Hildegard Behrens
Hildegard Behrens ( born February 9, 1937 in Varel, † August 18, 2009 in Tokyo ) was a German opera singer in the vocal range soprano. She was best known as the lead singer of dramatic soprano roles in the operas of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss.
Career
Hildegard Behrens grew up in Varel up in a medical family, the youngest of six children and attended the school and in Oldenburg. Like all siblings in her music-loving family, she learned piano and violin. After high school she studied law in Freiburg im Breisgau and made the first legal state exam. Then she took at the Freiburg Music Academy on the study singing and had her first stage appearance. Later she founded her study law with the " urge to go into the world " and said she would also like to become an interior designer.
The first engagement took Hildegard Behrens, 1972 to the German Opera on the Rhine in Dusseldorf and Duisburg, where she sang Marie in Alban Berg's Wozzeck, after a few minor roles. Your international breakthrough came with the role of Agathe in Weber's Der Freischütz. In 1976 she sang the Giorgetta in Puccini's opera Il tabarro at New York's Metropolitan Opera. 1977 Herbert von Karajan engaged her. For the lead role in Richard Strauss' Salome at the Salzburg Festival, bringing her international career began
She sang at the major opera houses of the world and had international success. So they took over in 1979 the role of Sieglinde in Die Walküre Peter bus - staging and was so successful that it was subsequently committed to several guest appearances to Dusseldorf, Munich and New York " Metropolitan " in Monte Carlo. As legendary apply their ideas as Brünnhilde in Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Bayreuth Festival in the 1980s.
Behrens worked with famous conductors such as Claudio Abbado, Leonard Bernstein, Karl Böhm, Christoph Eschenbach, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Herbert von Karajan, Rafael Kubelik, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Seiji Ozawa, Esa -Pekka Salonen, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Giuseppe Sinopoli and with directors Peter Busse, Volker Schlöndorff and Franco Zeffirelli.
Hildegard Behrens died at the age of 72 years at an aortic aneurysm rupture during a festival tour in Tokyo.
Repertoire
Her repertoire encompassed almost the entire dramatic role spectrum of Wagner and Strauss compartment: Brünnhilde ( Der Ring des Nibelungen ), Isolde ( Tristan and Isolde ) and Elektra ( Elektra ) are regarded as their key games, but also dramatic characters from the musical theater of the later twentieth century, embodied again and again.
Her interpretation of the title character Katarina Ismailova from Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Jenufa from Leoš Janáček's opera of the same, as well as Emilia Marty in The Makropulos which have become legendary. Luciano Berio composed for her opera Cronaca del Luogo with which they opened the Salzburg Festival in 1999.