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| Victoria de los Angeles is Catalan and was born in Barcelona in 1923. She comes from a musical family and entered the Conservatorio de Liceo in Barcelona to study both singing and piano. She completed the six-year course in just three years and graduated with full honors when she was only eighteen. She joined the Ars Musicae group where she was introduced to a vast repertoire of Lieder, French and Spanish song and the music of baroque and renaissance composers. In 1944 she made her debut in a recital at the Palay de la |
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Musica Catalana and several months later made her operatic debut as the Countess in Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro at the Gran Teatro del Liceo in Barcelona. In 1947 she won the Geneva International Singing Competition, which brought her to the attention of the BBC, for whom she was invited to sing the part of Salud in de Falla's La Vida Breve. Her debut at the Paris Opéra in 1949 was a triumph and the following year saw an equally successful debut at Covent Garden, as Mimì in La Bohème. In 1950 and 1951 she made her debuts at La Scala, Milan in the title role of Ariadne auf Naxos and as Marguerite in Gounod's Faust at The Metropolitan, New York, where she was especially admired throughout her operatic career. She sang regularly at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, appearing in roles such as Elsa in Lohengrin, the title roles in Massenet's Manon and Puccini's Madama Butterfly, and on one memorable occasion as both Nedda and Santuzza in I Pagliacci and Cavalleria Rusticana.
Throughout the 1960's de los Angeles regularly appeared at all the world's major opera houses, including the Colón in Buenos Aires; Bellas Artes in Mexico City; the Vienna State Opera; Rome Opera; San Carlo in Naples; La Monnaie in Brussels and opera houses in Copenhagen and Stockholm. Her operatic repertoire also included Don Giovanni, Carmen, Il Barbiere de Siviglia; Acis and Galatea, Pelleas et Melisande, Die Meistersinger, La Traviata, Simon Boccanegra and Dido and Aeneas. In 1961 she was invited by Wieland Wagner to open the Bayreuth Festival in a new production of Tannhäuser.
During her long career, Victoria de los Angeles collaborated with many of the world's greatest conductors, including Sir Thomas Beecham, Sir John Barbirolli, Herbert von Karajan, Sir Georg Solti, Pierre Monteux, Charles Münch, Victor de Sabata, Tullio Serafin, Carlo Maria Giulini, Eugen Jochum, István Kertész, Zubin Mehta, André Cluytens, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Georges Prêtre and Gabriele Santini. She also appeared with several leading singers and accompanists in recital, including Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Gerald Moore and Geoffrey Parsons.
A tribute to her on her 75th birthday—which she could not attend for health reasons—took place in Madrid in 1998 and included Alicia de Larrocha, Lucero Tena, Juan Antonio Alvarez Parejo, Agustin Leon Ara, Miguel Zanetti, and Juaquin Achucarro, interpreting works by Scarlatti, Soler, Perez de Albeniz, Falla, Beethoven, Debussy, Chopin, Albeniz, and Granados. The pianist de Larrocha said of her that night, "Victoria is a national and international glory."
Main body of Biography courtesy of EMI Classics
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