Ruth Hesse

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Ruth Hesse (born September 18, 1936 in Wuppertal ) is a German opera singer with the mezzo-soprano and alto voices . She sang at the Bayreuth and Salzburg Festival and for 23 years at the Vienna State Opera . In 1982 she was appointed Austrian chamber singer .

life and work

Hesse first studied with Peter Offermanns in Wuppertal, then with Hildegard Scharf in Hamburg and finally also in Milan. She made her debut in 1958 at the Lübeck City Theater as Orpheus in Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice . She remained engaged in Lübeck until 1960, after which she was engaged for two seasons at the Lower Saxony State Theater in Hanover . In 1960 she made her debut at the Hamburg State Opera and at the Bayreuth Festival , where she appeared until 1979 and where she was gradually given larger and larger roles from the flower girl, squire and alto solo to Magdalene and Mary to Ortrud.

From 1962 to 1995 the singer was engaged at the Deutsche Oper Berlin , where her “dark-timbred, large-sized voice capable of intense drama of expression” was used in a variety of roles - in operas by Mozart , Wagner and Verdi , Smetana , Strauss and Henze .

In the second half of the 1960s she made her debut in rapid succession at numerous important opera houses in Europe:

Hesse has also made guest appearances at the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux , the Opéra de Lyon , Opéra de Marseille and the Théâtre du Capitole in Toulouse, at the Festival d'Orange and the Grand Théâtre in Geneva, at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels and at De Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam, at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, ​​at the Royal Stockholm Opera and at the Moscow Bolshoi Theater . She has also performed in several opera houses in Italy, including the Teatro dell'Opera in Rome, the Teatro Regio in Turin and La Fenice in Venice. Invitations to North America have taken her to the San Francisco Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, to the National Opera in Washington and to Mexico City , in South America she has performed at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires and at the Opera in Rio de Janeiro . A guest performance by the Deutsche Oper Berlin also brought her to Japan.

The singer quickly became very popular in Vienna, where she sang 44 times Herodias and 24 times Richard Strauss's wet nurse , 23 times Ortrud, 19 times Brangäne , and also Magdalena and Mary, Fricka and Waltraute by Richard Wagner and 17 times the Eboli, also Amneris, Azucena, Maddalena and Preziosilla by Giuseppe Verdi . In Vienna she could also be seen and heard in roles as varied as Giulietta in Offenbach's stories by Hoffmann and the sexton in Janáček's Jenůfa . In 1982 she was appointed chamber singer at the Haus am Ring , and on November 29, 1988 she said goodbye to the Viennese audience as Herodias.

In the concert hall, the singer was successful both in concert operas, for example as Herodias in New York's Carnegie Hall in 1975 , as well as in oratorios and large choral orchestral works, such as Beethoven's Ninth at La Scala in Milan . She has sung under the direction of conductors Karl Böhm , Christoph von Dohnányi , Heinrich Hollreiser , Herbert von Karajan , Carlos Kleiber , Sir Georg Solti and Hans Swarowsky .

Towards the end of her stage career, she was also active in the educational field.

Ruth Hesse has been married to the director Siegwulf Turek since 1976 and has lived in Hallstatt since 1994 .

Roles (selection)

First performance of Henze's Der Junge Lord , Berlin 1965

World premieres

repertoire

Bartók :

Bizet :

Luck :

Hindemith :

Engelbert Humperdinck :

Janáček :

Grain gold :

  • Barbara in Violanta

Mozart :

Offenbach :

 

Richard Strauss :

Stravinsky :

Verdi :

Wagner :

Sound documents (selection)

Operas

There are also sound documents in the roles of Fricka and Waltraute in a complete Ring des Nibelungen (Westminster) and as Floßhilde in Rheingold (on Eurodisc and on Philips)

Choral orchestral works

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Karl-Josef Kutsch , Leo Riemens : Large singer lexicon . 4th edition. Volume 7. Saur, Munich 2003, ISBN 978-3-598-44088-5 , p. 2064
  2. ↑ Alexander Werner: Carlos Kleiber: Eine Biographie , accessed online on October 29, 2016 at [1] .
  3. ↑ Karl-Josef Kutsch , Leo Riemens : Large singer lexicon . 4th edition. Volume 7. Saur, Munich 2003, ISBN 978-3-598-44088-5 , p. 5288
  4. ↑ Discogs: Korngold * - Eva Marton * • Siegfried Jerusalem, Walter Berry • Ruth Hesse • ​​Horst R. Laubenthal, Munich Radio Orchestra *, Marek Janowski - Violanta , accessed on October 29, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Hesse, Ruth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German opera and concert singer with a mezzo-soprano and alto voice
DATE OF BIRTH September 18, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Wuppertal