Angela Gheorghiu

Angela Gheorghiu commands attention among leading opera figures through her distinctive vocal timbre and commanding stage persona as a diva. Her core repertoire centers on principal Italian and French parts.

She entered the world as Angela Burlacu on September 7, 1965, in Romania’s Adjud. The surname Gheorghiu came from her first husband, an engineer she divorced in 1994 yet continued to regard amicably. At Bucharest’s Ciprian Porumbescu Conservatory—later absorbed into the National University of Music of Romania—she studied with Mia Barbu and received her diploma in 1990, just as opportunities abroad opened for Eastern European singers.

Her first British appearance took place at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 1992, when she sang Zerlina in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Mimi in Puccini’s La bohème. She has kept a lasting association with that theater even while her engagements multiplied elsewhere. New York’s Metropolitan Opera heard her for the first time in 1993 as Mimi in La bohème; she has returned there despite friction with its management.

Decca signed her and captured her Violetta on a 1995 recording of Verdi’s La Traviata. Further Decca projects followed, among them the 1996 recital Arias, before she moved to EMI for the 1997 La Rondine conducted by Antonio Pappano. Most of her later discs appeared on EMI. Her marriage to tenor Roberto Alagna, which ran from 1996 to 2013, proved a major factor in her ascent, casting the pair as opera’s foremost power couple who regularly appeared together.

She has performed at leading houses across Europe and the United States, including a 2007 La Traviata at Milan’s La Scala led by Lorin Maazel. In 2008 she sang at the Metropolitan Opera’s Summer Concert in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and at the Divas in Beijing concert during the Summer Olympics. As her career entered its middle phase, she took on weightier spinto soprano roles such as Puccini’s Tosca, which she performed in a 2011 Covent Garden production later released on video.

Her recordings have stayed largely within opera, though she issued the song recital Plaisir d’amour on Decca in 2019. She has avoided crossover material yet contributed to Vangelis’s final album, Juno to Jupiter. She has preserved links with Romania, appearing in a 2015 Bucharest benefit concert for victims of the Colectiv nightclub fire. In 2021 she gave another benefit concert for Metropolitan Opera musicians deprived of income by the COVID-19 pandemic. With the 2024 Signum Classics release A Te, Puccini—her first album in several years—she presented Puccini’s rarely heard songs for voice and piano. By then her discography exceeded fifty items.