23 minute read
Program 1: Wagner Highlights
FORT WORTH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
ROBERT SPANO, MUSIC DIRECTOR KEVIN JOHN EDUSEI, PRINCIPAL GUEST CONDUCTOR KEITH CERNY, Ph.D., PRESIDENT AND CEO
Friday, November 18, 2022, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, November 19, 2022, at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, November 20, 2022, at 2:00 p.m. Bass Performance Hall Fort Worth, TX
Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra Robert Spano, Conductor Christine Brewer, Soprano Chad R. Jung Lighting and Projection Designer
WAGNER HIGHLIGHTS
WAGNER
WAGNER Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
Intermission
WAGNER The Ride of the Valkyries from Die Walküre
WAGNER Forest Murmurs from Siegfried (orch. Wouter Hutschenruyter)
WAGNER Excerpts from Götterdämmerung (adapt. Robert Spano) Morning and Siegfried's Rhine Journey Siegfried's Death and Funeral Music Brünnhilde's Immolation Christine Brewer, Soprano
Video or audio recording of this performance is strictly prohibited. Patrons arriving late will be seated during the first convenient pause. Program and artists are subject to change.
PROGRAM NOTES : RICHARD WAGNER
PRELUDE to DIE MEISTERSINGER von NÜRNBERG
DURATION: About 10 minutes
PREMIERED: Munich, 1868
INSTRUMENTATION: Two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, cymbals, triangle, timpani, harp and strings
“In spite of all my indifference, I must confess that the ‘Assumption of the Virgin’ by Titian exercised a most sublime influence over me, so that, as soon as I realized its conception, my old powers revived within me, as though by a sudden flash of inspiration.
“I determined at once on the composition of Die Meistersinger.”
— Richard Wagner (Born 1813, Germany; died 1883)
PRELUDE: A typically brief musical composition that serves as an introduction to a larger musical work.
FURTHER LISTENING:
Wagner: Tristan und Isolde Parsifal Lohengrin
by Jeremy Reynolds
Rehearsals for Wagner’s Die Meistersinger were so long that they caused a strike before the opera’s 1868 premiere. Franz Strauss, a French horn player in the orchestra and father of famous composer Richard Strauss, called for the strike a er a particularly egregious, five-hour rehearsal, bloated thanks to Wagner’s constant interjections and digressions. (Wagner was famously pompous. Among other things.)
Still, the opera, Wagner’s only comedic work, was an enormous success, though it was later tainted by association when the Nazis came to use it in propaganda messages.
The story takes place in Nuremberg in the 16th century and explores the tale of a talented but unrefined singer’s romance with a master singer’s daughter. The master singers, a historically middle-class group made up of members of the German guild for lyric poetry and art song and composition, were quite stuffy in their rules for musical composition. In his pursuit of his lady love, the young singer Walther challenges the masters’ preconceptions about song and their compositional systems.
It’s hard not to read a bit of Wagner into his protagonist Walther. Wagner saw himself as every bit the pivotal force in music history he turned out to be. He first began tinkering with the idea of an opera on the guild in 1845: “I had formed a particularly vivid picture of Hans Sachs and the mastersingers of Nuremberg,” Wagner wrote. “I was especially intrigued by the institution of the Marker and his function in rating master-songs ... I conceived during a walk a comic scene in which the popular artisan-poet, by hammering upon his cobbler’s last, gives the Marker, who is obliged by circumstances to sing in his presence, his come-uppance for previous pedantic misdeeds during official singing contests, by inflicting upon him a lesson of his own.”
The music of the Prelude is grand, ornate and pompous. It calls back to earlier styles of composition through contrapuntal writing, or writing multiple melodic lines that harmonize together. Here, Wagner introduces many of the opera’s themes, including Walther’s contest-winning song and passages in the winds that sound like literal busywork for the guild’s students. It’s o en performed alone as a concert work.
At the opera’s premiere by the Bavarian State Opera, Wagner, ever humble, stood to acknowledge his audience, shattering longstanding protocol that only the monarch could address an audience from a box seat.
