Christine Schäfer

A Frankfurt native, soprano Christine Schäfer studied at the Berlin University of the Arts with Ingrid Fi-gur and completed her education with Aribert Reimann, Sena Jurinac, Arléen Auger, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Her international career began in 1995 when she made her debut as Lulu at the Salzburg Festival; she has since performed there in the roles of Konstanze, Ilia, Che-rubino, and Donna Anna, and, in the summer of 2009, as Handel’s Theodora. She has additionally made appearances at London’s Royal Opera House, the Metropolitan Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Paris Opera, Bavarian Staatsoper, Netherlands Opera, and the Glyndebourne Festival. In the 2010-11 season, among other roles she sang Konstanze in Mozart’s Abduction at the Berlin Staatsoper and Gilda in Rigoletto at the Met in New York as well as the Angel in Messiaen’s St. François at the 2011 Munich Opera Festival. Since the beginning of her career, Christine Schäfer has pursued an intense interest in art song. Together with such specialists as Irwin Gage, Graham Johnson, and Eric Schneider, she has performed in concerts with pianists including Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Daniel Barenboim, Christoph Eschenbach, and Hélène Grimaud. Christine Schäfer’s repertoire ranges from works of the baroque to modern music, and she has worked with such conductors as Claudio Abbado, Pierre Boulez, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Charles Mackerras, Seiji Ozawa, Simon Rattle, and Christian Thielemann. In 2007 the magazine Opernwelt named her Singer of the Year, and in the same year her song collection Oder soll es Tod bedeuten? won the Echo Klassik Award. Since 2009 she has been a member of the Academy of the Arts in Berlin.

LUCERNE FESTIVAL (IMF) debut on 31 August 1997 in Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Claudio Abbado conducting the Berlin Philharmonic.

August 2011