It is an assumption universally shared by everyone in her entourage, and one easy enough to imagine for anyone who hears her sing, that Lisa Marie Rogali is destined to perform on the world’s greatest stages—New York’s Metropolitan Opera, La Scala in Milan.

Since the fall of 2012—during her first semester at Penn State, when she auditioned for a workshop showcase of Mozart’s comic opera Così fan tutte—Rogali ’16 A&A has distinguished herself through the mastery of her craft. Reviewers have praised her expressive, versatile voice and described her powerful performance onstage as breathtaking, compelling. Over the years, Rogali has scooped up awards and accolades galore, aced multiple song competitions, and made her mark on more than one young artist program.

Last spring, the mezzo-soprano debuted at Carnegie Hall as the alto soloist in Mozart’s Coronation Mass. And in November, she stepped on stage at the Virginia Opera in Norfolk, Fairfax, and Richmond to play Carmen, one of the most iconic and coveted female roles in the operatic repertoire. This year, she’ll reprise that role at the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee. She’ll play Rosina in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia in Florida’s Sarasota Opera, and she will perform the role of Paquette in the South Florida Symphony Orchestra’s concert production of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide.

These are tremendous accomplishments for a young artiste. But for Rogali, singing in august venues is less important than singing itself, less meaningful than enjoying every role, every piece of music, and every step of a career that—for a shy girl from a modest background growing up in the small northeast Pennsylvania town of Hawley—seemed far-fetched, if not impossible.

“I know everyone’s different, but I don’t really care about the prestige of where I sing,” she says. “I have so many friends who say things like, ‘If I don’t make it to the Met by 35, I’m going to quit.’ If for some reason I never make it to the Met, I’m going to be OK.”

Rogali’s goal, she says, “is for singing to be my main career, my main source of income. As long as I am able to financially support myself through my singing, I’ll be happy.”

It seems a plausible goal, particularly with Carmen under her belt. This is Rogali’s biggest role to date—and a part that seems perfectly suited to her in more ways than one. “She’s got the looks, she’s got that beautiful hair,” says her vocal coach, Nathalie Doucet.

Most importantly, Rogali has the voice—versatile, warm, colorful. Impressive in its extensive range. But Rogali also has what Doucet—director of Detroit Opera’s Resident Artist Program—believes is a rare ability to inhabit every character she plays. “When she’s singing, she just grabs your attention, and you can’t look away,” Doucet says. “That’s star quality. That’s something I rarely see. And Carmen, she knows how to be a star, but she’s also a character with a lot of complexities, a lot of thoughts and ideas. I think Lisa can associate well with that, and it’s where the two of them meet as people.”

Doucet, who encouraged Rogali to audition for Carmen, knew these attributes would only enhance the singer’s vocal talents and wow the audition committee in the same way she made an immediate and lasting impact on Ted Christopher, artistic director of Penn State’s Opera Theatre, when she auditioned for Così fan tutte in 2012.

“People in the performing arts often say, ‘You either have it or you don’t.’ I think that’s a little lazy, because it discounts the fact that most performing artists have worked really hard to get to where they are,” says Christopher. “However, it is true that every once in a while, you see a performer and there is something riveting about them no matter how basic or how developed the skills are. Lisa had an intensity of presence, a natural demeanor, and a real fearlessness that you can’t fake.”

That 2012 audition was all the more impressive because Rogali had never sung opera before. At the time, she knew nothing about the genre. “The first opera I ever saw was the one I was in [my] freshman year,” she says with a laugh. “I remember that Ted Christopher and [professor emerita of music] Beverly Patton came up to me after my Così audition and said, ‘You have to sing opera,’ and I was like, ‘What?’ I had no concept of opera, no idea about languages, the training, or any of it. But they just threw me in immediately.”

Rogali possesses a natural and commanding stage presence, which makes it almost impossible to believe her claim that she is an introvert, and that she’s happiest in her own company. As a little girl, Andrew Rogali says of his only daughter, “She didn’t have a lot of friends. She spent a lot of time by herself in her room.”

Hawley’s rural location (Andrew moved his family there from Bergenfield, N.J., where Rogali was born) made it a tough place for playdates and such. But her solitude was also a function of the challenging home environment Rogali and her brother, Kevin, grew up in. Andrew, who still worked three jobs in New Jersey, was able to visit his family on weekends; his wife at the time—Rogali’s mother, Mary—struggled with mental illness.

“I had to work really, really hard to even just go to school, because sometimes my mom wouldn’t even want to drive us to the bus,” Rogali says. “There were a lot of extra steps I had to take just to do the normal things that kids do. I never had people over at my house, and I was very secretive about what was going on at home.”

Her mother’s unpredictability—frustrating at best, heartbreaking at worst—was a constant challenge. As was money, or lack thereof. At least one of her former teachers believes the painful circumstances of her youth are reflected in her singing. “It feels like you can hear a soul in Lisa’s voice that, I think, comes from the difficulties and challenges she’s faced in her life,” says professor emerita of voice Jennifer Trost, who coached Rogali through her time at Penn State.

