The night before I was scheduled to talk with Joseph Calleja about his considerable weight loss and fitness routine, the Maltese tenor tweeted: “Sipping margaritas in Galveston . . . .” Some tequila is only natural when rehearsing a Puccini opera (as Calleja was this fall with Madama Butterfly at Houston Grand Opera, his company debut). But it was somewhat ironic to see such a health-conscious tenor openly indulge.
Unsurprisingly, it’s all part of Calleja’s regime. “In the end, if I work out three, four times a week,” he said, noting as well that he’d also indulged that same evening in a dinner at Morton’s Steakhouse, “then I can go and indulge without having to worry about the calories I’m ingesting, because I know I’ll be burning them the next day.”
In an age where fad diets are dominating the cultural landscape—from cookies to juices to tapeworms—it’s refreshing to hear someone, let alone an operatic tenor, speak sensibly and logically about diet and exercise. “It’s all about common sense, really,” Calleja says of his weight loss, a hefty 50 pounds over the past two years.
Calleja has always worn his weight well (“strapping” and “swarthy” are two words that seem to have been invented for the 32-year-old tenor), and a youth spent steeped in athletics left the singer continually active. The former shot put, javelin, and discus thrower grew up in a sports-centric family (he competed on a European level in his teens) and, at age 7, was almost indoctrinated into his grandfather’s and father’s amateur boxing circle.
“But my mother protested,” he laughs. “She said [to my father], ‘No, you’ll get his nose broken and he can have a flat nose like you and your father!’ And thank God she did that, because otherwise it might have changed my nasal cavities and I wouldn’t have been able to sing after all.” In the midst of soccer games and track and field competitions, however, Calleja was also working on his musical chops.
“I have videos of me singing from when I was three or four—you know, folk songs, nursery rhymes, and stuff like that,” he says. “I’d pretend to sing with a microphone.” And though he attended Malta’s De La Salle College, a school that places a huge emphasis on athletics, Calleja had already turned his focus to a different playing field. At 15, he met teacher Paul Asciak. “‘Basically the voice is very special, and I think you have a shot being a professional opera singer, but you have to forget everything else,’” Calleja remembers Asciak telling him after just a few lessons. By “everything else,” Asciak meant Calleja’s workout routine of weight lifting and high-intensity interval training.
“And maybe he exaggerated a little bit,” Calleja reflects. “Obviously, before I met Paul, I used to work out at the gym or play basketball four or five times a week for at least two hours each session.” That time was then replaced with equally rigorous study sessions with Asciak which included some singing but also a full-body training program, “listening to the old recordings [of] the old masters, watching diagrams of the diaphragm to see how it works, exercising the breathing, and stuff like that. We went into detail pretty much immediately.”
Within three years, Calleja made his stage debut at Malta’s Astra Theatre singing Macduff in Verdi’s Macbeth (a role he would later take to both Seattle Opera and the Metropolitan Opera). His success in the role was a precursor to the Bel Canto repertoire that forms the foundation of the tenor’s career today. Prizes from the likes of the Caruso Competition and Plácido Domingo’s Operalia Competition started to pour in for the 20-something tenor, but this time for his ability to toss off a high C rather than tossing a shot put. He made an impressive debut on the Decca label in 2004 with a collection of ardent tenor arias including selections from Lucia di Lammermoor and La traviata, and today Calleja is now one of the most sought-after tenors around the world.
With such a drastic shift in lifestyle (to say nothing of the normal gain that comes from aging) Calleja began to pack on the pounds. He can’t pinpoint the exact reason for the weight increase, but he finally put his foot down. “Two years ago I said, ‘I’m too young for this. I’m 30 and I have to take [control] of this now, otherwise the problem is going to compound.’”
There weren’t any health complications that came with the weight gain, and Calleja could still play a basketball game, but intuition told him that the problems were about to start. “In order to be healthy at 40, you have to think about it now,” he explains of his thinking. “You have to prepare and lay the groundwork from now and not kind of arrive there and expect to be healthy.”
