BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
After her first steps, in the 50s, in the Teatro Fortuny in Reus, her performances in the Municipal Theatre Company in Basel between 1956 and 1960, and the contract with Bremen Opera from that year, Montserrat Caballé’s glowing career took off in New York, when, in 1965, she replaced Marilyn Horn in the leading role of Lucrecia Borgia, by Donizetti, at Carnegie Hall. At the end of the first aria, the audience gave her an ovation of twenty minutes and at the end of the performance her meteoric artistic career around the most important opera theatres in Europe and America started: La Scala in Milan, MET in New York, Staatsoper in Vienna, Royal Opera House in London, Opéra de Paris, Liceu in Barcelona, Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid, Bolshoi in Moscow, Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, the opera houses in San Francisco, Hamburg and Munich, etc. and the festivals in Salzburg, Aix-en-Provence, Orange, Glyndebourne, Pesaro and Verona.
Montserrat Caballé’s repertoire was immense. With nearly 90 different operatic roles, she had no rival in the lyric world. Her recordings catalogue is equally prolix, with over 80 titles, half of which are complete operas.
Before her international emergence, Caballé performed diverse roles in the theatres in Basel and Bremen, from Verdi and Puccini’s heroines to Arabella or Salome, by Richard Strauss. As years passed by, her career started focusing on a smaller number of composers whose repertoire she delved into and perfected until she reached her unforgettable performances of Gioachino Rossini, Luigi Cherubini, Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, Francesco Cilea or Jules Massenet.
She made her début in Madrid in 1967 with La traviata and Manon, sharing stage with Alfredo Kraus in the last one. Later she would perform her greatest roles at the Teatro de la Zarzuela: Elisabetta (from Robert Devereux), Cio-Cio-San, Norma, Adriana Lecouvreur, Maria Stuarda, Leonora, Semiramide, Ermione, Maddalena (from Andrea Chénier), Silvana (from La fiamma, by Ottorino Respighi), Elisabetta (from Don Carlo) or the protagonist queen in Sancia di Castiglia, by Donizetti, one of the composers she gave a devoted attention to as an interpreter, researcher and in dissemination. The audience in Madrid also witnessed her rare and emotional incursions in the German repertoire, performing Salome, by Richard Strauss, and Isolde and Sieglinde, by Richard Wagner.
As a soloist, she sang with the greatest orchestras and the most renowned conductors of the second half of the past century, such as Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein, Carlos Kleiber, Sir John Barbirolli, Zubin Mehta, James Levine, Claudio Abbado, Seiji Ozawa, Riccardo Muti, Sir Georg Solti, Sir Colin Davis, Carlo Maria Giulini, amongst others.