English soprano Felicity Lott passed away on May 15 following a battle with cancer. She was 79. Born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, Lott began singing lessons at age 12. While studying at the Royal Academy of Music she met pianist Graham Johnson who would become her lifelong accompanist. Her operatic debut came with the English National Opera in 1975 when she sang the role of Pamina in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Appearances at …
Jessye Norman, the legendary American opera singer and recitalist, passed away on Monday. She was 74. Norman was born in the segregated south in Augusta, Georgia. She was surrounded by music at an early age, listening to radio broadcasts of operas and singing in church as a child. At the age of 16, she was offered a full scholarship to Howard University where she studied voice with Carolyn Grant. She went on …
Richard Strauss lived long enough to witness the death of one world and the emergence of another. Consider that when Strauss wrote his first song, Weihnachtslied, in 1870 at the age of 6, Wagner was just hitting his stride with the premiere of Die Walküre, and Tchaikovsky had recently completed his gushingly romantic Overture-Fantasy, Romeo and Juliet. By 1949, the year of Strauss’ death, the atomic bomb had been dropped. The corinthian-column-studded Munich National Theater, where Strauss’ father Franz …