Petra Lang

Petra Lang, a native of Frankfurt am Main, initially received her degree in violin before taking up training as a singer at the Academy for Musical Art in Darmstadt and at the Peter Cornelius Conservatory in Mainz. She had master classes with Ingrid Bjoner, Brigitte Fassbaender, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and Peter Schreier and studied many of the Wagner roles with Astrid Varnay. Lang began her career as a mezzo-soprano in 1989 at the opera studio of the Bavarian Staatsoper and acquired a wide repertoire of roles as a member of the company ensembles in Basel, Nuremberg, Dortmund, and Braunschweig. Since 1997 she has been a freelance artist performing around the world. It is above all through her portrayal of Brangäne in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde that Lang has won international recognition. She has performed this role at such venues as the Dresden Semperoper, the Royal Opera House in London, Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam, the Vienna Staatsoper, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the Bayreuth Festival, where she also appeared as Ortrud in Lohengrin in 2011. Other signature roles for Petra Lang include Kundry in Parsifal, Cassandre in Berlioz’s Les Troyens, and Judith in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle by Béla Bartók. It was with Sieglinde in Die Walküre, which she sang at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and the Bavarian Staatsoper, that she first ventured into the soprano territory, and she has been ascending the Olympus of the dramatic soprano repertoire by undertaking Brünnhilde in the Ring, a role she first sang in the fall of 2012 in concert performances under Marek Janowski in Berlin; her stage debut in the role was in May 2013 at the Opéra National de Paris. Lang’s recording of Les Troyens has won a Grammy Award, two BRIT Awards, and the German Record Critics’ Prize.

LUCERNE FESTIVAL debut on 5 September 2001 in Mahler’s Second Symphony led by Riccardo Chailly.

May 2013