Felicity Lott

English soprano Dame Felicity Lott had a major international career as an operatic, concert, and recital singer. She recorded extensively and was known for her rich voice and intelligent projection of words, as well as for an engaging, unpretentious personality onstage and off. Lott began her musical studies on the violin and piano, but she did not entertain the idea of a musical career until after completing a degree in French at the Royal Holloway College. Having studied voice during college, she auditioned for the Royal Academy of Music and spent the next four years there. Her debut came in London as Seleuce in Handel's Tolomeo, but she first came to public attention in 1975 when she stepped in as Pamina in Die Zauberflöte at the English National Opera, where she also sang Natasha in Prokofiev's War and Peace and Roxane in Szymanowski's King Roger. In 1976 at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, she continued this thread of modern opera in Henze's We Come to the River and Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream. The following year, she sang Anne Trulove in The Rake's Progress at Glyndebourne and Jennifer in Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage at the Welsh National Opera. Perhaps even more important was singing the Countess in Strauss' Capriccio for the Glyndebourne Touring Company; this was the first of many Strauss roles she was to make her own. Lott also undertook roles from the standard repertory, including Poppea in Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea, the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro, Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte, and Xiphares in Mitridate, rè di Ponto. She had great success in French opera, especially as Charpentier's Louise, Blanche in Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmelites and the Woman in La voix humaine. She eventually added more Strauss roles to her repertoire, including both Octavian and the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, Christine in Intermezzo and Arabella. She sang at all of the major opera houses around the world, including Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco, the Metropolitan, Hamburg, Dresden, Vienna, Paris Opera, and Munich. Her Mozart roles remained central in her performing schedule. Lott was also very active as a recitalist. She was one of the original members of the Songmaker's Almanac, a group created by pianist Graham Johnson to explore all areas of song literature. She and Richard Jackson were admired for their performances of Wolf's Italienisches Liederbuch. She was also well known for her interpretations of the songs of Francis Poulenc and recorded nearly all of the songs appropriate for female voice. Her performances of Schumann's Frauenliebe und -leben and Berg's Sieben frühe Lieder were also highly acclaimed. Her recital programs were unusually varied, often contain little-known pieces, and were much anticipated by audiences. She also appeared regularly with major orchestras around the world. Her concert repertoire included the second and fourth symphonies of Mahler, the oratorios of Bach, Handel, Mendelssohn, and, of course, the Four Last Songs of Strauss. When Lott began performing, her voice was a medium-sized lyric soprano with a strong lower register. As she matured, the voice took on darker hues that enabled her to be able to fulfill all of the demands of the great Strauss operas for which she was justly famous. She had excellent control of the entire dynamic range and a wonderful feel for the long phrases of Mozart and Strauss. She was an excellent actress and was careful to create a complete character in her performances. In the new century, she continued performing, including a 2004 appearance in Offenbach's La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein at the Châtelet in Paris. Her later recordings covered Schubert (2010), Elgar (2011), and Mahler (2012), among others. Lott was married to actor Gabriel Woolf. She became a Commander of the British Empire in 1990 and was knighted as a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1996. In an interview with the BBC, in May 2026, Lott revealed that she had cancer, and died shortly after, on May 15. ~ Richard LeSueur, Rovi