Christa Ludwig
Artist ∙ Classical
Christa Ludwig ranked among the elite in a golden era of postwar singing that, with hindsight, seems more glamorous than anything we’ve known since. And she wasn’t just admired but adored—with an intensity that grew through a career of almost half a century. Born in 1928 in Berlin, she started young, making her debut as an 18-year-old Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus (1874) in Frankfurt, where she learned her craft during the early 1950s. But from there, her homebase shifted to Vienna, with regular visits to Salzburg and the New York Met, where she sang cross-dressed "trouser" roles—Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro (1786), Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier (1911)—with legendary casts under conductor Erich Leinsdorf. Essentially a mezzo, she encompassed dramatic soprano heights as Leonore in Fidelio (1805) and the Marschallin in Rosenkavalier, without losing the creamily voluptuous velvet sound that, combined with big projection and a sense of fun, made her a go-to singer for conductors like Böhm, Karajan, and Bernstein. In more intimate repertoire, German song became a speciality—few women have attempted Schubert’s Winterreise, let alone delivered it with such emotional authority. Another was Bach, with Ludwig singing the Passions and B minor Mass alongside starry names like Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and her husband Walter Berry (with whom she often shared a stage). Her death in 2021, aged 93, brought to an end one of the truly great careers of 20th-century singing.
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