Calleja quickly returned to the fitness routines of his youth, along with some new ones designed by his cousin, an actor and trainer. Once again, the hard work paid off. “I lost 50 pounds very organically and without doing zany diets or anything like that—just eating normally and exercising and lifting weights.” Though initially discouraged from weightlifting as a singer, Calleja found that—if done responsibly for fitness and not to gain a body builder’s physique—lifting has a score of benefits. “It helps everything,” he stresses. “It helps your resting heart rate, it helps bone density, it helps resistance. It’s incredible.”
Calleja is proof positive that consensus about singers and physical health is evolving. Whereas many performers who aren’t blessed with small frames still accept that they would do their voice a disservice to push for weight loss, slender singers are becoming less and less of an anomaly. Calleja’s less epic proportions when he returned to the Met stage in the title role of Les contes d’Hoffmann only help to sound the death knell of the proverbial fat lady. (He may not have been wearing them, but plenty of black bras and panties abounded in the Giulietta act of that production.)
Yet there is a difference, he points out, between being big and being fat. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have the physique of Brad Pitt,” he says. “But I [went] from really fat to just a normal big guy with the muscle and stuff like that, which makes it believable onstage in all the romantic roles I do. . . . It is true at one point Joan Sutherland said that big bodies make big sounds. But she said ‘big,’ she didn’t say ‘morbidly obese.’ And I think that young singers nowadays, it’s very refreshing to see them take care of their bodies and be healthy. In an opera singer, it’s not just his voice as the instrument; his whole body is the instrument. And for your voice to be healthy, the rest of your body has to be healthy.”
Particularly healthy was how Calleja tailored his workout style to fit his vocal style, keeping in mind that the lower registers of the male voice can get away with different physical exertions that would be difficult for the tenor range to handle. “The tenor voice is not a normal male voice,” he stresses. “Baritone or bass-baritone, that’s the male voice. The natural tenor voice is why tenors are more rare. I don’t want to say ‘freak,’ but it’s not that far off from it. The notes we hit in opera and the kind of tessitura we sing in opera are not normal for the male voice.”
Calleja also cites this as the reason why tenors are more likely to “get into trouble” vocally compared to their bass and baritone brethren. And while Calleja can’t escape the occasional cold or flu, his fitness routines have kept him more resilient. Like Keith Miller’s training program at Puissance in New York, Calleja bases his exercise on interval training, preferring 15-minute sets of high-intensity exertion and recovery time to a leisurely hour-long jog.
“You never see a cheetah or a lion or a tiger going for a 20-mile run,” he explains. “They stalk their pray, there is a huge amount of exertion—which is short, which pushes the body of the animal to its limit—and then there’s the recovery period. . . . And I think that is also exactly what happens in opera. You go onstage, you have your 12-minute section, you go out, and you come back in and you have another 12- or 14-minute section. I think that actually helps me—this kind of system helps me onstage by training my body to that kind of situation.”
Calleja is also a proponent of working out on the morning of a show—so long as it’s light exercise performed at least five or six hours prior to curtain. He is acutely aware of overexertion and the detrimental possibilities it can have on the voice, particularly when it comes to stretching his immune system and tensing his neck and back muscles. “You do need some kind of flexibility in the instrument,” he says. Calleja is also reluctant to exercise on city streets: “It’s bad for the joints, and there’s pollution around.” But apart from that, he’s a rather low-maintenance jock, requiring only a gym in whatever city he performs and “trainers and trousers.”
When done right, exercise not only keeps singers’ bodies and immune systems in shape, it also helps with their resistance and deportment—essential qualities for contemporary opera stagings. “Nowadays, staging requires you to get down and dirty, so to speak,” Calleja says. He may be returning to the Met this month in Franco Zeffirelli’s tried-and-true staging of La bohème, but he has also worked with Bartlett Sher in the Met’s physically active new Hoffmann that eschews the traditional stand-and-sing for a production equal parts Kafka and Fellini with a Grotowskian commitment to movement. Later this year, he’ll also step into Mary Zimmerman’s recent Lucia di Lammermoor (starring opposite the equally limber soprano Natalie Dessay), which includes running with swords and an intricately choreographed suicide scene for Edgardo.
