Anja Harteros is a German soprano. She has a vast repertoire encompassing Mozart, 19th-century German and Italian operas, and Lieder. Her career took off after she won the 1999 Cardiff Singer of the World competition.
Biography
Harteros was born in Bergneustadt, North Rhine-Westphalia, to a Greek father and a German mother and has two siblings, Alexia and Georgios. As a child, she was encouraged by her parents to pursue classical music and singing. Eventually, her music teacher at the Wüllenweber-Gymnasium in Bergneustadt, August Wilhelm Welp, noticed her considerable talent and recommended that she be professionally educated in singing. In 1986, she started voice training under Astrid Huber-Aulmann in Gummersbach, concurrently with her schooling. In 1990, she began studies with Wolfgang Kastorp, conductor and répétiteur at the Cologne Opera, who accompanied her in a series of concerts and later became her husband. Her first performances were in music institute concerts and in a school production of The Marriage of Figaro in 1990, as the Countess. In 1992 she gave her first concert at the Kantonsschule Schwyz in Switzerland. After completing high school in 1991, Harteros continued her voice studies under Liselotte Hammes at the Cologne University of Music. Her original singing teacher, Huber-Aulmann, continued to teach her until early 1996, and Harteros accompanied Huber-Aulmann on concerts tours in 1993 and 1994 to Russia and the United States, which attracted lots of attention to the singer. Just before her final exams, she was employed as an ensemble member of the Schillertheater NRW. After her 1996 exams, she joined the ensemble of the Theater Bonn. In the summer of 1999, she won the Cardiff Singer of the World competition, which led to many invitations for concerts and guest performances. This was the major breakthrough for her career: since then, she has appeared as a guest at all the major world opera houses, including Frankfurt, Lyon, Amsterdam, Dresden, Paris, Hamburg, Vienna, New York City, Munich, Cologne, and Berlin, as well as the Salzburg Festival. She has also given concerts and Lieder recitals all over Germany, as well as in Boston, Florence, London, Edinburgh, Vicenza and Tel Aviv. She sang the title role in a new production of Händel's Alcina at the Munich Opera Festival in 2005. Her repertoire includes the roles of Mimì, Desdemona, Micaëla, Eva, Elisabeth, Fiordiligi, Contessa, Arabella, Alice Ford, and Alcina. She sang her first Violetta in La traviata in 2004 and her first Amelia in Simon Boccanegra in 2005 with San Diego Opera. In February 2011, she debuted in Leonora in concert performances of Verdi's Il trovatore at the Kölner Philharmonie. Withdrawing from the planned debuting performances as the Marschallin in Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier in San Diego, she assumed the role in Munich and then in Vienna later in the year. In 2015, Harteros with Jonas Kaufmann and Antonio Pappano collaborated on a studio recording of Verdi's Aida.
