Ruth-Margret Pütz

Ruth-Margret Pütz (born February 26, 1930 in Krefeld ; † April 1, 2019 in Stuttgart ) was a German opera singer ( soprano ) and singing teacher.

Life

Years of apprenticeship in Cologne and Hanover

Ruth-Margret Pütz had before her singing career 4½ months in which unrelated to her baritone Berthold Puetz in Dusseldorf lessons in singing receive. At the age of eighteen she was hired as a beginner by Herbert Maisch at the Cologne Opera in 1949 and made her debut as an apprentice with the page in Rigoletto by Giuseppe Verdi . In 1951, at the end of her second year of beginners, she sang Gretchen in Wildschütz by Albert Lortzing and Nuri in Eugen d'Albert's lowlands .

Two years later she was hired as a coloratura soubrette at the Hanover Opera House , where she worked on her first repertoire. With the intention of giving her singing an even better basis, she asked her colleague, the well-known singing teacher Otto Köhler , for lessons. In the following six years, Otto Köhler became her only singing teacher. During his training, her voice developed from a coloratura soubrette to a coloratura soprano .

International career

A successful guest performance with the Stuttgart State Opera in Edinburgh as Konstanze in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail led to her engagement as a permanent member of the Stuttgart State Opera in 1959 . Her debut role there was the Zerbinetta in Richard Strauss ' Ariadne auf Naxos , with which Pütz achieved an extraordinary success with the press and the public. At the age of only 29 she was appointed chamber singer in Stuttgart . At that time, Pütz was the youngest female chamber singer in Germany.

Because of her portrayal of the Zerbinetta and her success with the Lucia di Lammermoor in Stuttgart, the international press became aware of Ruth-Margret Pütz. In 1962 Herbert von Karajan signed Pütz as a coloratura soprano at the Vienna State Opera . Ruth-Margret Pütz had been a guest at the Vienna State Opera since 1958. From 1958 to 1970 she sang nine different roles in a total of 37 performances. At the Bayreuth Festival in 1959/1960 she sang one of the flower girls in Parsifal and in 1960 she sang the Waldvogel in Siegfried .

During her career, Pütz was one of the ensembles of the opera houses in Hanover , Stuttgart and Hamburg . She also appeared regularly at the Salzburg Festival . In 1961 she sang Konstanze in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail there as a partner of Fritz Wunderlich . She was also heard in North and South America.

From 1963 to 1968 Ruth-Margret Pütz was also a permanent guest at the Hamburg State Opera . As an oratorio singer she sang in Johann Sebastian Bach's Passions, Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 and Haydn's oratorios and masses. On February 16, 1962, the night of the great Hamburg storm surge , she sang Haydn's The Creation in the Hamburg Music Hall , together with Heinz Hoppe and Franz Crass and the NDR Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Igor Markevitch . She toured the Soviet Union with the Capella Coloniensis under Ferdinand Leitner . As a song interpreter, Pütz performed together with the pianist Sebastian Peschko with songs from the romantic to the modern. Together with Hermann Prey she sang the Italian song book by Hugo Wolf and was sharing Christmas songs of Peter Cornelius with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau .

Ruth-Margret Pütz had a long, artistic friendship with the conductor Sergiu Celibidache , who invited her many times as a soprano to his concerts.

Ruth-Margret Pütz was an official member of the Stuttgart State Opera until her final departure from the stage in the 1994/95 season. In 1976 she took part in a new production of the operetta Orpheus in der Unterwelt by Jacques Offenbach in Stuttgart . In Richard Strauss' opera Der Rosenkavalier she later switched from the role of Sophie, which she had sung over 100 times in the course of her career, to the role of the maid Marianne Leitmetzerin. In the 1980s she sang this role regularly from the new Rosenkavalier production (1981/82 season, premiere: December 1981) in Stuttgart until the 1987/88 season. She continued to perform with Marianne Leitzmetzer, including at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf .

