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Ghiaurov's career spanned both the great Russian roles--Boris Gudonov, Khan Konchak, Prince Gremin, Ivan Susanin, Kovanschy, and the great Italian and French roles--King Philip, the Devil in both Mefistofele and Faust, the Padre Guardiano in Forza, Attila , Fiesco, Silva, and Don Quichotte. While a genuine bass, he had a strong enough upper range that he was also a fine Don Giovanni, and could even manage the Toreador Song from Carmen with panache. Though most of the roles he sang were serious ones, he is also a noted performer of Don Basilio in Il Barbiere di Siviglia and Colline in La Boheme, which has the one solemn aria in the last scene, and considerable clowning in the preceeding ones. He brought to these roles a rich and powerful voice, considerable acting ability, and a striking physique. His voice was at its prime during the late 1950s, '60s, and '70s, becoming rather dry by the 1980s, but he was still able to perform some of his roles very ably through the 1990s, leaving the more vocally strenuous ones and relying on a solid technique and his mastery of text and drama. As a singing actor, he avoided extra-musical effects such as sobbing or shouting, instead drawing characterizations from the music and shading nuances into the text.

His family was poor, but when he was a child, his parents encouraged him to sing. When his voice broke during adolescence, he continued to study music, learning to play clarinet, violin, and trombone on borrowed instruments, and he also studied drama, which at that time was his career choice. He was discovered as a singer while serving in the army (where he played clarinet and conducted the chorus), and studied with Christo Brambarov and then at the Moscow Conservatoire. He credits much of his vocal longevity to the fact that he never pushed his voice during those early years--in fact, during his first year of studies he worked on only one octave, doing only vocal exercises. Studying with Brambarov, he learned Italian style as well as Russian style, something of a rarity for Slavic singers at that time.

He made his debut as Don Basilio at the Sofia Opera in 1955 and sang Pimen (in Boris Godunov) at the Bolshoi in 1957. By 1958, he first sang in Italy, through in Faust rather than in an Italian opera. Three years later he made his Covent Garden debut, in 1960 made his La Scala debut as Varlaam in Boris, and in 1965 he first appeared at the Metropolitan. At the Salzburg Festival he sang the lead in Boris Godunov, for the first time, also in 1965. He appeared in many productions and roles at those opera houses, and was also a frequent performer at the Vienna State Opera, the Paris Opera, the Chicago Lyric Opera (where he made his US debut), and many others.

Aside from opera, he frequently performed and recorded Russian songs. He is married to the Italian soprano Mirella Freni, and has participated in guiding her into her forays into the Russian repertoire, notably Tatiana in Eugene Onegin and Lisa in Pique Dame.

He left a wide recorded legacy. Some of the more outstanding include a recital recording on Arkadia (Arkadia 807.1) from 1961 that displays not only his voice but his acting abilities--in the aria "Madamina," from Don Giovanni he produces some of the sleaziest sounds in recorded opera! Decca released a Grandi Voci album devoted to him (Decca 448 248-2) that spans the width of his roles. In complete opera recordings, his Mefistofele (Decca 410 175-2) was recorded too late to capture the full bloom of his voice, but his characterization and dark humor is unforgettable. He made two major recordings of Boris Godunov, the first with von Karajan on Decca, the second with Tchakarov on Sony. The first is the most vocally expansive, the second, made two decades later, is perhaps more mature dramatically. ~ Ann Feeney

Herbert von Karajan was the most renowned conductor to emerge from Europe in the post-World War II era -- and through fortuitous timing throughout his career, and in spite of controversy that dogged his early years, he was the most recorded conductor of the 20th century, and is likely to remain one of the most visible (and biggest-selling) conductors well into the 21st century. Born in Salzburg and descended from a family of Greek origin with deep roots in Austria -- including scholars and physicians in Vienna and Salzburg -- he was a music prodigy, playing the piano at three and playing his first recital a year later. He received encouragement in his teens to shift his focus from the piano to the podium, and the experience of hearing Toscanini conduct on a visit to Vienna possessed him to follow that path. Toscanini and -- a great irony -- Wilhelm Furtwangler became his two idols among conductors; Karajan's teachers included the renowned Viennese conductor (and one time Bruckner student) Franz Schalk. He got his first musical post in 1928 -- at age 20 -- at the Ulm City Theater, initially as chorusmaster and later as conductor, and over the next seven years he learned how to lead an orchestra from the ground up, serving as coach and every other capacity common to a small but busy musical berth.

