Natalie Dessay isn’t your average opera star. Ask her about the challenges of the profession and she won’t speak of the difficulties of melisma, or the necessity of being fluent in multiple languages. Rather, Dessay believes that an opera singer’s primary job is to communicate the emotions of a character to the audience: in other words, to act. It’s a quality that is sorely lacking in most opera singers, and grossly undervalued by directors. “Dessay even says with diva-worthy bravado that she refuses to return to the Metropolitan Opera unless it agrees to mount a new production for her – a desire born not of vanity but her unrelenting desire to deliver compelling theater.”