Elīna Garanča

Mezzo-soprano Elīna Garanča experienced an abrupt ascent after her acclaimed 2003 appearance at the Salzburg Festival in Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito. Reviewers and listeners alike have repeatedly highlighted the scale of her vocal gift. She contributed to multiple best-selling discs alongside Anna Netrebko and took part in the Grammy-winning Vivaldi opera recording Bajazet with soprano Patrizia Ciofi. Those projects drew on the distinctive warmth and strength of her voice together with her uncommon theatrical presence. Her operatic repertoire spans a wide range of roles, while her concert and recital programs likewise cover extensive ground. She made her first appearance at the Bayreuth Festival in 2023, and the following year she released the album When Night Falls....

Born on September 16, 1976, in Riga, Latvia—then within the Soviet Union—Garanča grew up in a musical household; her father conducted choirs while her mother sang and taught voice at the Latvian Academy of Music and the Latvian National Opera. She entered the same academy in 1996, working with Sergei Martinov before pursuing further studies in Austria and the United States. The year 1999 proved decisive: she joined the roster of the Meiningen Opera (Südthüringisches Staatstheater) and captured first prize at the Mirjam Helin Singing Competition in Finland. The next season she moved to the Frankfurt Opera, where her assignments included Rosina in Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. Her debut recording, Arie Favorite, appeared on the Ondine label in 2001 and presented arias by Mozart, Donizetti, and Bellini. Building on the momentum from Salzburg, she made notable first appearances at the Vienna State Opera in 2004 and the Paris Opera in 2005, both times as Dorabella.

An exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon was signed in 2005; the initial release under that agreement, the Mozart Album featuring Netrebko, reached listeners in 2006. Her 2008 Metropolitan Opera debut created an immediate stir, and she followed with highly regarded performances of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and Bellini’s Norma at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. Among later projects on the same label was Aria Cantilena, a program of songs and arias by Offenbach, Villa-Lobos, and additional composers. Her recordings also appear on Virgin Classics, TDK, and Erato. Throughout the 2010s she maintained a steady sequence of stage successes and studio releases, among them Musical America’s designation of her as Vocalist of the Year in 2010. The disc Romantique, recorded with the Filarmonica del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, received the ECHO Klassik award in 2013. Subsequent collections such as Revive (2016) and Mozart and Vivaldi (2017) grouped arias thematically around central operatic works. Onstage she has concentrated on core Italian and French parts, returning to the Metropolitan Opera for Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux in 2016 and headlining a Staatsoper Berlin production of Samson et Dalila in the 2019–2020 season led by Daniel Barenboim. The 2019 album Sol y Vida earned her the Opus Klassik Singer of the Year Award in 2020. She also joined Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin for a recording of Elgar’s Sea Pictures issued the same year. In 2023 she sang the role of Kundry in Wagner’s Parsifal for the first time at the Vienna State Opera; when the originally scheduled artist withdrew, she was engaged for her Bayreuth Festival debut in the same production. Sony Classical released the Vienna performance in 2024. Later that year she returned to Deutsche Grammophon with When Night Falls..., an album of orchestral songs and works for voice with guitar or piano.

She is married to conductor Karel Mark Chichon and they have two daughters. Garanča wrote the autobiography Wirklich wichtig sind die Schuhe.