DJ, Rocker, Father: The Many Lives of Tenor Jonathan Tetelman

Back home in Romania, Tetelman is a new father to a 10-month-old: a daughter named Caira. He also recently released his debut album with Deutsche Grammphon, a collection called Arias.

It’s generating the kind of buzz legends are made of: The BBC Music Magazine calls the disc “quite simply a sensation,” while the U.K.’s Gramophone magazine dubbed him “the most exciting tenor discovery” since Jonas Kaufmann. The New Yorker, meanwhile, compared him to the late great Alfredo Kraus.

And now the Chilean American tenor is back on stage, practicing for San Francisco Opera’s La Traviata, its first new production in 30 years.

But all appearances to the contrary, Tetelman considers this to be “down time.”

“This year is the first year ever in my professional opera history—or maybe even in my singing history—where I don’t have to learn something for this season. I have no new roles,” he explains.

Even so, fatigue has sunk its claws in Tetelman. With a day free of rehearsals, he anticipates an early night.

“I can't even stay awake past like 7:30, 8 o’clock, and I'm waking up at like four in the morning. It’s really annoying,” he laughs, before cheekily adding: “I'm going for 8:30 tonight.”

Tetelman knows as well as anyone how important rest is. The way he sees it, there’s been a trend in his career: of taking breaks whenever the pressure threatens to overwhelm him, only to return to the art form with renewed enthusiasm.

Opera wasn’t always the soundtrack to Tetelman's life, though. He was adopted into a family living near Princeton, New Jersey. His mom was a hospital architect from Berkeley, California, and his father a state attorney for New Jersey’s Department of Human Services.

Their tastes veered more toward classic crooners like Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin. Tetelman and his younger sister would “rock out” to cassette tapes of The Temptations and Elvis Presley on family road trips.

A young Tetelman showed a talent for mimicry, and he loved to sing—so much so that his voice caught the attention of a local music teacher at age 8.

The teacher recommended he apply for Princeton’s now-defunct American Boychoir School. “That's where I got my formative training as a classical singer,” Tetelman says.

Around age 10, he sang his first solo there, an excerpt from “The Lord Is My Shepherd,” Psalm 23. By eighth grade, he had made his first major recording: He and his fellow Boychoir members were featured on the best-selling holiday album The Lost Christmas Eve by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

Even back then, music was something Tetelman had always loved. It didn’t feel like schoolwork. But when his voice started to deepen and his days as a boy soprano were over, he needed a break. He needed a change.

“I was a rebellious kid, and I picked up a guitar so girls would like me,” he laughs. “It was the most cliché thing to do.”

For four years, as a teenager, he played in a rock band, touring the local bars long before he was old enough to drink.

“We'd go from school straight to the bar and then go to school in the morning,” Tetelman recalls. He chuckles that homework sometimes took a backseat.

But as he neared college, Tetelman started to drift back to classical music. And he rediscovered his voice, this time as a baritone. Opera, in particular, drew him in.

“There is this passion in the way that you sing in the chest voice in opera, which involves lining up the power of your voice with the control of that power and then creating something beautiful with those two things. It’s really something that no other medium can do vocally,” he says.

Six years of college and mounting student loans, however, left Tetelman looking for an escape. His professors had been nudging him toward a tenor repertoire, accurately perceiving that he had been “misdiagnosed” as a baritone in his late teens.

It was a lot of pressure. And the future seemed uncertain. So Tetelman again took a break, this time landing a job as a DJ in a Manhattan night club for three years.

“It was just another outlet for my interest in music that I might not have been getting from my college,” Tetelman explains. “It’s a lot like classical music because there's a lot of this tension and release, these buildups and then drops.”

But while Tetelman was fascinated by the intricacies of melody, harmony and rhythm, he knew that most of his customers just wanted a beat to dance to. And over those three years, Tetelman found himself missing opera, missing the challenge of learning the music and inhabiting a character.

“I like the historical aspect of telling these stories and being these characters,” Tetelman says. “That, to me, is really interesting: to go into someone else's life in a different time, in a different place.”

He started to think: “Why am I like lying to myself? If I want to be an opera singer, I have to at least try. I have to give this a shot.” And with that, Tetelman reinvented himself as a tenor. He resumed his studies and launched his career. His star has been on the rise ever since.