If so, Rogali is only tangentially aware of it. The passage of time has made it easier to recall the good moments with her mom, she says: the occasional mother-daughter movie nights and heart-to-hearts, and their shared love for their three cats, Cisco, Butch, and Sundance, which have been with Rogali since childhood. But even today, Rogali finds it difficult to talk about her past, and it’s particularly hard for her to speak about her mother, who died a couple of months after Rogali’s 2016 college graduation.

To get through it all at the time, Rogali sought refuge in her studies—she was always a good student—and in music. In middle school, she joined the band and played the clarinet, which, she says, was a good choice for an introvert: “I could just hide behind my instrument and play.” One of her best friends was part of the theater crowd and convinced Rogali when she was in ninth grade to audition for the school musical. She did so only to be with her friend—but Rogali made her first of many marks onstage and scored a lead role in the youth edition of Once Upon a Mattress.

After that, she was unstoppable. Performing—both singing and acting—became an outlet for the shy Rogali, an opportunity, she says, “to step into someone else’s shoes, to express myself through them, to be loud.” Through her school years, she bagged lead role after lead role in production after production. “I figured out that this was something I could do, and I was singing all the time—practicing in the shower, trying out different styles, experimenting with my voice and what I could do with it,” she says.

Andrew recalls his daughter singing in her room, but even though people would stop him and rave about her talent, he had no idea just how talented she was until he saw her perform as Dorothy in a local production of The Wizard of Oz in her first year of high school. Still, when the time came for college, he had reservations about his daughter, a first-generation college student, studying music. How, Andrew wondered, would a career in music performance, even for someone with such a gift, deliver on the necessities of life—a steady paycheck, health insurance—that had been so difficult for him to achieve?

Rogali worried about these things, too­—and still does, she admits. That’s why she made the more prudent decision to major in music education. Penn State’s program, she says, had a great reputation; its graduates seemed to find jobs easily. “I figured that being a music teacher was a way to keep music in my life and also give me a job,” she says.

Even after Christopher and Patton discovered her, so to speak, and it became clear that Rogali could indeed become a professional opera singer, she hesitated to go that route but still took every performance opportunity that came her way in her four years at University Park. Rogali sang lead roles in Penn State Opera Theatre productions of Poulenc’s La voix humaine and Dialogues of the Carmelites, and in Puccini’s La bohème. She was a soloist for Leonard Bernstein’s Mass for the College of Arts and Architecture’s 50th-anniversary celebration, and performed in Stephen Sondheim’s Marry Me a Little for the School of Theatre. Rogali also performed with local theater companies in State College, playing Cosette in Les Misérables, Louise in Gypsy, and Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. She entered every voice contest she could, and in her senior year, she won a Metropolitan Opera National Council Encouragement Award.

Even today, Rogali cannot say enough about the support she received at Penn State—the school, she says, “defined my career.” The School of Music aims to create as many cross-genre performance opportunities as possible for students to showcase their talent, and that openness helped Rogali continue developing the versatility of her voice. But Trost, Rogali’s former teacher, says it wasn’t only the unique, indescribable elements of Rogali’s voice that allowed her to thrive. It was also that she is hardworking, dedicated to improving her craft, and teachable in a way that many young singers aren’t.

“She had this tremendous combination of talent and abilities, and she was eager to learn,” says Trost. “That created reciprocity, the ideal student-teacher relationship, if you will, where I was willing to learn from her as much as she was willing to learn from me.”

Trost, who retired from Penn State last May, was an accidental opera singer herself. She went to college to study biology with the idea of becoming a veterinarian, auditioned for a choir in her first week, and was told she should major in voice performance. Before coming to Penn State to teach, she enjoyed a career as an opera singer and recitalist, working for 13 years in Germany, where she was a leading soprano with the Wuppertal Opera and a soprano soloist at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. Over the years, she’s performed with and taught many talented singers. “Whenever you hear young singers, based on your experience and on what you know is the accepted standard, you listen to the voice and you say, ‘What’s the potential?’” Trost says. “What you’re hoping for is to project 10 years into the future. You can’t always do that, but in Lisa’s case, everything came together. All the ingredients she had boded well for success.”

Talent is one thing for a performer. Luck plays a role, serendipity. Degrees and pedigrees matter to some extent. Finding the right teacher is important. And connections are key to success. That’s why Trost encouraged Rogali to go to the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music for a master’s in voice performance, knowing that an advanced degree would help her meet people with the necessary expertise and connections, and the heft needed to embark on a performance career. Rogali’s sensible inner voice reminded her where she’d come from and admonished her for taking on onerous debt. Her dad cautioned her on the same. But going to CCM “was a risk I wanted to take,” she says, “and I was getting so much reinforcement from people in my support system, I believed that it would work out.”

