For Joseph Calleja, tenor from Malta with voice ‘like sunshine,’ a star-making role at Met?

For tenor from Malta, a star-making role?

NEW YORK — There’s something about the honeyed sweetness of Joseph Calleja’s voice that seems to evoke memories of a golden age, as if this young tenor carried within his vocal cords a secret passed down from bygone generations.

“Nobody sings like that anymore,” said Craig Rutenberg, director of music administration for the Metropolitan Opera. “His voice is just so intrinsically beautiful, with a very old-fashioned vibrato. It’s sort of like sunshine to me.”

Since Calleja began performing professionally in his native Malta in 1997, when he was barely 19, he has appeared in many of the world’s leading opera houses and recital halls. He has developed a repertory of two dozen roles and recorded two well-received solo albums.

It’s striking how often reviewers reach for historical comparisons when describing his voice. Some have praised it as the most thrilling lyric tenor sound since Luciano Pavarotti; others invoke the names of legendary singers from earlier eras, even Enrico Caruso.

Yet despite his abundant gifts, Calleja, as he freely acknowledges, has been a work in progress. He has struggled at times to put together the elements of his voice — high notes, color, breath control, dynamics — into a complete package. And his efforts at acting have sometimes been rudimentary.

Now, at the age of 31, he is taking on his highest-profile assignment yet, preparing a new role, the title character in Jacques Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” (”The Tales of Hoffmann”) at the Met. The new production, directed by Tony-winning Bartlett Sher, opens on Dec. 3 and will be broadcast live to movie theaters around the world in high-definition on Dec. 19.

A triumph could give Calleja a final push toward international stardom — and make him perhaps the best-known export from his tiny island nation since a certain elusive falcon of fiction and film.

Anything less than a big success and he’s likely to continue being viewed as just one more among a crop of talented young tenors on the current opera scene — or, perhaps worse, as a promising singer who overreached by taking on a role for which he wasn’t ready.

But if Calleja is nervous about the stakes, it wasn’t evident during a morning rehearsal earlier this month, nor in an interview during the lunch break that followed.

“When I started to study the role in June, it was like a ready-made suit,” he said between bites of a tuna sandwich. “It fit the voice incredibly. And that’s good, because I don’t want to go on stage and look like I’m doing it for the first time. I want to BE Hoffmann.”

When the conversation turns to Calleja’s training and the influences that have formed his style and sound, one name stands out above all — his first and only teacher, fellow Maltese tenor Paul Asciak.

Asciak, now 86, recalled his astonishment when he first heard Calleja’s voice — its “fresh, pure and velvety” timbre in the lower register and “lightness and flexibility” when higher. It reminded him of some of the “Golden Age singers, a school of singing I have always greatly admired but now seems almost lost.”

Asciak said he did his best to instruct Calleja in the ways of the old singers, emphasizing especially “perfect evenness of tone, sustained phrasing and clear diction.” Since Malta’s Royal Opera House had been destroyed during WWII, opportunities for his student to attend live performances were limited. “So I had to talk to Joseph about opera,” Asciak said, “and introduce him to recordings of some of the great tenors of the past.”

Calleja said he adopted what he could from the style of these singers, including “the ability to diminuendo any high note to a whisper.”

And their vibrato, that rapid, slight variation in pitch on a given note that creates an uncommonly warm tone — the sunshine that Rutenberg hears in Calleja’s voice.

Calleja takes great pride in his Maltese heritage and still makes his home there. He recently separated from his wife, soprano Tatiana Lisnic, with whom he has two small children.

Few Maltese have made it prominently onto the world stage in recent years, and Calleja is keenly aware of the pressure that puts on him.

“I’m viewed in my country as an ambassador, an object of tremendous pride,” he said. “Obviously, if I mess up, it’s going to be very disappointing for many of my fellow citizens.”

Each of the last several summers he has given a concert in Malta, and he’s campaigned hard but so far unsuccessfully for the nation to build a full-scale performing arts center where opera productions could be staged.

But although he knows that in one sense he’s representing his country, what drives him most is his love of performing.

Recalling his recent performances in Puccini’s “La Boheme” in Vienna, he says, “People were crying backstage. Other than my children looking up at me with adoring eyes, I cannot imagine anything as beautiful as singing and creating that electrical bond between you and the audience.”