King Ludwig II of Bavaria let the moment pass.10 | 2022/2023 SEASON
PROGRAM NOTES : RICHARD WAGNER
PRELUDE and LIEBESTOD from TRISTAN und ISOLDE
DURATION: About 19 minutes
PREMIERED: Munich, 1865
INSTRUMENTATION: Three flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, harp, and strings
“Never in my life having enjoyed the true happiness of love I shall erect a memorial to this loveliest of all dreams in which, from the first to the last, love shall, for once, find utter repletion. I have devised in my mind a Tristan und Isolde, the simplest, yet most full-blooded musical conception imaginable, and with the ‘black flag’ that waves at the end I shall cover myself over – to die.”
— Richard Wagner (Born 1813, Germany; died 1883)
TRISTAN CHORD: An unresolved chord consisting of an augmented fourth, sixth, and ninth interval above a bass note, that expresses characters’ ecstatic pain of unrequited love. (BBC Music Magazine)
FURTHER LISTENING:
Wagner: Tannhäuser Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg Parsifal
by Jeremy Reynolds
When Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde premiered, influential critic Hans von Bulow didn’t hold back, writing, “The Prelude to Tristan und Isolde reminds me of the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel.” Indeed, reception to the opera was decidedly mixed due to its progressive sense of harmony. To explain, classical music typically revolves around building up harmonic tension and then resolving it. Without digging too hard into the theory, this involves stringing together a series of “unstable,” dissonant chords that push toward a stable, consonant home — with dissonance and consonance meaning particular physical acoustical properties of sound.
No one was better at building toward and delaying that sense of resolution than Richard Wagner, who pushed conceptions about music and harmony toward stranger and stranger lands throughout the course of his career. The music of Tristan and Isolde is one of the best examples of his abandonment of traditional harmony, right from the first moments. The cellos enter with an ascending leap before falling back down, with the winds entering at the end of the phrase with a strange, “unstable” harmony that sounds and feels like it should resolve, but it doesn’t. This chord, the “Tristan chord,” has excited generations of music theorists, as instead of resolving it moves to another unstable harmony. This phrase repeats on different pitches several times, never providing that sense of resolution and release, until the melody takes off in earnest in the strings, a winding, sighing tune of unrequited passion that doesn’t fully resolve until the end of the piece.
The Prelude and Liebestod (Love-Death) pairs music from the opening of the opera and the final aria. To orient listeners, the composer himself explains the story of the opera here:
Prelude: Taking on the role of suitor for his uncle, the king, Tristan brings to him Isolde. They love each other. From the most timid complaint of unquenchable longing, from the most delicate quivering, up through the most fearsome outburst confessing a hopeless love, the feeling here traces every phase of this hopeless struggle against inner passion‚ until, sinking back unconscious, that passion seems to be extinguished in death.
Concluding Movement: And yet, that fate has kept apart in life now lives on, transfigured, in death: the gates to their union are open. Isolde, dying atop Tristan’s body, perceives the blessed fulfillment of her burning desire: eternal union in measureless space, no bounds, no fetters, indivisible!
At the time of composition Wagner, whose wife was accusing him of unfaithfulness, had been swept up by the writings of the German philosopher Schopenhauer, who emphasized the value of music above other art forms. While opera had typically married music and text more equally, Wagner ran with these ideas by fronting the music in telling the stories of his operas therea er, with Tristan und Isolde marking the first successful such work.
FORT WORTH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA |11
PROGRAM NOTES : RICHARD WAGNER
THE “RIDE of the VALKYRIES” from DIE WALKÜRE
DURATION: About 5 minutes
PREMIERED: Munich, 1870
INSTRUMENTATION: Two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons, six horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, snare drum, triangle, strings
“I wish I could score everything for horns.”
— Richard Wagner (Born 1813, Germany; died 1883)
LEITMOTIF: A recurring musical theme that is associated with a person, idea or action. Wagner is credited with cementing the operatic use of such musical devices, which commonly appear in music for film and television as well.
FURTHER LISTENING:
Wagner: Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold) Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) Siegfried
by Jeremy Reynolds
There are obsessive compulsives. Then there’s Wagner.
