Lisa Della Casa

Lisa Della Casa was born in Burgdorf, Switzerland, in February 1919 and studied at the Zurich Conservatory under Margarete Haeser. She made her début at the Solothurn-Biel city theatre in 1941 and joined the Zurich Opera in 1943, where she remained through the war years in the standard Mozart and Italian lyric soprano repertoire.

Her international career took off with her Salzburg Festival début in 1947 and her appointment to the Vienna State Opera ensemble in 1948 — the company in which she remained a leading principal soprano for the next quarter-century. Her central roles were the Strauss soprano repertoire — Arabella, the Countess in *Capriccio*, Ariadne, the Marschallin and Octavian in *Der Rosenkavalier* — for which her cool, lyric, classically-trained voice and her aristocratic stage presence made her the leading interpreter of her generation. She also sang Mozart’s Countess, Pamina and Donna Elvira; Tatiana in *Eugene Onegin*; and the lighter Wagner soprano roles (Eva, Elsa). Her Decca recordings of the Strauss Four Last Songs and of much of the operatic repertoire with Solti, Böhm and Karajan remained reference performances.

Della Casa retired from opera in 1974 at fifty-five — an unusually early withdrawal — and lived in seclusion at her castle in Münsterlingen for the remaining forty years of her life. She died in December 2012. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of her Strauss and Mozart work.