In demand across Europe, opera singer Madison Nonoa is back home to perform in (m)Orpheus. Photo / Michael Craig
Home for the first time in four years, Portugal-based soprano Madison Nonoa talks to Joanna Wane about playing Cupid — on and off the stage.
When Madison Nonoa was about 11, she was cast as a young Cosette in the musical Les Miserables. Both her grandmothers were in the audience, holding hands, as she sang her big solo number, Castle on a Cloud.
It’s a bittersweet memory for the talented young soprano, who’s back in New Zealand fresh from a breakthrough performance alongside opera legend Cecilia Bartoli at the famous Salzburg Festival in Austria (yep, the one where the von Trapp children sang in The Sound of Music).
She’s been thinking a lot lately about all the sacrifices her family has made to support her career. Masi, the grandmother on her Samoan mother’s side, had multiple sclerosis and died young. “By the time she came to that last show, she was completely blind,” says Nonoa, who grew up in the Waikato and is one of eight siblings. “She couldn’t see me, but she could hear. The life I have now and the things that I’ve been able to do would just blow her mind.”
Reconnecting with her roots has been a long time coming for the 30-year-old, who lives in a fifth-floor apartment not far from the beach in Lisbon, Portugal’s capital city. She hasn’t been home since 2019.
Nonoa likes to say she went to the same school as James Bond, although Daniel Craig was quite a few years ahead of her at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama. One of only 18 students chosen from around the world to train at its prestigious opera course, she spent her first year out of college in lockdown. All the work she had lined up was cancelled within a couple of weeks.
“It felt very dystopian. I was so used to London being full of people and chocka-block, then suddenly there was no one around. It was completely empty. It started with the toilet rolls disappearing and then just went downhill from there,” she says. “Not being able to get home was terrifying. My grandparents are quite elderly and I was hearing stories of people not being able to get back to say goodbye to loved ones. I didn’t know how I’d cope with that.”
In 2021, there was a glimmer of hope when she was booked to sing in (m)Orpheus, a collaboration between New Zealand Opera and Black Grace, directed and choreographed by the dance company’s founder, Neil Ieremia. Then that season was cancelled, too. With life since restored to some sort of post-Covid normality, the show is finally set to open in Auckland next week.
Described as a dance-opera collision through a Pasifika lens, it’s a reimagining of Christopher Gluck’s 18th-century masterpiece Orpheus and Eurydice. The orchestral score has also been reconceived by composer and percussionist Gareth Farr for a 10-piece modern chamber ensemble, using exactly the same notes but on a range of instruments, some of which didn’t exist in Gluck’s day.
In the original ancient Greek legend, Apollo’s son, Orpheus, is given permission by the gods to rescue his wife, Eurydice, from the underworld. However, there’s nothing the gods like more than toying with human lives, so there’s a catch. Orpheus must lead out Eurydice without looking back at her or she will be lost to him forever.
The lovers, who’ll be performed here by Samson Setu and Deborah Wai Kapohe, are accompanied on their journey by Amor (or Cupid) and that’s where Nonoa comes in. It’s a role she’s already very familiar with; this will be her third Cupid this year, although each production has interpreted the character differently. In Bordeaux, the director told her she was a devil, trying to thwart the lovers. “I had to be crazy!” she says. “I think the stage direction was literally, ‘I want you to run around like Gollum.’”
In Salzburg, where she sang with Bartoli, Cupid was almost angelic. This time, in (m)Orpheus, she’s a mischief-maker, a provocateur who sees it all as a game. So whose side is she on, then? Nonoa laughs. “I mean, is love really on anyone’s side ever? I’m on my own side, I think.”
Whether it’s the inevitable introspection that comes from spending months in lockdown or the perspective you get from living on the other side of the world, Nonoa has come to feel a strong sense of standing on the shoulders of those who came before her.
Her grandmother, Masi, was just a young girl when she was sent out from Samoa in the late 1950s. Her grandfather, Aleli, arrived about the same time although they met here. Apparently, he was hard to miss in Hamilton — always carrying a big radio around with him because he loved music so much.
