Gundula Janowitz

The soprano Gundula Janowitz possessed a voice widely considered among the most exquisite produced by performers of her generation in the latter half of the twentieth century. Her career proved exceptionally long-lasting, spanning from the 1950s into the closing years of the 1990s. The range of works she performed reached from Handel through Richard Strauss while regularly incorporating both Italian and German-language pieces. Reissues of her recordings and live performances continued to surface well into the twenty-first century, and she figured on the 2024 release Karajan A-Z: Wagner, Wolf-Ferrari.

Born in Berlin on August 2, 1937, Janowitz spent her formative years in Graz, Austria, and holds Austrian citizenship. She launched her professional path in the late 1950s with a 1959 appearance as Barbarina in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro at the Vienna State Opera, conducted by Herbert von Karajan. The next year brought her first Bayreuth Festival role, a flower maiden in Wagner’s Parsifal. In 1962 she joined the permanent ensemble of the Vienna State Opera. Throughout the 1960s she collaborated intensively with Karajan there, taking on heavier parts such as the Empress in Richard Strauss’ Die Frau ohne Schatten—often at the conductor’s encouragement—alongside her Mozart assignments. One early milestone was her 1964 recording of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte for EMI, led by Otto Klemperer with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus in England. Beyond Karajan and Klemperer, she worked with other leading conductors of the era, among them Eugen Jochum, Georg Solti, Karl Böhm, and Leonard Bernstein.

Janowitz made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1967, singing Sieglinde in Wagner’s Die Walküre, and first appeared at London’s Covent Garden in 1976 as Donna Anna in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Her roles extended into Italian opera, encompassing several Verdi parts, notably the title character in Aida. She performed on principal stages worldwide, including La Scala in Milan, the Paris Opera, the Royal Opera House in London, and the Salzburg Easter Festival. It was in Salzburg that she began cultivating a lieder career that would continue after her operatic work ended, lasting into the late 1990s. Her final operatic appearance took place on May 18, 1990, at the Vienna State Opera in Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos. In subsequent years she remained active as a teacher. Her recorded output exceeds two hundred entries, many of which serve as benchmark interpretations of German operas. The album The Last Recital: In Memoriam Maria Callas, captured in 1999, was released in 2017.