Mark Gresham | 3 OCT 2021
The story is based loosely on historical events during the Roman Civil War of 49–45 BC.
Mezzo-soprano Daryl Freedman performs the iconic role of Julius Ceasar in a cast that also includes soprano Jasmine Habersham as Cleopatra and mezzo-soprano Megan Marino as Sesto Pompeo.
EarRelevant’s publisher and principal writer Mark Gresham recently spoke with Freedman about playing Caesar as a “trouser role” and singing Handel’s music. The following is a lightly edited Q&A drawn from that interview.
Mark Gresham: Give us your take on Julius Caesar, the character you’re portraying.
Daryl Freedman: I’m so excited that I get this opportunity to sing this role. It’s such a powerful and interesting character, so it’s such a thrill to get to do this with The Atlanta Opera.
The opera is not strictly historical. What’s interesting to me is what Handel took from history and the liberties he took with the characters for the stage. He brought so much more to these roles and put so much into this opera emotionally. Each character has such depth; you can see the multi-faceted dimensions throughout the different emotional journeys the arias take you on. The arias for both Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, and for all the characters, are so contrasting.
For Julius Caesar, his first aria is so stately and proud; he has just conquered and won the battle and is here in Egypt about to take over. His second aria is full of vengeance and anger. Then the third time, he sings an accompanied recitative where he’s crying at the death of Pompeo, and he’s so emotionally lost and raw, and you see this tender and vulnerable side in him. The fourth aria he has is condescending and shows how cunning he is as a statesman and warrior. So you see all these different facets of him, but Handel provides that for us.
It makes my job a little easier in that Handel created a very multi-faceted character, making sure that a heroic conquerer and one of the most incredible military generals of all time is not just someone who is strategic and powerful at all times, but there are times where he can let his guard down and show a little vulnerability, and there are times where he can show many different sides of himself. That’s exciting for me. With the role of Cleopatra, every one of her arias is so different from the other, and that goes to show what a genius Handel was and creating a real piece of theater that captivates. What’s also interesting is the history. It’s such a fascinating story that Handel chose and then adapted the characters and situations to make it a better theater experience.
This role is so juicy and exciting to play, and I’m thrilled that I get the chance to do it.
Gresham: Obviously, you’re not a Baroque castrato, but a mezzo-soprano, and you’re portraying one of two very complex characters who are equally powerful, albeit perhaps in different ways. How does being a female singer affect your approach to the role of Julius Caesar? Do you think it’s much different than were it coming from a male singer playing the part?

The Tusculum portrait of Julius Caesar. (Archaeological Museum, Turin, Italy)
Freedman: I’ve recently been thinking a lot about how, as artists, everything we do is unique because we are unique individuals. If you portray a role, that portrayal of that role can never have existed before. No one else would have come to it in the same way. Every single performance by every individual is unique. So I feel like as a mezzo-soprano playing this role, it has to be different than somebody else, like a baritone or a countertenor, because I have a different life experience than they have. I’m going to come at things differently. I’ve lived my entire life as a woman, so I will see the character traits of Julius Caesar differently than someone who has lived as a man their whole life.
Something I find interesting about this production is when Mattie Ullrich, the costume designer, was talking about how for the costumes she’s designing for the pants roles, she’s not trying to hide the fact that we are women playing men. It’s almost like she doesn’t want to gloss over that fact; she doesn’t want to conceal it. She is almost trying to blur the lines of gender and show that power can come from things other than masculinity. We certainly are incorporating masculine traits and masculine qualities into the costumes, but, again, we’re not trying to hide the fact that we are women.

Detail of a working sketch by costume designer Mattie Ullrich. (photo: Felipe Barral/TAO)
At the same time, I’m trying to inhabit the role of this powerful general and statesman and find it really empowering for me, as a woman, to own and inhabit power, stealthiness, strategy, and all the things that Caesar embodied, and not necessarily have it defined by masculinity. That kind of power, it’s not a definition of masculinity; still, it’s the definition of Caesar.
Gresham: Authority.
Freedman: Absolutely. He had such control over his troops, and people were loyal to him almost in a cult-like way. He was so charismatic and influential in the way he could… I don’t know if “manipulate” is the right word, but he was very strategic. He knew how to make things happen to gain more power, and he was certainly interested in seeing if more power was possible.
Women are not often encouraged to find and exhibit their power because women throughout history have often been encouraged to present more subserviently. It’s been genuinely empowering to get to own the power within me and not ever feel hindered by my gender in any way. I try not to let my gender hinder me in any way, regardless. I certainly don’t like to think of it like that, but you know society can impact us even unconsciously in specific ways.
So there must be differences in the ways that we approach the roles as a woman for sure.
Gresham: Speaking of a woman who exhibited a lot of power herself, we have Cleopatra. On the one hand, we have an opera written from the perspective of how the Baroque era interpreted the story of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra. We, on the other hand, are looking at it from the twenty-first century. How does that affect your view of the whole opera beyond just your own role? Viewed from our times, it seems more than just an 18th-century “love the conquers all things” story.
Freedman: It’s interesting how Handel ends the opera with a “happy” chorus. It was commonplace at the time, almost necessary, that you have to end with one. Suddenly, we have a happy ending, love conquers all, and we all live happily ever after. But I don’t know if Cleopatra and Caesar would have necessarily considered that “the ending” at that point in their lives. That’s more of a construct for the theater.
But one thing that we can look at in a 21st-century mindset is how fascinating Cleopatra’s power was. For her to have such power in her own right was very unusual for her time. And the way she knew how to seize the power she gained: she would use her femininity to gain access to worlds she wouldn’t have been able to acquire if it weren’t for her insightfulness in using that to achieve the kind of power she wanted.
Gresham: She was quite an intellect also.
Freedman: Absolutely. You have to be extremely intelligent to gain that kind of power.

