At the Widow's peak

FUNNY girl, Amelia Farrugia. The soprano sings in a polished, refined voice, but in the spoken words between she can inject a blunt, amusing working-class accent. In 2010, Melbourne saw her decked out and partying in 1930s New York under Lindy Hume's direction in Johann Strauss's operetta Die Fledermaus. Hume wanted a Brooklyn accent, so Farrugia borrowed from Fran Drescher's nasally TV nanny.

Occasionally, Farrugia would let that twang into song. Not so for her latest title role as Hanna in Lehar's The Merry Widow. Sure, there's fun to be had, employing a northern English accent this time for the widow with lower-class farming origins who has only just come into money. Over coffee one day, Farrugia taped a member of the chorus, a northern English girl, reading Hanna's dialogue and copied her speech patterns, but the music - most famously, the Vilja Song - will be accent-free.

After all, this production's director, Giles Havergal, cautioned Farrugia: ''Don't let the iron fist out of the glove too often.'' That would be a velvet glove in this operetta, first performed, in Vienna, 107 years ago.

''There is an underlying grit and darkness there, but the velvet glove is on top,'' Farrugia says, at a beach cafe near the Sydney home she shares with her husband, concert promoter Paul Chesher, 48, and their son Ben, 9. The 41-year-old singer is wearing black, her brunette hair pulled back. We're a long way from Lehar's near-bankrupt Pontevedro, a fictionalised version of the Balkans' Montenegro. Hanna, Farrugia says, ''never hits out too brutally, even though she's a farm girl. Does that make sense?''

Given the performer's own background, her laugh and self-deprecation, it's hard to imagine her as an imperious diva on-stage or off. ''You know, I'm from Campbelltown-Bankstown [in western Sydney] and I took this really aggressive [approach to Hanna], and Giles said, 'Well, back in the day, that's probably not how she would have done it'.''

The eldest of four children, Farrugia's parents scraped a living to send her and her siblings to be educated privately. Yet it was her father, who immigrated with his family to Australia at age two from the town of Zejtun in Malta, who convinced Farrugia to drop an offer to study law at the University of Sydney in favour of studying her passion, music. This move led her to perform at the Sydney Opera House, the cultural icon her Maltese grandfather, a carpenter, helped construct.

Her artistic pinnacle was performing for Pope Benedict XVI at the World Youth Day final Mass in Sydney in 2008, she says. Is her voice God-given? ''My faith is really deep because I've been raised as a Catholic … Definitely my voice comes from God - in my mind - and it is a gift, and everything else is a gift.''

When we speak, Farrugia is on the verge of spending more than three months in Manhattan at the beginning of 2012, putting on full make-up each night to be No.1 understudy to Russian soprano Anna Netrebko in the title role of Jules Massenet's Manon, at the Metropolitan Opera. She's philosophical about whether she'll actually get to perform as Manon Lescault for a New York audience.

''I did Manon for the 2010 Sydney season and felt I was in good voice, so I took it over to the Met and sang it for them,'' she says. ''Four months later, I was offered the cover [understudy role] of Anna Netrebko. It means so much to me because when I was 25 I went over to do the Met [National Council] Competition and I was one of 10 winners. Manon'sGavotte was one of the pieces I sang, for a full house, and I remember looking up at the chandelier and thinking, 'Please, God, let me get back in my own right'.''