Soprano Sophie Karthäuser earned recognition as a Mozart specialist through disciplined preparation and stage work rather than any inborn gift. Apart from select exceptions, her core engagements remain anchored in Mozart and Haydn, placing her advantageously as period-instrument groups and their leaders advanced into Classical-era works and later.
Born in May 1974 in Malmedy in Belgium’s Walloon region, she initially sought to follow her older sister, a clarinetist with a regional orchestra. As a young child she therefore began on the simpler recorder before switching to clarinet. Participation in a local church choir gradually drew her toward singing; at sixteen she commenced vocal study with Belgian instructors, enrolled at the Royal Conservatory of Liège, and solidified her direction after receiving Belgium’s Förderpreis together with a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music in Britain. There she worked with soprano Noelle Barker, whose focus lay in contemporary repertoire, and received occasional private coaching from Elisabeth Schwarzkopf late in the latter’s career. Nevertheless Karthäuser found herself drawn to Baroque and Classical music. Her first operatic appearance was as Pamina in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte at Frankfurt’s Alte Oper. Upon completing her Guildhall studies she attracted engagements from conductors including William Christie, for whom she performed Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro, René Jacobs, with whom she took several roles such as Polissena in Handel’s Radamisto, and Emmanuelle Haïm, who cast her in Charpentier’s Medée at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs Elysées, among others. Her recording debut arrived in 2003 on an album of André Modest Grétry’s music with the early-music ensemble Les Agrémens; issued on the Ricercar label, the disc received a Diapason découverte award.
A steady presence on Baroque opera stages throughout the 2000s and 2010s, Karthäuser collaborated with Jacobs on a multi-city tour of Haydn’s Die Schöpfung during the 2015–2016 season. After capturing the audience prize at the 2003 Wigmore Hall Song Competition she also built a recital career, appearing with various partners including Eugene Asti. Her song programs and recordings often explored later repertoire than her orchestral engagements; among them were an album of Poulenc mélodies and, in 2016, Kennst du das Land?, a set of Hugo Wolf songs with Asti. Her adventurous Baroque recordings have earned multiple honors, among them a Diapason d’Or for Michel Richard de Lalande’s Leçons de Ténèbres, recorded in 2015 with Sébastien Daucé and Ensemble Correspondances. From the mid-2010s onward she has recorded principally for Harmonia Mundi, including a 2022 release with Les Arts Florissants of Vivaldi’s hypothetical Great Venetian Mass.