Money was tight and they couldn’t afford formal music lessons, so her five uncles taught themselves, learning to play multiple instruments by ear. “They didn’t have very much and it was their way of having fun and fitting in. I have lots of memories of my one of my uncles teaching me and my cousins how to sing.” By the 80s, the Nonoa Brothers band was famous in the Tron. Ironically, Nonoa’s mother, the only girl, is also the only one who can’t sing.
Growing up, Nonoa often wondered why her grandparents had left the beauty of the Pacific Islands, although she knew Masi was sent here for a better life. “But when I started to think about that as an adult I thought well, what was that better life?” she says.
“They never had any money. They never had anything. And that meant that my mum and her brothers grew up very poor. And they didn’t grow up with their Polynesian heritage so much, because my grandmother gave them all English names and only spoke to them in English because she wanted them to be New Zealanders.
“I think that was a choice she felt she had to make, but I see that culture loss now through quite a different lens because it cost them part of their identity. And I know my mum felt very lost and it was a very big struggle for her. So my grandparents didn’t really have that better life. My mum and her brothers didn’t really have it, either, because they were the generation that assimilated.
“Me and my cousins, we’re really the first generation that’s actually had the benefit of that move. We’ve been able to go on to university and I’ve been able to move overseas. I feel very proud and humbled by the stories of sacrifice that went before me and I want to stay conscious of that, because it’s part of who I am.”
For Nonoa, there was an inevitability about the path that led her to becoming a professional singer. Her Pākehā whakapapa isn’t musical at all, but she’s extremely close with that side of the family too and they’ve been just as influential. There’s an apocryphal story of how her father’s parents, Carole and Don, were pushing Nonoa in her pram along Wellington’s Lambton Quay when they passed a young opera singer busking. Nonoa stuck out her feet to stop the pram and several songs later was still refusing to budge. That busker was Joanna Heslop, who went on to a professional career and sits on the board at NZ Opera.
It was Carole who decided Nonoa should start learning a musical instrument, after reading a newspaper article that said it was beneficial for children (she played violin for 12 years and reckons it never sounded better than a scratching cat). And it was Carole who spotted a notice in the paper about a local opera production of Carmen, where Nonoa made her debut with the Hamilton Children’s Choir while still at primary school.
Moving to London after doing a Bachelor of Music degree at the University of Auckland was a culture shock. Most of the students at Guildhall had come through Oxford or Cambridge and had been at special training schools their whole lives, although remarkably there were two other Kiwis, Filipe Manu and Benson Wilson, on the opera programme in her year.
Portugal, where she’s lived with her boyfriend João for the past year, reminds her of New Zealand. Not only the landscape but the Portuguese people, who tend to be more reserved than their flamboyant Spanish neighbours. “There’s a sign near the border that says something like, ‘Please lower your voice — you’re in Portugal now.’ Yeah, they make a lot of jokes about that. They’re the calm ones.”
Nonoa began learning Portuguese as a distraction during lockdown, picking out her teacher from his profile on the website (he liked travelling, hiking and reading history). She had lessons with João online, they hit it off and eventually decided to meet. “It’s quite a cute story, in my opinion,” she says, although the reality of her opera commitments means she’s constantly travelling and hasn’t spent a decent length of time in Lisbon since January. He’s coming over to hear her sing in (m)Orpheus, though.
The production’s title is a play on words, referencing Ieremia’s reimagining of the story behind the opera as a metamorphosis for Orpheus, who has lost the feminine side of himself, represented by Eurydice. Eight Black Grace dancers will perform in the production, which is set in a dislocated future — visualised by renowned set and costume designer Tracy Grant Lord — where Pacific ceremonies and traditions are still honoured.
It will top off an extraordinary year for Nonoa, who admits auditioning for Bartoli was terrifying. Still singing in her late 50s, the Italian mezzo-soprano inherited a passion for music from her mother, Silvana, who had her own glittering career and is Bartoli’s constant travel companion.
Nonoa had never met anyone famous before but says Bartoli was lovely. Did she give her any advice? “She did. She said to me that one of the most important things, no matter what I do, is to be around people who love me. That’s how you live a happy life.”
Photos shot on location at ASB Waterfront Theatre in Auckland. Makeup artist: Karina Sanasaryan
New York Times: How three months of helping coach children under 7 came as a revelation.