Diana Damrau

To many, Diana Damrau is the complete soprano, with early success in coloratura roles and later thriving in lyric and bel canto roles. With a beautiful voice and astounding technique that allow her to reach the highest notes with seeming ease, she has a keen sense of drama, giving her operatic characters real emotions and total believability. She also exudes likable and attractive qualities on-stage. While she is perhaps best known for roles in Mozart and Richard Strauss operas, her repertory includes operas by Vivaldi, Rossini, Wagner, and many others. She also sings lieder by Richard Strauss, Mahler, and Wolf, among others. Damrau regularly appears at major opera houses and concert venues across the U.S. and Europe, including the Met, Covent Garden, and the Vienna Musikverein. In 2023, she returned to her early operetta roots with the album Operette: Wien, Berlin, Paris. Damrau was born in Günzburg, Germany, on May 31, 1971. Her vocal studies were at the Würzburg Musikhochschule, where her teachers included Carmen Hanganu, and she further studied in Salzburg with Hanna Ludwig. Damrau steadily built her career with appearances at the Stadttheater Würzburg and then at the Nationaltheater Mannheim and the Frankfurt Opera. During this period, she often sang in operettas such as Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe (“The Merry Widow”) and musicals (My Fair Lady). In 1995, she made her operatic debut at Würzburg’s Mainfranken Theater in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. Damrau debuted at Covent Garden in 2003 as the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. The following year, she sang the title role in Salieri’s L’Europa riconosciuta in a television broadcast from La Scala, with Riccardo Muti conducting. The breakthroughs continued with her 2005 Metropolitan Opera debut as Zerbinetta in Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos. In 2007, Damrau astounded Met audiences when she sang Pamina for six performances and then, in the same run, as Queen of the Night for two. Several of her major releases came out that year, including Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn alongside Iván Paley and her first solo release, Arie di Bravura. Damrau married bass-baritone Nicolas Testé in 2010. After the birth of their first son in 2010, she resumed her busy schedule: in 2011, she sang Elvira in Bellini’s I Puritani in Geneva and then returned to the Met as Countess Adèle in Rossini’s Le Comte Ory and as Gilda in Verdi’s Rigoletto. Similarly, the birth of her second son in 2012 didn’t slow down her performance docket, either, and she returned to the stage in 2013. That year, she premiered Iain Bell’s A Harlot’s Progress in the title role at Theater an der Wien. Damrau earned Echo Klassik Awards for her albums Poesie (2011) and Forever (2014), and she was named the Opus Klassik Female Singer of the Year in 2018 for her album Grand Opera. In 2020, she issued the album Tudor Queens with Antonio Pappano and a recording of lieder by Richard Strauss with Helmut Deutsch and Mariss Jansons. Damrau released the holiday album My Christmas in 2022 and returned to her early operetta roots with Operette: Wien, Berlin, Paris in 2023. ~ Robert Cummings & Keith Finke