I spent ten years singing in the Opera Australia chorus, and the question I got asked most at barbecues wasn’t about the costumes or the drama or the backstage gossip. It was this: “How do you actually tell if someone’s a good singer?”

Fair question. If you haven’t trained as a musician, opera singing can sound uniformly impressive — or uniformly strange. Big voices doing big things. How do you distinguish great from merely loud? How do you know when something special is happening?

Here’s my guide. No jargon. No music theory. Just the things I learned to listen for over a decade of standing on stage next to some of the best singers in the world.

Listen for the Voice, Not Just the Notes

The first thing most people notice about opera singing is the volume and the range — high notes, sustained notes, powerful notes. And yes, those matter. But the singers who stop your heart aren’t necessarily the ones who can sing the highest or the loudest. They’re the ones whose voices have a quality that gets under your skin.

Vocal colour is the term musicians use, but you don’t need the terminology to hear it. Some voices are warm and dark, like a cello. Others are bright and piercing, like light through a window. Some have a quality that’s hard to describe — a shimmer, a roughness, a catch that makes you lean forward in your seat.

Pay attention to that quality. When a voice makes you feel something before you even understand the words, you’re hearing something special.

The Breath Thing

Here’s something most non-musicians don’t notice until it’s pointed out: opera singers produce enormous amounts of sound without microphones, sustained over long phrases, while acting, moving, and sometimes lying on the floor pretending to die. The breath control required is staggering.

Listen for long phrases sung in a single breath. A great singer will shape a melody over eight or ten bars without gasping, without the sound thinning out at the end, without any sense of strain. The phrase will arrive and depart like it was effortless.

It isn’t effortless. It’s the product of years of training, precise muscular control, and excellent technique. But the illusion of ease is part of the artistry. When a singer makes something extraordinarily difficult look casual, that’s mastery.

Dynamics: The Quiet Stuff Matters More

Counterintuitive advice: don’t judge an opera singer by their loudest moment. Judge them by their quietest.

Anyone with a large enough voice can blast out a fortissimo high note. It’s impressive, sure. But the real test is pianissimo — singing softly, at pitch, with full vocal colour, in a large theatre. That’s fiendishly difficult. It requires a different kind of control, a different relationship with the breath, and a willingness to be vulnerable.

The moment in an opera that will often move you most isn’t the big climax. It’s the moment when the singer pulls back to almost nothing, and the entire audience holds its breath. If you’ve seen a great singer do this live, you know what I mean. The silence in the theatre becomes charged. Two thousand people, completely still, drawn into a single human voice at its most intimate.

Listen for those moments. They’re where the greatest singers separate themselves.

Words Matter

Opera is sung in Italian, German, French, Russian, English, Czech, and about a dozen other languages. You almost certainly don’t speak all of them. That’s fine — supertitles exist for a reason.

But here’s what to listen for even when you don’t understand the language: clarity and intention. A good opera singer doesn’t just produce beautiful sounds. They communicate meaning through every syllable. The consonants are clear. The vowels are shaped with purpose. Even without understanding the words, you can hear whether a singer is pleading, raging, teasing, or despairing.

The Italian word is “dizione” — diction — and it’s something Opera Australia’s coaches drill into every singer. Listen for it. A singer with great diction makes you feel like you understand the text even when you don’t.

The Acting Question

Modern opera demands that singers act convincingly while producing the most technically demanding vocal music ever written. It’s an absurd ask, when you think about it. Try acting out a death scene while executing a flawless trill. It’s like juggling while solving a maths problem.

The singers I admired most during my time in the chorus were the ones who made you forget about the technique entirely. You stopped hearing a soprano executing a difficult passage and started seeing a woman whose heart was breaking. The voice became transparent — a medium for emotion rather than an object of admiration.

This doesn’t mean every singer needs to be a great physical actor. Some singers communicate everything through the voice alone. The great Birgit Nilsson wasn’t known for subtle stage movement, but the emotional intensity she channelled through her voice was staggering. Different singers, different strengths.

What to Do at Your Next Opera

Here’s a practical checklist for your next performance:

Before the curtain goes up: Read the synopsis. Knowing the story frees you from worrying about plot and lets you focus on the singing.

During the overture: Let the orchestra wash over you. Don’t check your phone. Let your ears adjust to the acoustic.

When a singer enters: Notice the quality of their voice. What colour is it? Does it remind you of anything? How does it feel in your body?

During arias: Listen for breath control. Where does the singer breathe? Can you tell? Listen for dynamics — how they move between loud and soft. Listen for the quiet moments.

During ensembles: See if you can follow individual voices within the texture. In a duet, notice how two voices interact — do they blend or contrast?

At the curtain call: Trust your gut. If a particular singer moved you, they’re doing something right. You don’t need to know why.

The beautiful thing about opera singing is that you don’t need expertise to be affected by it. The human voice is the oldest instrument, and we’re all wired to respond to it. Training your ear just helps you understand what you’re already feeling.

Now go listen to something. I suggest starting with Kiri Te Kanawa singing “Song to the Moon” from Dvorak’s Rusalka. You’ll know what I mean about vocal colour within about eight bars.