Hildegard Behrens

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Hildegard Behrens (born February 9, 1937 in Varel ; † August 18, 2009 in Tokyo ) was a German opera singer ( soprano ). She was best known as the singer of the dramatic soprano roles in Richard Wagner's and Richard Strauss ' operas .

career

Hildegard Behrens grew up in a medical family in Varel as the youngest of six children and attended the girls' school there (today elementary school at Schlossplatz) and the Varel grammar school (today: Lothar-Meyer-Gymnasium ), where she graduated from high school in 1957. Like all siblings in her music-loving family, she learned the piano and violin during her years in Varel . After graduating from high school , she first studied law in Freiburg im Breisgau and passed the first state examination in law. Then she started studying singing at the Freiburg University of Music and had her first stage appearance. She later founded her law degree with the “urge to go out into the world” and said she would also have liked to become an interior designer .

Hildegard Behrens' first engagement took place in 1972 at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf and Duisburg, where she sang Marie in Alban Berg's Wozzeck after a few minor roles . She soon got bigger roles in operas by Mozart, Strauss and Wagner. Her international breakthrough came with the role of Agathe in Weber's opera Der Freischütz . From 1974 she was also a member of the Frankfurt Opera. In 1976 she sang Giorgetta in Puccini's opera Il tabarro at the New York Metropolitan Opera . In 1977 Herbert von Karajan hired her for the leading role in Richard Strauss' Salome at the Salzburg Festival , which marked the beginning of her world career.

She sang at the most important opera houses in the world and enjoyed international success. In 1979 she took on the role of Sieglinde in Peter Busses production of Walküre and was so successful in Monte Carlo that she was subsequently committed to several guest appearances in Düsseldorf, Munich and the New York “Metropolitan”. Her performances as Brünnhilde in the Ring des Nibelungen at the Bayreuth Festival in the 1980s are considered legendary .

Behrens has worked with important conductors, for example Claudio Abbado , Leonard Bernstein , Karl Böhm , Christoph Eschenbach , Sir John Eliot Gardiner , Herbert von Karajan, Rafael Kubelík , James Levine , Lorin Maazel , Zubin Mehta , Seiji Ozawa , Esa-Pekka Salonen , Wolfgang Sawallisch , Giuseppe Sinopoli and with the directors Peter Busse, Volker Schlöndorff and Franco Zeffirelli .

Hildegard Behrens died at the age of 72 of an aneurysm rupture of the aorta during a festival trip in Tokyo . She was buried in the family grave in the Varel cemetery .

repertoire

Her repertoire encompassed almost the entire spectrum of dramatic roles in Wagner and Strauss: Brünnhilde ( Ring des Nibelungen ) , Isolde ( Tristan and Isolde ) and Elektra ( Elektra ) are her key roles, but she also embodied dramatic figures from the music theater of the later twentieth century again and again.

Her interpretation of the title character Katarina Ismailowa from Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mzensk and the Jenůfa from Leoš Janáček 's opera of the same name and Emilia Marty from his The Makropulos Affair have become legendary. Luciano Berio composed the opera Cronaca del Luogo for her , with which she opened the Salzburg Festival in 1999.

Opera productions available on DVD

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Hildegard Behrens 1937-2009. In: derstandard.at . August 19, 2009, accessed December 23, 2014 .
  2. Singer Hildegard Behrens is dead At: netzeitung.de Important soprano dies while traveling: - Singer Hildegard Behrens is dead ( Memento from August 22, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  3. Obituary ( Memento of the original from July 23, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Kusatsu International Summer Music Academy & Festival. Official Site  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / kusa2.net
  4. Information from the Office of the Federal President