Bust of Cleopatra VII (Altes Museum, Berlin, Germany)
Gresham: She was a Macedonian, the last of the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt; the only one who deigned to speak Egyptian, in addition to a variety of other languages of the Hellenistic world.
Freedman: Right, she was the only one who learned Egyptian. I thought that was so wild.
Gresham: What do you find to be musical and vocal challenges posed for you by Handel? That’s a big difference, I would think, from singing the role of Fricka in Das Rheingold, seeing as you just came off of doing that in September with Opera Virginia. I’m seeing a good bit of Verdi and Wagner in your performances over the last few years. Of course, they pose different challenges than those found in Handel’s operas.
Freedman: Absolutely. Going straight from Wagner to Handel is definitely interesting, but I have felt so grateful that I’m getting to do some Handel right now. I feel like the way you sing Handel has to be in a vocally efficient and healthy way. Handel needs this kind of flexibility and freedom to sing fast coloratura passages. And to let the trills “trill,” you have to have a kind of vocal production that is just healthy and free.
Being someone who sings a lot of Wagner and Verdi, I find that getting the chance to sing Handel between those things is just a blessing. It is so wonderful for the voice.
After I finished my production of Das Rheingold, I went into my Handel boot camp. I have been working really hard to make sure I maintain complete vocal freedom, get my coloratura up to tempo and let my voice fly on the breath, and make sure nothing is “holding.” If something in my throat my tongue is holding, then my coloratura won’t fly and my trills won’t release.
It’s been so much fun to get to sing this repertoire. I really love Handel, and it’s a great complement to Verdi and Wagner because it keeps your voice honest.
Gresham: I see that Das Rheingold with Opera Virginia was your first production after the pandemic. I also see you had sung the role of Azucena in Il trovatore in February 2020 with Opera San José, just before the pandemic shut everything down.
Freedman: I had several things canceled. I was supposed to do Il trovatore with Portland Opera and with Madison Opera (WI), a Salome in Malmö, Sweden, and some concerts in Virginia.
So yes, the first live production that I was able to do was that Rhinegold I just came off of, but this Julius Caesar with The Atlanta Opera will be my first production inside an actual opera house. The Rheingold was an outdoor production due to the safety protocols.

Daryl Freedman rehearsing her role as Julius Caesar. (credit: Felipe Barral/TAO)
Gresham: What drew you to opera as a singer?
Freedman: I’ve always loved to sing. I went to public school, and I remember I was in kindergarten the first time I’d ever heard live singing. It was the fifth-grade choir, and I was just obsessed with it. I couldn’t wait till I could be in fifth grade and sing in the choir. I did and sang in choirs throughout elementary school, middle school, and high school. I did all of the theater that I could get my hands on.
I started taking voice lessons in high school because I was doing all of the high school musicals. My voice teacher took me to my very first opera. She was leading a college opera, and she took me to see it because she thought it might interest me. She thought I had an operatic sound. I was a senior in high school at that point, and I thought it was just so interesting, so I decided to go to college for vocal performance. I wasn’t sure at that point if opera was what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to learn how to sing the best way that I could.

Daryl Freedman rehearses with William Meinert who plays Curio, Caesar’s General (photo: Felipe Barral/TAO)
Once I was there, my roommate at the time said that she was going to audition for an opera in Italy that was the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music program in Lucca, Italy. She was going up to New York for this audition and asked if I wanted to come with her. I was so nervous. I had never yet pursued opera at that point. We went and did our first opera together in Lucca: Puccini’s Suor Angelica. This magical production took place in an actual convent in Italy, and we used the space as the community in the real world would have used it. It was almost immersive in a way, but the audience didn’t move, but it was such a moving and influential production for everyone involved. After that, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life, and I decided to pursue opera with all of my being.
I’m going to be doing my second Suor Angelica at the Salzburg Festival this summer, so that’s going to bring me full circle to the very first opera I ever did.
Gresham: Some final thoughts about taking part in this Atlanta Opera production of Julius Caesar post-pandemic?
Freedman: I feel like getting back into performing in an opera house for the first time after COVID will be something really special that we’re all going to share with the audience, the opera cast, and everybody on the production team. This is going to be a momentous occasion for us all, and I’m so excited that I get to be a part of it.
This production is so exciting and innovative. It doesn’t take place in a traditional historical setting. It’s set in a kind of post-apocalyptic world with the fusion of history and a mythical world, so it’s going to be a fascinating and fresh new take on this opera. There’s amazing choreography throughout and incredible sets and costumes. This production is going to be spectacular, so I’m excited.
I spent the pandemic in Philadelphia, but I watched the incredibly innovative things that Atlanta Opera was doing throughout the pandemic. It was such an inspiration to see an opera company work through such a difficult situation and bring so much creativity to it, enhance an operatic experience and give audiences a chance to see live opera during a pandemic in such an innovative way. I was just blown away by the incredible things The Atlanta Opera was doing. So when I got this opportunity to come to Atlanta and sing with this company, It feels so special to be a part of such a groundbreaking company, and I’m just so excited about getting the chance to sing this role here. ■

Mark Gresham is publisher and principal writer of EarRelevant. he began writing as a music journalist over 30 years ago, but has been a composer of music much longer than that. He was the winner of an ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for music journalism in 2003.