Melissa Petit

The French soprano Mélissa Petit, who was born in 1990, hails from Saint-Raphaël on the Côte d’Azur. She received her vocal training, which she began at the age of 14, in her hometown and in Nice; master classes took her to Francisco Araiza, Cheryl Studer, Siegfried Jerusalem, and Ann Murray, among others. Petit gained her first stage experience in the opera studio of the Hamburg Staatsoper from 2010 to 2013. She joined the ensemble of Zurich Opera in 2015, where she appeared in such roles as Ännchen in Weber’s Freischütz, Sophie in Massenet’s Werther, and Créuse in Charpentier’s Médée; she has been freelancing and performing internationally since 2017. At the Bregenz Festival, for example, she has appeared as Micaëla in Bizet’s Carmen and as Gilda in Verdi’s Rigoletto. She has performed Giannetta in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore and Papagena in Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Opéra national de Paris, and she took on the female title role in Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and Zurich Opera. Mélissa Petit made her role debut as Juliette in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette at the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing. Her repertoire also includes musicals such as Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, in which she has appeared in Zurich. Cecilia Bartoli engaged her in 2021 as Bellezza in Handel’s Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno at the Salzburg Whitsun Festival, where she also sang Servilia in a concert performance of Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito. At the 2022 Salzburg Summer Festival, Mélissa Petit appeared in a concert performance of Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher. In the fall, she will perform as the vixen Sharp-Ears in a new production of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen staged by Stefan Herheim at the Theater an der Wien.
She was also a guest there in 2020 as Marzelline in Christoph Waltz’s staging of Beethoven’s Fidelio.

June 2022