Ileana Cotrubas

Ileana Cotrubaș was born in Galați, Romania, in June 1939 and studied at the Bucharest Conservatory with Constantin Stroescu. She made her début at the Bucharest National Opera in 1964 as Yniold in *Pelléas et Mélisande*, and won the international singing competition at ‘s-Hertogenbosch in 1965 — the prize that took her west.

She joined the Frankfurt Opera in 1968 and through the 1970s built one of the major lyric-soprano careers of the period. Her central roles — Mimì in *La bohème*, Violetta in *La traviata*, Susanna and Pamina in the Mozart operas, Mélisande, Tatiana in *Eugene Onegin*, Norina in *Don Pasquale* — were sung at Covent Garden (her début 1971), the Vienna State Opera, La Scala, the Salzburg Festival, the Metropolitan Opera (from 1977), the Glyndebourne Festival and the Chicago Lyric Opera. She was particularly admired in the long-lined Mozart and lyric Italian repertoire that her flexible voice, refined musicianship and direct emotional projection made distinctively hers.

Cotrubaș retired from staged opera in 1989, an unusually early retirement for a singer at the height of her powers, and taught masterclasses through her subsequent decades. She died in Mödling, Austria, in May 2024. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of her Italian and Mozart work from the 1970s and 1980s.