Teresa Żylis-Gara

Teresa Żylis-Gara was born in Landwarów, then in Poland (now Lentvaris, Lithuania), in January 1930 and studied at the Łódź Music Academy. She won the international singing competition in Munich in 1960 and made her début with the Oberhausen Opera that year, joining the Düsseldorf Deutsche Oper am Rhein in 1962 and the Cologne Opera in 1965.

She emerged across the 1960s and 1970s as one of the leading lyric-dramatic sopranos of the international operatic stage. Her central repertoire was the Mozart roles (Donna Elvira, the Countess, Fiordiligi, Pamina), the Italian lyric soprano parts (the title roles in *Tosca*, *La traviata*, *Manon Lescaut*, Liù, Mimì, Desdemona), the Strauss heroines (Octavian, the Composer, the Marschallin, Arabella, Ariadne), and Tatiana in *Eugene Onegin* — the role she sang at her Metropolitan Opera début in 1968 and with which she was particularly identified. She sang regularly at the Salzburg Festival under Karajan from 1968, at La Scala, the Vienna State Opera, the Paris Opéra, the Bayerische Staatsoper, Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera (where she remained on the roster for over fifteen years).

Żylis-Gara retired from staged opera in the late 1990s and taught at the Łódź Music Academy in her later career. She died in Łódź in August 2021. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of her Mozart, Strauss and Italian work.