Joyce DiDonato

Joyce Flaherty was born in Prairie Village, Kansas in 1969, the sixth of seven children in an Irish-American family. Her father, Donald Martin Flaherty, was a self-employed architect who designed houses in the area; her mother, Kathleen Claire (McGlinchy) Flaherty, worked for the Gas Service Co. writing recipes in their test kitchen. One of her sisters, Amy Hetherington, was a music teacher at St. Ann Catholic School, which Joyce and her siblings attended. She later went to Bishop Miege High School where she sang in musicals. She entered Wichita State University (WSU) in 1988 to study vocal music education, because she was initially more interested in teaching high school vocal music and musical theatre. She became interested in opera after seeing a PBS telecast of Don Giovanni, and then, in her junior year, when she was cast in a school production of Die Fledermaus.

After graduating from WSU in spring 1992, DiDonato decided to pursue graduate studies in vocal performance at the Academy of Vocal Arts. Following her studies in Philadelphia, she was accepted in the Santa Fe Opera's Apprentice Singer program for the summer 1995 festival season, where she appeared in several minor roles and understudied for larger parts in such operas as Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, Richard Strauss' Salome, Kálmán's Gräfin Mariza and the 1994 world premiere of David Lang's Modern Painters. She was honored as one of several Outstanding Apprentice Artists by the Santa Fe Opera that year.

She became a part of Houston Grand Opera's young artist program in 1996; she sang there from autumn 1996 until spring 1998. During the summer of 1997, DiDonato participated in San Francisco Opera's Merola Opera Program.

During her apprentice years, DiDonato competed in several vocal competitions. In 1996 she won second prize in the Eleanor McCollum Competition and was a district winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. In 1997 she won a William Matheus Sullivan Award, while in 1998 she won second prize in the Operalia Competition, first place in the Stewart Awards, won the George London Competition, and received a Richard F. Gold Career Grant from the Shoshana Foundation.

In a 2016 interview with English mezzo-soprano Janet Baker, DiDonato discussed that from age 26 to 29 (circa 1995–1998), she radically changed her vocal technique. "When a lot of my friends were getting covers at The Met and leading roles at [The New York] City Opera,… it wasn't coming together for me. And I stopped and I said, 'OK, let's revamp.' .... And I was really bad for about a year and a half, because my teacher was taking away all the mechanism that I was using to sing. And it was the best thing that could have happened."