With the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany (which Karajan joined in 1933) and the positions that opened up with the purging of Jewish and part-Jewish musicians from all posts, Karajan saw an opportunity to advance rapidly on a bigger stage than any available in Austria -- he moved his career to Germany in 1935, and became the youngest man in the country to hold a music director's position when he was appointed to the job at Aachen. He was not overtly political, however, and gladly accepted an invitation from Bruno Walter -- perhaps the most prominent Jewish conductor to have been forced out of Germany -- to conduct Wagner's Tristan und Isolde at the Vienna State Opera. From 1938 through 1942, he conducted the Berlin State Opera, and that same year he made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1941, he accepted the appointment as music director of the Berlin State Opera.

Karajan found himself in an awkward but prominent position in Germany during the Nazi era. His approach to conducting -- his demanding rehearsals and his precision, even in dealing with such august bodies as the string section of the Berlin Philharmonic -- and his intense personality, coupled with bracing, exciting musical results, earned him the admiration of Adolf Hitler. Additionally, his avoidance of any public displays of resistance to Nazi ideology made him a favorite of the Nazi cultural officials as a counterweight to Wilhelm Furtwangler, the most renowned conductor in the German-speaking world but also a fiercely independent voice, who was known to regard the Nazi Party officials around him with disdain and dismissiveness. It soon became clear that the government was intent on playing Karajan off against Furtwangler, using the younger conductor to subtly pressure the older man and prick his understandably outsized ego. And Karajan gained the quietly repeated nickname of "Hitler's favorite." How much he did to encourage or engender this "fandom" -- beyond pursuing excellence at the podium -- is questionable, and it should be pointed out that septuagenarian composer Franz Lehár enjoyed similar admiration from the Nazi dictator, despite his being apolitical and also having a Jewish wife. Ironically, Karajan found himself in a somewhat similar situation when he married a woman of Jewish descent, Anita Guetermann, in 1942; after that, he was out of favor with the party as well.

Karajan made his recording debut in 1938, at age 30, and those early recordings, including his first Beethoven symphony (No. 7) and some Wagner preludes, as well as symphonies by Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Dvorák, are of significant academic interest, as are his wartime recordings. But Karajan's major career on record didn't really begin until after World War II in Vienna, when he met producer Walter Legge. Although Karajan wasn't able to conduct in public because of his activities in Germany during the war -- he was "denazified" officially until 1947 -- Legge, as representative of a privately owned business (EMI Records), was able to arrange sessions with the Vienna Philharmonic. Those recordings, done during a time when musicians in occupied Vienna needed to work just to raise their food rations to a subsistence level -- which included the Beethoven Eighth and Ninth symphonies, among other works -- had a quality and an urgency that were bracing to listeners at the time, and they were still being reissued, in audiophile remastered editions, four decades later, in 2005 and 2006.

Karajan's career ascent was stymied in the decade after the end of the war by his rivalry with Furtwangler, who would not let him near either the Berlin or the Vienna Philharmonic orchestras. Instead, he took the leadership of the Vienna Symphony, and also became the principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra. It was with the Philharmonia, for EMI, that Karajan's recorded legacy grew astronomically in the late '40s and the first half of the '50s. Karajan's denazification and his appointment to the Philharmonia coincided with the advent of magnetic tape recording in England (though EMI was slow to adopt the new system) and the LP record; he was also more open to the concept of recording than Furtwangler or any of his older conducting rivals, who tended to regard making records as an unpleasant adjunct to a music career. Where Furtwangler, Erich Kleiber, Hans Knappertsbusch, etc., kept their recording activities to a minimum, Karajan reveled in the act of recording -- he made dozens of records across those seven years, of repertoire ranging from Bach to Vaughan Williams, including operatic works, from Mozart to Johann Strauss and Richard Strauss that have never been equaled, not even by his own subsequent efforts. He also cut his first complete Beethoven symphonic cycle, which straddled the mono and stereo eras -- the First through Seventh and the Ninth were in mono, but the Eighth was in stereo. The Beethoven cycle was also an illustration of Karajan's mindset -- Karajan had never performed the Fourth Symphony in concert, and it would never have occurred to Furtwangler, Kleiber, et al., to record a work that they'd never had in their concert repertoire, but Karajan simply did the Fourth for the first time for the cycle. That series of recordings was also notable for the vision of Beethoven's symphonies that they presented, resplendent in a lush string tone, bursting tension, and energy that oozed out of every bowing and note. Virtually all of his recordings from the 1950s, whether in mono or stereo, retain exceptional luster and richness, owing to Walter Legge's production and the work of the EMI engineering staff, and continue to sell well in the 21st century.