Teaching activity

From 1989 to 1992 Ruth-Margret Pütz taught at the Trossingen University of Music .

voice

Ruth-Margret Pütz had a “brilliant, beautiful coloratura voice ” that never lost its tonal beauty even in the highest registers or in the deep and therefore enabled her to take on lyrical roles that were not related to the subject. She was considered by music critics and musicologists as "one of the best German coloratura sopranos of the post-war period".

Audio documents

In the 1960s, Ruth-Margret Pütz took part in several opera recordings that are still popular today and are now also available on CD, for example as Papagena in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Otto Klemperer , as Frau Fluth in Otto Nicolai's Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor alongside Fritz Wunderlich or as Amor in Christoph Willibald Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Václav Neumann .

For the broadcasting Ruth-Margret Pütz also trips undertaken in the genre of operetta : as a partner of Heinz Hoppe she sang excerpts from The beautiful Galathée and The Count of Luxembourg , with René Kollo she sang at the Cologne Radio in Madame Pompadour from Leo Fall , when She appeared at Bavarian Radio in 1966 in an operetta concert with Fritz Wunderlich as a partner; with Alfredo Corda she also recorded duets from the operetta Lump mit Herz by Hans Carste .

In 1971 Ruth-Margret Pütz was a guest on the musical ZDF broadcast Do you recognize the melody? with Ernst Stankovski .

Discography

Work edition

• Ruth-Margret Pütz Vol. 1: Opera (3-CD-Box, Hamburg Archive for Singing Art 2011)
• Ruth-Margret Pütz Vol. 2: Game opera + operetta (2-CD box, Hamburg Archive for Singing Art 2011)
• Ruth-Margret Pütz Vol. 3: Concert + Oratorio (2-CD-Box, Hamburg Archive for Singing Art 2011)
• Ruth-Margret Pütz Vol. 4: Lied (2-CD-Box, Hamburg Archive for Singing Art 2011)

literature

• Klaus Ulrich Spiegel: Brava, brava, bricconcella! Ruth-Margret Pütz - a German virtuoso . Hamburg Archive for Singing Art, 2011. (Documentation accompanying the CD edition)
• Karl-Josef Kutsch , Leo Riemens : Large singer lexicon . Third, expanded edition. Saur, Munich 1999. Volume 4: Moffo-Seidel, ISBN 3-598-11419-2 , pp. 2818 f.
• Klaus Umbach and Karl Schumann in the text booklets for the recordings (Columbia) EMI SMC 91-426 / 28 S and C 197-30 191/93.

Web links

• Works by and about Ruth-Margret Pütz in the catalog of the German National Library
• Ruth-Margret Pütz in theInternet Movie Database(English)
• Ruth-Margret Pütz at Discogs (English)
• Ruth-Margret Pütz with Bach Cantatas (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ruth-Margret Pütz: Recital . CD review. Kulturradio rbb from June 1, 2018. Accessed April 1, 2019.
2. ^ Ruth-Margret Pütz . Retrieved April 1, 2019.
3. ^ Chronicle of the Vienna State Opera 1945-1995, Verlag Anton Schroll & Co., Vienna and Munich 1995.
   Schedule archive of the Vienna State Opera. Retrieved April 12, 2019.
4. ↑ 1876 ​​BAYREUTH 1991. Chronicle of the Bayreuth Festival, editor: Peter Emmerich.
5. ↑ Homepage of the Salzburg Festival
6. ↑ Quotation from: Karl J. Kutsch, Leo Riemens: Großes Sängerlexikon . Third, expanded edition. Saur, Munich 1999. Volume 4: Moffo-Seidel, ISBN 3-598-11419-2 , pp. 2818 f.
7. ↑ Quotation from: Horst Seeger: Opernlexikon. Volume K-Z. Rowohlt 1982, p. 720.
8. ↑ Do you recognize the melody?  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.