New Artist of the Month:
Soprano Chelsea Lehnea

In October, l'Opéra Orchestre Normandie Rouen posted on YouTube its recent staging of La traviata (Sept.30-Oct. 7). The word-of-mouth that followed reached my inbox, so I investigated: The immediacy of Chelsea Lehnea’s voice, making both her role and European debut as Violetta, carried across the Atlantic.

That Traviata has since been viewed over 11,000 times and paid professional dividends for the American soprano, 33. Bookers all over the world have gotten in touch with interest—easily “the most positive reaction [she’s] ever gotten” for a debut role. But if you ask Lehnea, she and her colleagues were simply expressing “the honesty of the score”—a phrase she circled back to again and again in conversation.

“We’re just singing the truth that's there,” she insists.

The globetrotting lifestyle of an opera singer isn’t new for Lehnea. The daughter of missionaries, she grew up “on the road”—a few years in Germany, a few years in Mississippi.  But she took in her first opera not as a child in Europe but from the comfort of her own living room as a teenager: the 2005 Salzburg Traviata with Anna Netrebko, broadcast on PBS. 

By then, singing was already a constant. According to family legend, a toddling Lehnea sang so loudly during one church service that the pastor arranged for her to be pulled out of the nursery to sing “Jesus Loves Me” for the congregation.

“I was one of those people that was singing before I could talk,” she says.

Lehnea enrolled at Lee University, a private Christian school near her birthplace of Chattanooga, TN. At the time, her dream was to become “the next great Elphaba.” But her voice teacher, Virginia Horton, wondered if she might have operatic potential. During her sophomore year, she gave it a shot, mainly to get Horton “off [her] back.” She didn’t hit a terribly high note, she recalls—a G—but the sound that came out of her body “scared me and the pianist.”

“Mrs. Horton was just sitting there, like, ‘I told you,’” Lehnea remembers.

And so it begins

She enrolled at the University of Maryland for graduate school, where she began studying with soprano Carmen Balthrop. Balthrop was the first to hand her the music to Violetta's famed aria “Sempre libera.” Lehnea remembers seeing all the ornamentation and “freak[ing] out”—ironic now, given that Lehnea’s crackling coloratura is one of her calling cards.

“Carmen saw me long before I saw me,” Lehnea says of Balthrop, who, like Horton, died in 2021. “She was the one who really was just like, ‘Baby, open up. Let it fly.’”

Those high notes really settled once Lehnea could “let it fly” on a big stage—like the San Francisco Opera. While in the Merola Opera Program in 2019, she sang excerpts from Maria Stuarda and Lucia di Lammermoor in its season-end concert. 

“Having that big of a space to send the sound, finally everything clicked,” she says. 

Since then, Lehnea has sung both those roles in staged productions, playing Lucia with the St. Petersburg Opera in 2024 and Elisabetta in Opera Baltimore’s Maria Stuarda in 2025. She’s also become a regular with New York City bel canto specialists Teatro Nuovo, with The New York Times singling her out for praise in recent productions of Donizetti’s Poliuto and Carolina Uccelli’s Anna di Resburgo.

Lehnea now studies with her UMD classmate James Smidt, a.k.a. “Haus of Shmizzay,” famous in equal measure as a pedagogue and online provocateur. Asked to describe how her voice has evolved in the past few years, she says she’s gotten “reacquainted with [her] chest voice”—leaning into it, rather than leaning away, as she’d been advised to do by previous teachers. 

“Coming from being a belter, that was a huge part of my identity and my sound,” she says. “But the more I've figured it out, the power that I have on the top is because of the knowledge and experience of everything I have at the bottom. I’m just trusting the voice in all of its registers and letting the sound be what it's going to be.”

As 2025 transitioned into 2026, Lehnea was focused on her online voice studio, which she started shortly after her star turn in Rouen and promptly filled up. She teaches from her home base in Merritt Island, Florida: a 31-foot-long Class A RV she shares with her partner, bass-baritone Andrew Allan Hiers. (The original plan was to buy a tiny house, but “inflation threw [that option] out,” she says. “So, I have everything that a normal house would have, just on wheels.”) 

In the new year, she plans to make good on that deluge of invitations post–Traviata, once she “get[s] all of the organization and the resources in place.”

“If I get the chance to make the world cry with me for a minute, I'm not going to waste it,” she vows.