The character Tetelman has grown closest to has been Rodolfo, the impoverished poet from the Giacomo Puccini classic La Bohème. It was his first lead tenor role on a major stage, performed to a 3,000-seat house in China.

That experience, Tetelman says, “solidified that, yes, I want to do job. I want to be an opera singer.” He identifies with Rodolfo’s meandering journey through life.

“He’s that guy who’s finding his way, figuring out life,” Tetelman says. But for all their similarities, Tetelman laughs that Rodolfo can also be a mirror for his flaws, a character he loves to hate.

“I really despise him because he is such a coward. He’s exactly like me,” he says with self-deprecating laughter.

Rodolfo’s evolution from wide-eyed romanticism to cynicism to repentance—as he finds love and rejects it, only to grapple with regret—is echoed in another one of Tetelman’s signature roles: that of Alfredo Germont in La Traviata.

Ever playful, Tetelman teases that he calls Alfredo “Freddy G.” It’s a character that has been with him even before his stint as a DJ: He covered the role for Opera North, serving as a back-up in case the star performer fell ill.

La Traviata tells the story of Alfredo’s romance with a popular Paris courtesan, Violetta, whose profession threatens to bring shame to his family. Violetta loves him dearly, but under pressure from his father, she agrees to give him up to save the family reputation.

Alfredo, however, doesn’t realize the sacrifice she’s made: Heartbroken, he lashes out, publicly denouncing her at a party and throwing money at her feet. For Tetelman, it's a scene that illustrates how young and naive Alfredo is.

“That's what happens when you get your heart broken. You just want to run away. You just want to quit because it's so painful,” Tetelman explains. He figures Alfredo has never experienced real heartbreak before.

“So he's going to act in the worst way imaginable because he doesn't know how to deal with his problems. And that's life. That's what makes for a great drama in opera: people experiencing these emotions for the first time.”

Tetelman’s rendition of these swelling highs and lows has earned him some major debuts: It was the role of Alfredo that first brought him to London’s Royal Opera in early 2020, albeit in unexpected style.

Tetelman was in Paris for an audition at the time, and “it went terribly.” He was preparing to board a plane home when his phone rang. It was his agent. He expected to pick up and hear about how badly he’d done.

Instead, he learned that the tenor initially slated to perform in the Royal Opera’s La Traviata had dropped out, leaving an urgent opening. The conductor, Daniel Oren, had recommended Tetelman.

“He called me and said, ‘Do you know Alfredo?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I kind of know it. I could probably put it together in a month or two.’” There was only about a week and a half of rehearsals left, though. Still, Tetelman took the opportunity. It proved to be a turning point.

“I had such a great cast and great experience,” he gushes. “It made me really fall in love with this opera.”

The coronavirus pandemic shuttered theaters not long after Tetelman’s Royal Opera debut, but even that created an opportunity for Tetelman. It allowed him to concentrate on his role in the rarely staged 20th-century masterpiece Francesca da Rimini, from the Italian composer Riccardo Zandonai. The scale of the orchestra often proves to be a challenge for singers.

“Luckily I had a year to prepare it, sitting on my ass in New York,” Tetelman laughs.

That production would be one of the highlights of the 2021 opera season—performed without live spectators and streamed from the Deutsche Oper stage in Berlin to audiences around the world. The buzz it created for Tetelman led to his recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon.

“Now we're planning on putting together a Puccini album for the centennial of his death,” he confides.

As he looks ahead, Tetelman reveals he’s interested in pursuing “more dramatic, heavier music, a bigger fach of tenor.” But he’s being careful. He doesn’t want to compromise artistry for ambition: “I’m looking forward to doing it, but I’m trying to stay lyric, lighter lyric, as long as I can.”

And next year, he will resume debuting new roles, with plans to perform in Il Tabarro and Simon Boccanegra.

But one of the things he’s most looking forward to is spending time with his fiancée and daughter in their current home of Pitești, Romania. Whenever he holds 10-month-old Caira—named after the city in Egypt—he experiences a connection he’s never had before.

“Because I'm adopted, this is my first blood relative that I know or have known my entire life. So it's a really meaningful step. I don't feel like there's just me in this world, you know? There's someone else too that comes from the same blood as I do.”

First, though, it’s time to rest up: He has new stages to conquer, both in San Francisco—and beyond.


See tenor Jonathan Tetelman in his San Francisco Opera debut with La Traviata, opening November 11, or follow him on Instagram at @tenortetelman.