ROMANIW GREW UP near Swansea, Wales, and was raised by her mother, a police officer working on domestic violence cases, and her grandparents. Nobody in her family was especially musical, but there was something operatic about her Ukrainian grandfather, a confident, eccentric character who would break into song regularly while walking down the street.
She moved to London to attend the Guildhall School of Music and Drama without having ever seen an opera. (Verdi’s “Falstaff,” her first, was a fun introduction. “Then I saw ‘Capriccio,’” she said with a laugh. “I still can’t get into it.”) In just her second year of college, Romaniw represented Wales in the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition, next to singers with contracts at La Scala, the Bolshoi Theater and the Metropolitan Opera.
“What I had was fearlessness,” she said. “And I was very, very gullible.”
Romaniw was surprised, then, when she felt fear. While in Houston, on the Young Artist program there, sudden lucidity onstage led to major performance anxiety, she said.
“You can put yourself in some really crippling positions where you inhibit yourself, because you’re too obsessed with wanting everything to be perfect,” she said. This anxiety, added to the feeling of “too many cooks” involved with her technique, had her returning to Britain feeling like “a nervous wreck.” It took six months to get psychologically ready to take any singing advice again.
Romaniw has been an ambassador for the charity Help Musicians for the past five years, and is happy to speak about topics like stage fright, weight changes and mental health issues, which previous generations of opera stars might have shied away from. “Selfishly, I used to quite enjoy it if I saw someone of quite high status making mistakes,” she said. “I was like, ‘See, they’re human!’ I would have given anything for someone to say, ‘I sang Gilda at E.N.O. and I missed the top note.’”
In recent years, Romaniw’s voice has developed as her body has changed. When she was pregnant in 2023, she was singing Ariadne in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” at Garsington Opera. Suddenly she felt her sound deepen. “It was really refreshing and surprising to sink into these long, big, broad lines,” she said. “My breath work got better, because I had that lower-down support that helped me feel like I could just soar over the orchestra.”
