Deborah Voigt Makes Eagerly-Awaited Role Debut as Brünnhilde in Met’s New Walküre, Opening April 22

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“The entire opera world is poised to hear the soprano Deborah Voigt sing her first Brünnhilde.” — Anthony Tommasini, New York Times

After impressing critics and fans alike as Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West at the Metropolitan Opera, this spring Deborah Voigt returns to her home company for a milestone role debut: for the first time, she takes on Brünnhilde – one of opera’s most challenging and iconic roles – in a new production of Wagner’s Die Walküre. This second installment of Robert Lepage’s complete new Ring cycle also stars Bryn Terfel as Wotan, with music director James Levine on the podium; according to the New York Times’s Anthony Tommasini, the new staging is “the most anticipated event of the spring.” Die Walküre opens on April 22 for a run of seven performances, the last of which on May 14 will be featured in the popular Met: Live in HD series.

While long heralded as the leading dramatic soprano of our time, Voigt has until now sung only excerpts of Brünnhilde’s music in public. As an encore after her 2004 Carnegie Hall recital, the soprano “delivered Brünnhilde’s octave-leaping ‘Hojotoho’ from Die Walküre with bull’s-eye accuracy and power” (New York Observer). At the following summer’s Tanglewood Festival, she joined James Levine and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in a concert rendition of Götterdämmerung’s final act. In his New York Times review, Tommasini described Voigt’s performance as “blazingly powerful, deeply expressive, and, as always, musically scrupulous,” before concluding: “To no one’s surprise, she already sounded glorious as Brünnhilde.”

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