When Stacey Alleaume first sang Violetta, one of Verdi’s most beautiful and tragic roles, she went on stage with four hours’ notice. It was 2017, and the young soprano was a member of Opera Australia’s young artists program.

“I was supposed to go to a rehearsal of Carmen on the harbour and I got a call, ‘Stacey, we need you to come and do the matinee,’” Alleaume recalls. She had only had two cover rehearsals, the last a month earlier, and instantly had to “become the leading lady, because she has to carry the show from start to end”.

She rushed to the theatre. Time passed in a blur of checking her movements in the busy first act, meeting the tenor for the first time in the conductor’s room, singing the cadenzas, a wardrobe fitting, then suddenly, with a rush of adrenaline, she was on stage.

Alleaume opens a glittering OA Melbourne season at the State Theatre this week in the same opera, La Traviata. She has come a long way from the little girl growing up in Narre Warren in Melbourne’s outer east, practising crying in the mirror and begging her parents to join the choir.

“It’s taken me 11 years to get here, working my way up from OA’s schools company, doing little things in the Arts Centre, some extra chorus things, The Merry Widow and Gilda (in Verdi’s Rigoletto),” Alleaume says.

“This is my favourite opera so it’s wonderful. It’s an amazing role. Violetta goes on a massive journey in such a short time (from frantic Parisian nightlife, to true love in the country, to sacrificing her love and dying of tuberculosis). People have said this role is written for three sopranos because it requires so many layers and techniques for the voice.

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“Then you’re dealing with the normal stuff of your job: heavy costumes, hoping that people don’t step on your train, hoping that you don’t trip over a carpet. Something so little can throw off your performance but you can’t let it, because you have to stay in character.”

Opera Australia artistic director Lyndon Terracini has “tremendous admiration” for Alleaume. “She’s worked incredibly hard, she’s very talented, she’s tremendously disciplined. Not only does she sing Violetta wonderfully and incredibly beautifully, but she inhabits the whole role – every second she is on stage you believe that she is Violetta. She is so exciting and thrilling and beautiful and tragic.”