From the second half of the 1950s onward much of Karajan's activity -- apart from occasional forays to RCA Victor and Decca/London, and a short return to EMI at the outset of the 1970s -- was centered on the Deutsche Grammophon label, where the lion's share of his Berlin Philharmonic recordings would be made and released. From the advent of the stereo era onward, as his recordings gained him an ever-widening audience around the world, he would become among the busiest conductors in the studio in the entire world, and also one of the first to avail himself fully of the newest developments in air travel, jetting around the world to meet commitments and also learning to fly himself. Karajan in the late '50s and 1960s seemed as "new world" in his habits as the men he succeeded had seemed "old world." He re-recorded all of his key repertoire, from Beethoven to Schubert, more than once throughout the 1960s and 1970s, including a new cycle of the former's nine symphonies in each of the those decades and once more in the 1980s, and he extended himself more deeply into the classical era, with the symphonies of Haydn, and into the Baroque period with Bach and Handel (and even such crowd-pleasing pieces as the Albinoni Adagio and the Pachelbel Canon in D), and to the post-Romantic and modern eras with the orchestral works of Berg and Webern -- he was superb at the latter two, less so with Haydn, Bach, Handel, et al. It was almost a necessity to find these other areas, however, as Karajan's recording commitments multiplied; by the end of the 1970s, he had passed Leopold Stokowski -- the earliest major conductor to embrace the phonograph record, and practically a one-man recording industry -- as the most recorded conductor in history. Among his few "blind spots" among major Romantic composers was Gustav Mahler, whose music didn't become part of his repertoire until very late in his career -- although when he did embrace Mahler, the results were most impressive.

Karajan's career timing was fortuitous in other areas as well. With the advent of the home video era, there were two major bodies of his video performances waiting to fill that demand. Karajan's appearances on television dated back to the end of the 1950s, and his broadcasts from 1965 into the mid-'70s were distributed by Unitel, which later made them available on videocassette, laserdisc, and DVD. From the end of the 1970s, however, all of Karajan's video work was done through his own production company, Telemondial, which later licensed them to Sony for release commercially. Ironically, many of these were among his least-favored and controversial works critically -- too many of the Telemondial performances were more like music videos, with hours spent getting the sections of the orchestra looking right, from the correct angle, and synchronizing that shot up with a recording that was already made. With a few notable exceptions, such as the actual live performances in front of an audience at the Vienna New Year's concerts, most viewers dismiss these "documents" as artificial and totally the opposite of what a concert is supposed to be; they were about visual perfection rather than performance, and that seemed to characterize many of his late-career efforts in music. Additionally, during the final 15 years of his life, Karajan engendered some resentment from critics and fellow musicians for his rapidly escalating fees, which led the way to similar demands from other artists and helped to turn the economics of classical concerts into something resembling major-league baseball.

Karajan also played a key role in the development of the compact disc format, lending his work and his prestige to its rollout in 1981 -- it was also reportedly at his insistence that the original intended running time of the CD, 60 minutes, was pushed to 68 minutes, using the running time of a typical Beethoven Symphony No. 9 as a benchmark. At the time of his death in 1989, he had completed yet another Beethoven cycle and was beginning to redo many key works in the digital format; his last recording was of the Bruckner Seventh Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic. Oddly enough, for all of his renown, he was not the most honored conductor of his time, at least in the United States -- Sir Georg Solti earned more Grammy Awards -- but he was, along with American Leonard Bernstein, one of the two most well-known conductors in the world. And even the timing of his death was perfect, in that there was no slowing of the number of releases of his work -- CD conversions of work from the 1940s, 1950s (especially legitimate versions of live opera recordings, and in particular those with Maria Callas), and 1960s have filled release lists and still fill the racks of music stores more than two decades later; both EMI and Deutsche Grammophon have their "Karajan Editions" in various forms. ~ Bruce Eder