It has. Many major opera companies come to CCM to audition students. Rogali impressed the Minnesota Opera enough to be admitted in 2018 to its two-year Resident Artist Program, which, she says, “was like a jumping-off pad, and the roles they had available for my first season there fit me perfectly at the time.”

Her debut was short-lived: In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered performance venues around the world. Rogali returned to Hawley. Even for established artists, recouping their losses and getting back out into the world seemed tough, if not impossible, during that uncertain time. But Trost lauds Rogali for her “stick-to-it-ness,” and for finding creative ways to keep herself current despite the odds, most notably by retraining herself as a mezzo-soprano.

While Rogali has always had ease of range, she had performed to that point mostly as a soprano. During the pandemic, she realized that the roles she really wanted to play—Carmen, Angelina in La Cenerentola—are all mezzos. “They’re quirky roles, powerful femme fatale roles, and they’re totally me and up my alley. These roles not only fit me vocally, they also demand versatility in acting. They feel completely authentic to me and are perfectly suited to my strengths,” she says. “So I retrained on my own, learning all this new repertoire. It was risky, I know, but I thought, ‘What do I have to lose? There are so many people who aren’t doing anything right now, and I don’t know what the future is going to bring for any of us.’”

As pandemic restrictions lifted, Rogali hit the job market. Hard. “I applied to pretty much everything I could,” she says. “It was hard, because everything was virtual and you had to send professional videos that should be made with professional recording equipment. But I was in my kitchen with a sheet over my head and recording with a backing track to get a job.”

In the summer of 2020, Rogali was hired by the Glimmerglass Festival, an opera company that presents a summer season on the shores of Otsego Lake, a few miles north of Cooperstown, N.Y., and she would be invited back the next three summers. She then joined Detroit Opera (where she worked with Doucet) as resident artist for the 2023-2024 season, singing, among others, the role of Kate Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly. She also made her debut as Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia with North Carolina Opera and continued to enter—and place highly—in vocal competitions. And in early 2024, Rogali signed on with New York–based UIA Talent Agency.

There is a natural and lyrical beauty, a warm and rich color in Rogali’s mezzo-soprano voice that is pleasing to both the trained and untrained ear. “When she sings arias from that repertoire, you can tell immediately that her voice is happy, that it wants to be there,” says Doucet, who helped prepare Rogali for her Carmen debut. “Her strength and her artistry are really getting her noticed, and with an agent, it’s easier to get those big roles. But I really think that Lisa’s work ethic and her professionalism set her apart, and that’s why her name keeps coming up again and again. It’s why we at Detroit just keep trying to find ways to bring her back here.”

Rogali’s talent, discipline, and commitment to her craft,  and her love for opera and classical music, make her a promising ambassador for a genre that is struggling to attract younger audiences. The pandemic took a toll on opera houses and concert halls, but the issue is longstanding; in Christopher’s view, it has much to do with the value—or lack thereof—society places on classical music. This is a genre that demands time and commitment.

“These days, our focus is diffused, and it’s hard to have that level of attention,” Christopher says. “If we want young people to come to the opera, we need to invite them into the space and make them understand that this space requires listening, attention. That for that time period, there are rules—no phones, no notifications. I also think education is key: We should give context to a piece of classical music, let audiences know who wrote it, what it was like when it was first performed, make connections that increase understanding and appreciation.”

Creating that kind of engagement is not easy; it takes time and resources. But companies such as Detroit Opera are willing to commit to the effort. The company is focused on community engagement through education, Doucet says, and it is offering year-round programs to introduce opera to students in Detroit, both at the opera house itself and in schools throughout metro Detroit. She says that many companies are now approaching opera through a DEIB lens, incorporating performers, composers, librettists, and stage directors from different backgrounds. They’re also staging classic operas in unconventional, modern ways to appeal to younger demographics: A 2024 production of Carmen at the New York Metropolitan Opera was set at the U.S.-Mexico border instead of in Spain; Carmen sported denim cutoffs and turquoise cowboy boots.

These are the types of stagings and productions that Rogali would love to be a part of. She’s also eager to perform in new works that take on topical and current themes—gender, race, LGBTQ+ rights. Last April, she covered a lead role in Detroit Opera’s production of Breaking the Waves, an operatic adaptation of a Lars von Trier film of the same name that deals with love, social norms, and the female body. “Many operas were written a long time ago, but human emotion is human emotion, and that’s what they’re about,” she says. “A lot of people feel opera is only for an elite crowd, but it’s actually very relatable to most of us.”

In Doucet’s view, Rogali is the perfect ambassador for opera—young, talented, and accessible to her audience. “Lisa is so friendly with everyone who comes to the stage door,” Doucet says, “from the big donors to the small kids. She’s really good at talking up opera to everyone.”

If there’s one person Rogali doesn’t need to talk up opera to, it’s her dad. It’s not easy for Andrew to get to her performances, he says, but even if he can’t see her live, he’s now seen enough to assure him that his successful daughter made the right choice.  

Watch Rogali perform in the Virginia Opera's production of Carmen