A towering personality and intellect, one of Wagner’s quirks was an insistence on having his works performed whole and unabridged. At times, this caused clashes with his publishing company, Schott — still very much active today — which had more interest in making money than protecting the artistic integrity of the whole.
And so, a er the premiere of his opera Die Walküre, the second of the four operas that make up the famous Ring of the Nibelungen cycle, requests began slithering in for separate copies of the “Ride.”
An irate Wagner girded his loins and rode forth to do battle with his publishing company, which had caved immediately and began selling copies of the “Ride” for a tidy profit. At least, Wagner wrote a snarky letter to Schott demanding that they desist.
He lost that battle, and six years a er the original performance of Die Walküre, he caved altogether and li ed the embargo.
What makes the piece so compelling? Nowadays, its ubiquity is one of its greatest strengths. It’s the soundtrack for the helicopter scene of the film Apocalypse Now. It appears in the sitcoms The Big Bang Theory and Brooklyn Nine-Nine for melodramatic, comedic effect. Who doesn’t remember the refrain “Kill the Wabbit!”
But there’s something exciting and compelling about the rushing trills, swooping strings and unison brass blaring out the Valkyries cry. It’s simple, repetitive stuff, but it’s effective — the first whizzing scales sound like a gasp, before the accompaniment builds like gale-force winds. The melody itself in all its militant, dotted rhythms is something of a leitmotif for the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, the favorite daughter of Wotan. In context of the opera, the “Ride” opens the third act, as the Valkyries gather slain heroes to transport them to Valhalla, essentially heaven for slain warriors.
Brünnhilde actually carries a woman, Sieglinde, twin of Siegmund, also his lover and carrying his child, Siegfried the hero of later operas in the Ring cycle. (Game of Thrones had to get the idea from somewhere.) Wotan arrives and is enraged with Brünnhilde for defying his commands, and he puts her into a deep sleep on a mountain, guarded by a magical fire. Siegfried eventually awakens her and, of course, professes his love.
Zany operatic plots aside, the “Ride” is still regularly performed in orchestra halls and remains associated with charging into battle.
PROGRAM NOTES : RICHARD WAGNER
“FOREST MURMURS” from SIEGFRIED
DURATION: About 9 minutes
PREMIERED: Bayreuth, 1876
INSTRUMENTATION: Two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, glockenspiel, triangle and strings
“I can’t distract myself enough here, for sketches to a new opera are constantly buzzing around in my head, to the extent that I need all my strength to wrest myself from them.”
— Richard Wagner (Born 1813, Germany; died 1883)
LIBRETTO: the text used in an extended musical work containing all the words and stage directions. Wagner usually wrote in four stages: prose sketch, prose dra , verse dra and fair copy. (The Wagner Compendium)
FURTHER LISTENING:
by Jeremy Reynolds
Some background: Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung is an epic four-opera cycle comprising Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, or in English, The Rhinegold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried and Twilight of the Gods. (This form is a callback to ancient Greek dramas and the tradition of weaving together three dramas and a satyr play.) Wagner intended them to be performed as a series, one a er the other, but due to the monumental expense many opera companies perform them separately.
The third opera, Siegfried, is the tale of the hero Siegfried’s coming of age. It’s typical mythological fare: a dwarf is raising the orphan to kill the dragon and steal the ring of power. The first act is the dwarf working to reforge the hero’s sword, the second is Siegfried killing the dragon and learning to chat with birds — more on this in a moment — who then tell him to kill the dwarf before the dwarf betrays Siegfried. Siegfried then heads to the Valkyrie Brünnhilde’s rock and passes through the magic fire to claim his aunt as his lady love, all set to ravishing music that would inspire generations of composers writing for the concert hall, the opera house and even film scores.
“Forest Murmurs” is a synthesis of Siegfried’s interactions with the woodbird Wagner adapted for concert performance. Swings sway and swirl, as branches and leaves on the forest’s trees, painting a lush canopy in tones as the hero rests under a lime tree, waiting for the dragon to appear. Chattering woodwinds give voice to the wood bird, while Siegfried attempts to mimic the bird’s song with a reed pipe as the music slowly accelerates, hinting at passages and leitmotifs from other Ring cycle operas as the bird discusses Brünnhilde’s plight before it wings away to guide Siegfried to her rock.
