Pilar Lorengar

Pilar Lorengar was born in Saragossa in January 1928 and studied at the Madrid Conservatory with Ángeles Ottein. She made her début in zarzuela performances in Madrid and Barcelona in the late 1940s and through the early 1950s, and her operatic début came in 1955 at the Aix-en-Provence Festival as Cherubino in *Le nozze di Figaro*. She joined the Deutsche Oper Berlin (then the Städtische Oper) in 1958 — the company in which she remained as a leading principal soprano for the next forty years.

Her central repertoire was the Mozart and bel canto lyric-dramatic soprano roles — Donna Elvira, the Countess in *Le nozze di Figaro*, Pamina, Susanna, Fiordiligi, the title role in Verdi’s *La traviata*, Marguerite in *Faust*, Mélisande, and Strauss’s Marschallin. She sang regularly at the Salzburg Festival under Karajan and Solti, at the Vienna State Opera, the Metropolitan Opera (from 1966), Covent Garden, the Glyndebourne Festival and the Bayreuth Festival. Her Decca recordings of the Mozart repertoire and the Solti *Ring* cycle (where she sang Sieglinde and Gutrune) remained widely circulating reference performances. She was particularly admired for the warmth and even quality of her voice across a long career.

Lorengar retired from staged opera in 1991 and died in Berlin in June 1996. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of her Mozart, Verdi and Strauss work.