These recordings of the voices of Inge Borkh and Ljuba Welitsch are very fine examples of the art of the dramatic soprano from the 1950s and early 1960s. Borkh acquired a considerable reputation as Aida, Tosca, Turandot, and Medea in Cherubini’s opera of the same name, as well as Leonora in Fidelio. On this anthology, […]

That Richard Strauss loved and understood the soprano voice is an inescapable fact. He was married to soprano, Pauline de Ahna and thus had a living laboratory for his song-writing. Even after Pauline had retired from the stage, he continued to favour sopranos in his operas and other vocal compositions. And sopranos repaid him with […]

Richard Strauss came of age as a song composer in his late teens with his lushly upholstered Op. 10, set to poems by the obscure nineteenth-century versifier, Hermann von Gilm. In 1887, he started to give lessons to a promising young soprano, Pauline de Ahna, daughter of a retired general (and woe betide anyone who […]