Most composers work alongside a librettist to create an opera; Wagner wrote both the music and the text for the Ring cycle himself, cobbling together the narrative from Norse myths and their Germanic follow-up, the Nibelungenlied. For these operas, Wagner sought to synthesize opera’s disparate artistic elements — music, poetry, dance and more — to create a truly immersive experience. He wrote of this fusion in a series of essays in the early 1850s that preceded his work on the Ring, writing:
“The harmony, however, only the musician can invent, and not the poet. Wherefore the melody which we have seen the poet inventing from out of the word verse was more a discovered one-as being conditioned by harmony-than one invented by him. The conditions for this musical melody must first have been to hand, before the poet could find it as already validly conditioned. Before the poet could find this melody, to his redemption, the musician had already conditioned it by his own-est powers: he now brings it to the poet as a melody warranted by its harmony; and only melody such as has been made possible by the very essence of our modern music is the melody that can redeem the poet-that can alike arouse and satisfy his stress.”
Wagner: Die Walküre Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold) Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods
PROGRAM NOTES : RICHARD WAGNER
“SIEGFRIED’S RHINE JOURNEY” from GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG
DURATION: About 12 minutes
PREMIERED: Bayreuth, 1876
INSTRUMENTATION: Three flutes and piccolo, three oboes and English horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons, eight horns and two Wagner tubas, three trombones and bass trombone, tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbals, side drum, glockenspiel, four harps and strings
by Jeremy Reynolds
Putting on the first production of the full Ring of the Nibelung cycle in 1876 literally helped kill Wagner.
The performances took place in 1876 in a theater specially constructed for the purpose of performing Wagner’s operas. Wagner “borrowed” designs for the Bayreuth Festival Theatre from a different project by architect Gottfried Semper without permission, while King Ludwig II of Bavaria provided the primary funding. Still, Wagner had to raise vast additional sums and embarked on numerous concert tours throughout the theater’s construction to help raise funds, and these trips severely taxed the composer’s health. Wagner died in 1883, in part due to the strain of the tours.
The auditorium seats nearly 2,000, and the orchestra pit is one of the world’s most unusual. The pit is typically somewhat visible to the audience and singers. At Bayreuth, it is almost completely covered, making it difficult for singers and musicians to hear one another, but the balance is more favorable to the singers. This allows them to project more easily over the orchestra, an essential factor in successfully mounting such long, difficult productions without taxing the voice.
“Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” is an orchestral interlude (meaning there’s no singing) that bridges the Prologue and Act I of Götterdämmerung, the final opera of Wagner’s four-opera Ring cycle. The music depicts the Valkyrie Brünnhilde sending Siegfried off on new adventures. It begins quietly in the brass and murmurs in the winds, the dawn of a new day. Siegfried’s heroic music takes over a er a time in the strings and brass, with snatches of the Valkyrie motif from the famous “Ride of the Valkyries” representing Brünnhilde’s presence as Siegfried sets off on the journey that would result in his demise, with lighthearted passages belying the high drama of what was to follow.
Later in life, Wagner suffered from financial trouble — the first staging of the Ring cycle finished with a deficit of 1.1 million euros by today’s standards — and as well as increasingly severe angina attacks. His health deteriorated during concert trips to make up the deficit (the festival only survived thanks to state intervention), and he died at the age of 69 of a heart attack.
“Music drama should be about the insides of the characters. The object of music drama is the presentation of archetypal situations as experienced by the participants, and to this dramatic end music is a means, albeit a uniquely expressive one.”
— Richard Wagner (Born 1813, Germany; died 1883)
ORCHESTRAL INTERLUDE: A short piece of music that is played between the parts of a longer one, a drama, or a religious service. These can have a dramatic function as well as provide cover for scenery changes on stage.
