Gré Brouwenstijn

Gré Brouwenstijn was born in Den Helder, in the Netherlands, in August 1915 and studied singing at the Amsterdam Conservatory with Boris Pelsky. She made her début at the Netherlands Opera in 1940 as the First Lady in *The Magic Flute*, and through the early 1940s built a soprano career across the standard Italian and Mozart repertoire at Amsterdam and Rotterdam.

Her international breakthrough came at Covent Garden in 1951 with Aida and Elisabeth in *Tannhäuser*. She became one of the leading Wagner sopranos of the 1950s — Elisabeth and Eva at Bayreuth from 1954 to 1956, where her singing was particularly admired in the early Wieland Wagner productions. She sang the major Wagner heroines (Elisabeth, Eva, Sieglinde, the Walküre Brünnhilde) at Covent Garden, the Vienna State Opera, the Bayreuth Festival, the Glyndebourne Festival (where she sang Strauss’s Marschallin) and at Aldeburgh, where she was a regular partner of Britten in concert performance. She was also a notable Leonore in Beethoven’s *Fidelio*.

Brouwenstijn retired in 1971 and died in Amsterdam in December 1999. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of her Wagner and Strauss work from the 1950s and 1960s.