A soprano and a bass rarely duet. This married couple rarely shares a home

Soprano Cho Sun-hyung and bass Lim Chae-jun, who perform internationally as Elisa Cho and Simon Lim, have been married since 2017, but they have given just two duo recitals together.

Part of the reason is the repertoire. Opera is full of love duets for soprano and tenor, and soprano-baritone pairings are common, too. Duets for soprano and a true bass are comparatively rare, the couple said. “The vocal ranges are so far apart,” Lim said.

The rest of the reason is the calendar. The Milan-based couple spends about one or two months a year under the same roof. Cho, 45, has worked mostly in Germany, while Lim, 44, travels across Europe and the Americas for his engagements.

“We dated long distance for 10 years,” Cho said. “Now we’ve been married for almost 10.”

In busy seasons, she said, one of them comes home only long enough to swap clothes and do laundry before leaving again. When the weather turns cold wherever Lim is singing, she sometimes packs his winter clothes and flies out to exchange them.

The two met in 2007 at a singing competition near Mantua, Italy, while both were studying in Milan. Of about 200 entrants, roughly 10 reached the final, among them the two Koreans, and Lim won, Cho recalled. A few days later, he sent her a message on Cyworld, the Korean social network of the time.

Cho, a Kyung Hee University graduate, made her European debut in 2011 through Oper Frankfurt’s young artist program. Lim, a Daegu native, trained at La Scala’s academy and has since sung under conductors including Riccardo Chailly and Chung Myung-whun.

Both said the greatest advantage of marrying another singer is having a coach who understands them completely.

“He’ll tell me to drop my breath lower, or to open or close a vowel at a certain point, and that solves it,” Cho said. “He knows my problems so well.”

Living with another singer also means treating the body as an instrument. Before performances, they look after each other’s sleep, the humidity in the room and the first hint of a cough.

The only drawback, Cho said, is temperament.

“Apart from all the touring, the only downside is that I’m a J and he’s a P,” she said, referring to the Myers-Briggs types that separate planners from those who go with the flow. “If I had married a tenor, we would both have been on edge.”

They rarely appear in Korea for the same scheduling reasons. European houses book singers years in advance, the couple said, and offers from home often arrive after their calendars are full. Their most recent duo recital, at the inaugural Saya International Music Festival in Gunwi, Daegu, in September, fell in a rare open window. For the hourlong outdoor program, they sang only two duets, filling the rest with Korean art songs and opera arias.

Lim next sings Verdi’s “Macbeth” in Ferrara on Nov. 27-29 and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony under Chung at La Scala on Dec. 20, before returning early next year to Philip II in Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” the role he calls his favorite, in Marseille.

Asked what being married to another singer changes, Lim described a simple rule.

“We fight a lot, too,” he said. “But on a concert day, it’s: let’s not bother each other. Let’s take care of each other more.”