FURTHER LISTENING:
Wagner: Die Walküre Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold) Siegfried
PROGRAM NOTES : RICHARD WAGNER
“SIEGFRIED’S DEATH” and “FUNERAL MUSIC” from GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG
DURATION: About 13 minutes
PREMIERED: Bayreuth, 1876
INSTRUMENTATION: Three flutes and piccolo, three oboes and English horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons, eight horns and three Wagner tubas, three trumpets and bass trumpet, four trombones and bass trombone, tuba, triangle, cymbals, two timpani and tenor drum, six harps, and strings
“We must learn to die, and to die in the fullest sense of the word. The fear of the end is the source of all lovelessness.”
— Richard Wagner (Born 1813, Germany; died 1883)
FUNERAL MARCH: A slow, stately piece of music, usually in a minor key, and duple or quadruple time, that imitates the feel and pace of a funeral procession. (BBC Music Magazine)
FURTHER LISTENING:
by Jeremy Reynolds
A blazing minor chord opens “Siegfried’s Death,” resolving into a major chord and plucked harp strings and high, angelic strings. That first chord repeats, a cry of intense anguish, setting off another cascade of harp arpeggios. The music seems to call back to better times in Siegfried’s life as the work progresses for the first few minutes before the funeral march takes over, beginning with an uneasy, slithering string figure in the strings.
Götterdämmerung is the fourth and final opera in his Ring cycle, but Wagner actually conceived the libretto for this opera first in 1848. The story originally centered on the hero Siegfried — loosely inspired by Norse myths — as he dies due to a curse on the ring of power, and on his lover, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, as she took Siegfried’s body to Valhalla to redeem the gods. Upon reflecting on his original text and beginning, Siegfried’s Death, however, he realized that for this opera to have the emotional punch that he desired, audiences would need more intimate familiarity with what had come before.
He sketched the ring in reverse order: Siegfried, Die Walküre and Das Rheingold, fleshing out characters in text and music. It took fully 20 years for Wagner to set the original text of Siegfried’s Death to music, and though the majority remained as he’d written it in 1848, he adjusted the final scene and title to reflect the downfall of the gods — Götterdämmerung translates to “Twilight of the Gods” — and a new world order emerging from the chaos.
Wagner: Die Walküre Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold) Siegfried When a friend asked Wagner why he’d changed the finale and why the gods needed to perish, Wagner responded:
“I believe that, at a good performance, even the most naïve spectator will be le in no doubt on this point. It must be said, however, that the gods’ downfall is not the result of points in a contract… No, the necessity of this downfall arises from our innermost feelings. Thus it was important to justify this sense of necessity emotionally… I have once again realized how much of the work’s meaning (given the nature of my poetic intent) is only made clear by the music. I can now no longer bear to look at the poem [the libretto] without music.”
A er that slinking figure in the strings, the orchestra sounds a two note, thumping motif that recurs throughout the remainder work. Brass sound a first marching phrase, the thumping returns, the slinking string figure returns, and the winds answer the brass’s opening phrase. The music is all mourning and lamentation, a fierce demonstration of Wagner’s ability to capture feelings through abstract melodies and phrases, giving sound to emotions and impressions that text could not.
PROGRAM NOTES : RICHARD WAGNER
“BRÜNNHILDE’S IMMOLATION” from GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG
DURATION: About 18 minutes
PREMIERED: Bayreuth, 1876
INSTRUMENTATION: Three flutes and piccolo, three oboes and English horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons, eight horns, two Wagner tubas, three trumpets and bass trumpet, three trombones and bass trombone, tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbals, side drum, glockenspiel, four harps and strings
“I have only a mind to live, to enjoy — i.e., to work as an artist, and produce my works; but not for the muddy brains of the common herd.”
— Richard Wagner (Born 1813, Germany; died 1883)
WAGNER TUBA: A four-valved, brass instrument commissioned by Wagner for special effects in his opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelung. Despite its name, the instrument was created to bridge the acoustical and textural gap between the French horn and trombone. (Britannica; Grove Music Online)
FURTHER LISTENING:
Wagner: Die Walküre Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold) Siegfried
by Jeremy Reynolds
From downbeat to curtain, Wagner’s Ring cycle is about 15 hours of music, all building up to the grand finale of Brünnhilde’s immolation scene. Here, the Valkyrie, the daughter of the god Wotan, joins her love Siegfried in death by riding her horse into his funeral pyre, cleansing the famed ring of power in fire and burning the old order of the gods to ashes.