Apart from the new sense of theatricality in stagings, the vocal fireworks of Bel Canto also factor into the equation—especially since, as Calleja points out, the diapason has gradually increased as orchestras now tune higher than they did a century ago. This makes the feat of keeping up with the musical difficulties while singing in any imaginable position and filling one of the world’s largest opera houses an Olympian task to say the least.
“Getting through a whole opera, whether you’re the lead or not, is itself a very kind of physical act,” Calleja says. “It’s all about breathing—and when you sing right, it’s all about the diaphragm. And [singing] by itself, it’s a very physical act.” Unsurprisingly, this was also one of the reasons Calleja preferred to lose weight slowly, so as not to hinder his ability to keep up in any of these given circumstances.
To an extent, Calleja’s seemingly simple routines correlate with his performance philosophy onstage. “It’s all about basic research,” he explains. “I’m not a big fan of getting over-psychological in roles. . . . It doesn’t really help the audience. The audience has only two hours to view the show and to make up their mind and understand it. If you make something, let’s say, too harsh, too intelligent, and too kind of abstract, it tires out the audience. I think it also goes against the music.”
Just as the best exercises should challenge our most basic body parts, so do operas challenge our most basic emotions such as love, jealousy, betrayal, and revenge (in Calleja’s words, spoken like a true Donizettian tenor). Calleja focuses on the score to gain insight into his characters. A Puccini role, he says, is almost impossible not to play correctly thanks to the composer’s ability to manipulate orchestral colors. Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi may make you work a little harder, but the movements of an Arturo, Elvino, Edgardo, Nemorino, Alfredo, or Duca are still relatively laid into the framework of the music.
Calleja’s concern with singers today is that many pigeonhole themselves in the repertoire too strictly, which stunts development the same way a lifter can stunt muscle growth without properly challenging himself. Between Bel Canto and Verismo, in Calleja’s example, there isn’t a huge difference in terms of technique. Moreover, Calleja finds that the Bel Canto mindset should be used regardless of the role. “The reason is that all ‘Bel Canto’ means is ‘beautiful singing’ in Italian, literally translated,” he says. “It’s not astrophysics. It’s literally about beautiful singing.”
While the literal Bel Canto approach has deterred some singers who have endured extreme or major weight loss, Calleja didn’t notice any of the marked differences that are practically part and parcel with crash diets and gastric bypass surgery. With an average weight loss of a little less than half a pound a week, Calleja’s body—vocal quality and timbre included—had plenty of time to adjust to the gradual change. What did change, however, was the ease with which he could produce his signature sound (reminiscent of the “old masters” Calleja studied as a youth). He attributes this in a large part to his diet, which places a huge amount of importance on protein. “Our diaphragm is lined with the abdominal muscle which helps us control the abdomen—and, you know, the voice starts wobbling or you lose the support, and that’s when you’re in trouble.” For Calleja, eating a diet rich in lean protein and vegetables with the occasional grain (and margarita evening) is what keeps his abs—and the rest of his body—in check.
Yet as Calleja mentions throughout our discussion, every metabolism is different. “I have friends who eat out every day—lunch and dinner—and they drink an average of two bottles of wine a day,” he says. “And they’re slim. They don’t even exercise. Whereas I look at a glass of water [and] I gain two pounds.” Continually being on the road presents a similar challenge met with some forethought, alertness, and a stash of protein packets. Regardless which of the two categories you fall into, staying in tune with your body and staying alert is, per Calleja, the key.
“You really don’t have to exaggerate,” he says. “It’s not about having 2 or 3 percent body fat. It’s not about that. It’s just about being comfortable with yourself, about being healthy so your voice can be healthy, and about being believable in the role you’re doing. It really boils down to those things in the end.”
