Has your relationship with your voice changed over the years — not only technically, but psychologically or emotionally?
“Yes, profoundly. When I was younger, my relationship with my voice was more anxious — I wanted to control it. Today, it is more like a dialogue, or even a friendship. I listen more. Psychologically, I trust myself more, and emotionally, I accept fragility as part of the instrument. The voice carries our life experiences; it cannot remain unchanged, and that is not a loss — it is depth.”
Presence and repetition
You have sung certain roles many times, in different houses and productions. What allows a role to remain alive rather than become repetition?
“What keeps a role alive is listening — listening to the orchestra, to my colleagues, to the space, and to myself on that particular evening. I am not the same woman I was ten years ago, and neither is the role. Each performance exists only once. When I allow myself to truly be present, repetition disappears.”
Women, music, and truth
You have embodied so many complex women on stage. Do you feel that opera, through music, gives women a particularly truthful voice, even when the narrative itself is unforgiving?
“Absolutely. Opera gives women a voice that is sometimes denied them by the narrative itself. Even when the story is cruel, the music tells the truth. It does not judge — it understands. Through music, women are allowed complexity, contradiction, rage, tenderness, and transcendence. That is a profound gift.”
Jaho’s reading of “Sempre libera” (‘Always free’), resists triumph.
“For me, it is not freedom. It is a woman trying to convince herself that she can still live the life she built as armour.”
The brilliance of the coloratura lies in how the voice betrays what the words attempt to conceal.
“She is not celebrating freedom. She is running from vulnerability.”
In Act II, Violetta’s response to Giorgio Germont’s demand is marked by restraint rather than melodrama.
“She is already living with death inside her. She has no energy for theatrics.”
Her acceptance is not obedience, but lucidity.
“She understands his world, and she does not want Alfredo — or another woman — to suffer what she has suffered.”
Misunderstood women
Are there roles you have sung that you feel remain widely misunderstood?
“Yes — many. Butterfly is often misunderstood as submissive, when in truth she is radical in her devotion and belief. Suor Angelica is seen only through her tragedy, but her final moments are about transcendence, not despair. I wish audiences would see these women not as victims, but as souls who choose love, even in impossible circumstances.”
A lifelong promise: La Traviata
“My first encounter with opera came when I was fourteen years old. I went with my eldest brother to the Opera House in Tirana to see La Traviata*, as I was preparing for the audition to enter the ‘Jordan Misja’ music school. I could not have known that evening would quietly change the course of my life.
At the end of the performance, I turned to my brother and said — almost as a vow to myself — that I had decided what I would become: an opera singer. I told him that I would not die without singing La Traviata at least once in my life. From that moment until today, that promise has accompanied me everywhere.
Years later, I have sung Traviata on opera stages around the world more than three hundred times. Yet each performance still carries something of that first night — the wonder, the certainty, and the dream of a fourteen-year-old girl discovering her destiny.”
across cultures and languages, she allows them to speak — not as victims of history, but as human beings whose truth survives in sound.
Wherever she performs — from London to Milan, New York to Tokyo — Ermonela Jaho lends her voice to women whose inner lives have been silenced, misunderstood, or judged. She does not rescue them, and she does not sentimentalise them. She listens. And through that listening, across cultures and languages, she allows them to speak — not as victims of history, but as human beings whose truth survives in sound.
IMAGE CREDITS:
- Ermonela Jaho ‘s private collection
- BBC/Opera Rara/Russell Duncan
- The Royal Opera ©2026 Pamela Raith