Helga Dernesch

Helga Dernesch Biography

Helga Dernesch (b. February 3, 1939 in Vienna) is an Austrian soprano and mezzo soprano. Her career has taken her through four successive phases: from mezzo-soprano to lyric soprano to dramatic soprano and after about 1980 back to mezzo again "Her voice had great richness and power, and her strikingly handsome stage appearance and intense acting made her a compelling performer. Dernesch studied at the Vienna Hochschule für Musik before making her debut in 1961 singing Marina in Boris Godunov in Bern. She continued to sing in Bern from 1961 to 1963, in Wiesbaden 1963-1965 and in Cologne from 1965-1968.[1] She made her first appearance in Bayreuth (as Wellgunde in Der Ring des Nibelungen) in 1965. Two years later she was singing Elisabeth in Tannhäuser there, and Sieglinde with the Bayreuth Festival on tour in Osaka. She made her first appearance at the Salzburg Easter Festival in 1969. With Scottish Opera she performed Gutrune (1968), her first Leonore (1970), the Marschallin (1971), Brünnhilde, Isolde, Ariadne, and Cassandra. She has also appeared in most of the world's other great opera houses, including Zürich, Amsterdam, Glyndebourne, London, Paris, San Francisco, New York and Chicago in such roles as Leonore, Sieglinde and Brünnhilde in Die Walküre, Isolde, The Dyer's Wife in Die Frau ohne Schatten, Clytemnestra in Elektra, Kabanicha in Káťa Kabanová, The Countess in Pique Dame, and Larina in Eugen Onegin. She continued to sing regularly at the Bavarian State Opera where she sang the Marschallin in 1979 and created the role of Goneril in the premiere of Aribert Reimann's Lear in 1978, a role she also sang in several other German houses and for San Francisco Opera in 1981. In October 2000, she created the title role in another Reimann opera, Bernarda Albas Haus in Munich. She made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1985 as Marfa in Khovanshchina and subsequently sang Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus (1986), Herodias in Salome, Fricka in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, Waltraute in Götterdämmerung, and the Nurse Die Frau ohne Schatten (all during the 1989-1990 season). She returned to Met in 1994 for performances as Madame de Croissy in Dialogues des Carmélites and Adelaide in Arabella, and in 1995 as Leocadia Begbick in Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. In 1998 she sang Herodias for the Los Angeles Opera, and in 2009 she appeared as Grandmother Buryjovka in Jenufa at the Bavarian State Opera. She is married to the Austrian tenor Werner Krenn (b. 1943).