Wagner doesn’t recap all 15 hours of music of course, but instead runs something of a highlight reel, a collection of “leitmotifs” that creates a sort of miniature tone poem for the orchestra. There’s the snarling curse motif, a stately ascending arpeggio in the brass. There’s the more tender redemption-through-love tune, representing one of the main symbols in the cycle. There’s the Valkyrie’s war cry, which calls back to the famous “Ride of the Valkyries,” and so on.
(Film score afficionados will recognize that composers adapted the technique readily to the silver screen in the early 20th century.)
Prior knowledge of these themes certainly isn’t necessary to enjoy and appreciate the beaty and grandeur of Wagner’s epic finale, which is musically charged with ideas about ending an old corrupt system and beginning anew. But it can help some of the moments land with more poignancy and intensity — it’s a work of art that reveals more of itself with study and multiple listening sessions, as the density of the orchestral writing and the melodic content is staggering. A er all, Wagner spent more than a quarter of a century weaving the threads of his Ring cycle together, which he first announced in his published autobiographical work A Communication to my Friends, in which he proclaimed:
I shall never write an Opera more. As I have no wish to invent an arbitrary title for my works, I will call them Dramas. I propose to produce my myth in three complete dramas, preceded by a lengthy Prelude (Vorspiel). At a specially-appointed Festival, I propose, some future time, to produce those three Dramas with their Prelude, in the course of three days and a foreevening. The object of this production I shall consider thoroughly attained, if I and my artistic comrades, the actual performers, shall within these four evenings succeed in artistically conveying my purpose to the true Emotional (not the Critical) Understanding of spectators who shall have gathered together expressly to learn it.
That first festival took place in Bayreuth in 1876, from August 13th-17th. Today, the Bayreuth Festival still presents a new complete Ring cycle every few years in a specially designed theatre and remains dedicated solely to the production and performance of Wagner’s works.
Grammy Award-winning American soprano Christine Brewer’s appearances in opera, concert, and recital are marked by her own unique timbre, at once warm and brilliant, combined with a vibrant personality and emotional honesty reminiscent of the great sopranos of the past. Named one of the top 20 sopranos of all time (BBC Music), her range, golden tone, boundless power, and control make her a favorite of the stage and a highly sought-a er recording artist, one who is “in her prime and sounding glorious” (Anthony Tommasini, New York Times).
Christine Brewer is one of the most celebrated concert singers of our time. She has appeared around the world with orchestras in Boston, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Toronto, London, Dresden, Berlin, Leipzig, Paris, Sydney, Japan, Malaysia and many times with her home orchestra the St. Louis Symphony. She is frequently sought a er to sing the great symphonic works of Mozart, Brahms, Verdi, Mahler, Beethoven, Wagner, Janáček and Britten. She has performed Strauss’ Four Last Songs over one hundred times and she has also been invited to perform for such special engagements as the re-opening of Covent Garden with Plácido Domingo for HRH the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall.
On the opera stage, Brewer is highly regarded for her striking portrayal of the title role in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, which she has performed with the Metropolitan Opera, Opéra de Lyon, Théatre du Chatelet, Santa Fe Opera, English National Opera, and Opera Theatre of St. Louis. Attracting glowing reviews with each role, she has performed Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at San Francisco Opera, Gluck’s Alceste with Santa Fe Opera, the Dyer’s Wife in Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten at Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Paris Opera, and Lady Billows in Britten’s Albert Herring at Santa Fe Opera and the Los Angeles Opera. She created the role of Sister Aloysius in the world premiere of Doug Cuomo’s opera Doubt with the Minnesota Opera in 2013 and reprised the role in 2016 with the Union Avenue Opera in St. Louis.
Ms. Brewer continues her work with the Marissa, Illinois 6th graders in a program called Opera-tunities, which is now in its 14th year. She also works with the voice students at Webster University. On April 29, 2015, Christine Brewer joined 140 other notable celebrities receiving a bronze star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
Brewer’s discography includes over 25 recordings. Her most recent recording, Divine Redeemer on Naxos contains selections with concert organist Paul Jacobs.
