Opera: Stephen Costello and Ailyn Pérez's Matrimonial Duets

In Hollywood it may be fashionable—even desirable—for stars to get hitched. Not so in the world of opera, where singing schedules can play havoc with marital bliss. However, at least one vocally gifted couple is making it work onstage and off. Stephen Costello and Ailyn Pérez—husband and wife, tenor and soprano—seem to be a match made in verismo heaven. They are the only couple to have both won the annual Richard Tucker Award to an American opera singer on the threshold of a major career—he in 2009, she this year. They met as students at Philadelphia’s Academy of Vocal Arts, and since their marriage, in 2008, their careers have taken off independently and as a duo. Costello opened this Metropolitan Opera season opposite Anna Netrebko in Anna Bolena as Pérez was finishing a run as Marguerite in Faust at the Santa Fe Opera. Yet they seem destined to be cast together, most recently in La Traviata at the Royal Opera in January. “When there’s a married couple onstage, people expect the love duets to be even more fiery,” says Pérez. And there’s more passion to come this year—La Bohème at the L.A. Opera in May, Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz in Moscow, and another La Traviata, in Cincinnati. Outside the opera house, the pair couldn’t be more down to earth about the challenges of being diva and divo under one roof. They have a house in Chattanooga, Tennessee, but, as Costello says, “we don’t practice at home. It’s very dangerous to do that, because we have very different ideas about how something is supposed to go.”