Mirella Freni was the textbook example of a lyric soprano who expanded wisely to the spinto roles, conserving her voice so that even in her sixties, she still possessed enough vocal freshness and bloom that she made a credible Mimi in theaters all over the world. (In Italy, one of her nicknames was "La Prudentissima," or "the most prudent one.") She was also a highly sympathetic actor in both comedies and more serious roles.

Freni was born on February 27, 1935, in Modena, Italy. In an amusing coincidence, she and Luciano Pavarotti shared the same wet nurse as a child (both of their mothers worked in a tobacco factory, making their milk unsuitable), and she later joked that he obviously got the bigger share of the milk. Freni was a child prodigy, singing "Sempre libera" in her first public performance at the age of ten. At 12, she made her broadcast debut singing "Un bel di" in a radio competition. Beniamino Gigli, a competition judge, warned her that she could damage her voice if she continued to sing opera with her voice still so undeveloped. She waited until she was 17 to begin studying again. Her new teacher was Ettore Campogalliani, whose most-celebrated student had been Renata Tebaldi.

In 1955, Freni made her stage debut as Micaela in Carmen, one of her favorite and most effective roles. She briefly postponed further career development when she married conductor Leone Magiera and had a child (whom she named Micaela), but resumed singing again in 1958, when she won the Viotti Competition in Vercelli, Italy. The prize was the role of Mimi in La bohème in Turin, a role in which she later made her Met, La Scala, Chicago, and San Francisco debuts. In 1960, she made her Glyndebourne debut as Zerlina, in 1961, her Covent Garden debut as Nanetta in Falstaff, and in 1963, her La Scala debut as Mimi in the now-famous Zeffirelli production La bohème; Herbert von Karajan was the conductor for this production, and he became one of her prominent supporters. He encouraged her to move toward heavier repertoire, such as Desdemona in Otello, which she first sang with him in 1970; she later filmed Otello with Jon Vickers and Peter Glossop, which was directed and conducted by Karajan. At that time, he declared that he had waited 40 years to hear such a Desdemona. She started to add more lirico-spinto roles to her stage repertoire and also filmed the title role of Madama Butterfly with Karajan. However, she refused to sing the title role of Turandot when he asked her in 1980, and he subsequently refused to work with her again.

In 1981, she married Nicolai Ghiaurov, who encouraged her to examine the Russian repertoire. She began to add Russian songs to her recitals, with his coaching, and then in the late 1980s, she sang the role of Tatiana in Eugene Onegin. In 1990, she took on Lisa in The Queen of Spades. In the mid-'90s, she started singing Giordano roles for the first time, not only Fedora, a role typically beloved by divas toward the end of their careers, but the title role of Madame Sans-Gêne, a comedic, even occasionally farcical role. Her final stage performance came in 2005 at age 70, at the Washington National Opera, where she performed the teenaged lead role of Ioanna in The Maid of Orléans. That same year, she was honored by the Met, celebrating the 40th anniversary of her Met debut and the 50th anniversary of her stage debut. Following a long illness, Freni died in her home in Modena on February 9, 2020.

In 1990, she received the order Cavaliere di Gran Croce della Repubblica Italiana, and in 1993, the Légion d'Honneur. ~ Anne Feeney

One of the most successful and admired opera singers of all time, Luciano Pavarotti was king among tenors from the late 1960s through the 1990s. His voice was noted for its exciting upper register, and tailor-made for the operas of Verdi, Bellini, Donizetti, and Puccini, and as it darkened slightly over the years, for the verismo composers as well. His vocal longevity, which kept him singing youthfully well into his sixties, and still beautifully after that, was a credit to his commanding technique and artistry, and remarkable considering his nearly 40 years of performing.

