Joseph Calleja, the man popularly dubbed ‘The Maltese Tenor’, burst onto the international scene in 2004 with his acclaimed Decca debut Tenor Arias, but he has had a charmed career from the outset.

Joseph Callega

Joseph Calleja. Photo © Johannes Ifkovits

Born in 1978, he grew up surrounded by the Baroque splendour of the flower-bedecked but relatively quiet Maltese town of Attard. Although he only started singing seriously around the age of 14, by the time he was 19 he was making his operatic debut as Macduff in Verdi’s Macbeth. The following year, he won the Caruso Competition in Milan and was a prize winner at Plácido Domingo’s Operalia in 1999.

Calleja is relaxed and engaging, chatting over Zoom from his villa on the island he still calls home. “It’s funny, the way I became ‘The Maltese Tenor’,” he recalls. “It was the British and German press who, in the beginning, called me either ‘The Maltese Falcon’ or ‘The Maltese Tenor’. It would be hard to be a falcon – I’m six foot three and weigh 130 kilos! Falcons don’t come that big. I guess ‘The Maltese Tenor’...