Marlis Petersen

A native of Sindelfingen, Germany, soprano Marlis Petersen studied at the Stuttgart Academy of Music, where Sylvia Geszty was one of her teachers. Her first permanent engagement took her to Nuremberg in 1994; in 1998 she joined the ensemble of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf, where she remained a member until 2003. While there, she took on such roles as Konstanze in Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio, Sophie in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, and Norina in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale. Marlis Petersen made her Vienna Staatsoper debut in 2002 as Berg’s Lulu. Soon after came her debuts at the Royal Opera House in London as Zerbinetta in Strauss’s Ariadne, at both the Metropolitan Opera in New York and Chicago Lyric Opera as Adele in Die Fledermaus, and as Zdenka in Strauss’s Arabella at the Bavarian Staatsoper. She has appeared at the Salzburg Festival and the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence as a Mozart interpreter. Petersen has also taken part in several world premieres: as Aphrodite in Henze’s Phaedra at the Berlin Staatsoper, as Marta in Trojahn’s La grande magia at the Semperoper in Dresden, and in the title role of Reimann’s Medea at the Vienna Staatsoper. In recent years, she has gradually expanded her repertoire to encompass more dramatic roles. Under the direction of René Jacobs, she sang Leonore in the original version of Beethoven’s Fidelio, appeared in Frankfurt as Hanna Glawari in Lehár’s The Merry Widow and as Marietta in Korngold’s Die tote Stadt in Warsaw, and, in June 2019, made her role debut as Strauss’s Salome at the Bavarian Staatsoper. She will be artist-in-residence with the Berlin Philharmonic during the 2019-20 season. The critics of Opernwelt magazine have chosen Marlis Petersen as Singer of the Year three times: in 2004, 2010, and 2015. She was awarded the Austrian Music Theater Prize in 2013.

LUCERNE FESTIVAL debut on 29 August 2004 with works by Beethoven in a concert by the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra under Christian Arming.

August 2019