Pavarotti's father was a baker, and his mother worked in a cigar factory. As a boy, he sang alto in the cathedral choir, and when his voice changed he joined the Modena city choir. He had brief careers as a schoolteacher and an insurance agent; during that time, his major extracurricular activity was not music but soccer, and his play made him a local star. However, increased involvement in the choir (which took prizes in international competitions) led him to pursue vocal studies, and he eventually settled on singing as his aspiration.

Pavarotti studied voice with Arrigo Polo in Modena, then with Ettore Campogalliani in Mantua. His operatic debut was as Rodolfo in La Bohème in Reggio Emilia (April 19, 1961), and soon increasing success led to a debut in Amsterdam on January 18, 1963, as Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor. After singing the same role with Joan Sutherland in Miami in 1965, he was engaged to travel with her in the Sutherland Williamson International Grand Opera Company, touring Australia. In 1966 he appeared at Covent Garden as Tonio in La fille du régiment, where his seemingly effortless handling of the nine successive high Cs in the aria "Pour mon âme" sent his career into high orbit. He repeated the feat at the Metropolitan Opera in 1972, and for more than two decades after that he was a fixture on the operatic scene, appearing in nearly every major European and American house, and even China, where he performed Puccini's La bohème in the 1980s.

Pavarotti appeared in the first "Live from the Met" broadcast on the PBS network and was the most consistent draw on that series for years. His outstanding catalogue of recordings on the London (Decca) record label preserves nearly every role he ever performed and is hard to match for its quality and scope. His charity work included AIDS benefit concerts and world hunger gala events, as well as his "Pavarotti and Friends" concerts to benefit children, especially in the former Yugoslav states. He also founded a quadrennial contest to identify talented young singers and boost their careers. And, as one of the "Three Tenors," he brought operatic singing to a wider popular audience than previously might have been thought possible. In 2003 he released his first solo crossover CD, Ti adoro. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2006, yet remained positive and hopeful of still being able to record and perform until his death.

With a crystalline voice of fragile beauty and a sensitive quality of musicianship, Elizabeth Harwood was a lyric soprano of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Her intelligence and musical curiosity led her to a broad range of music, and her lovely, blond appearance and subtle stage manner made her welcome in a number of theaters. Along the way, she attracted the interest of Herbert von Karajan, who cast her in several important productions, featuring her in his 1972 recording of La bohème (as Musetta opposite the Mimi of Mirella Freni and the Rodolfo of Luciano Pavarotti) and as a non-Viennese Hanna Glawari, who had nonetheless mastered the Viennese style. An immensely serious artist, she spent the final years of her life working with students, serving them as devotedly as she had her art.

Following study at the Royal Manchester School of Music, Harwood won the Kathleen Ferrier Memorial Prize in 1960. After joining the chorus at the Glyndebourne Festival, she was assigned a solo role, making her debut as the Second Boy in a 1960 production of Die Zauberflöte. In 1961, she joined the Sadler's Wells Opera and began a steady rise through the ranks in such light roles as Susanna and Konstanze, Manon, Adele in Rossini's Le Comte Ory, Gilda, and Zerbinetta. In the mid-'60s, she was engaged for a company assembled to accompany Joan Sutherland on an Australian tour, alternating the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor with the superstar and performing Amina and Adina as well. Covent Garden welcomed her in 1967 when she sang the challenging role of the Fiakermilli in Strauss' Arabella. Later, the Royal Opera House was to hear her in such other roles as Gilda, Marzelline, Norina, Donna Elvira, Teresa in Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini and Bella in a revival of Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage. The latter production was recorded under the direction of Colin Davis and remains a showcase for Harwood's warm and knowing interpretation. She joined the Scottish Opera in 1967, singing there until 1974 such roles as Sophie, Fiordiligi, and Lucia.

A performance at Aix-en-Provence led to an invitation by Herbert von Karajan to come to Salzburg; there, she specialized in the Mozart repertory, singing Fiordiligi, the Countess, and Donna Elvira in the three Da Ponte operas, in addition to Konstanze in Die Entführung aus dem Serail. In addition to Salzburg, the 1970s brought debuts at La Scala (1972) and the Metropolitan Opera, where she appeared as Fiordiligi in 1975. Glyndebourne heard her again in the 1970s and 1980s when she returned as Fiordiligi, Mozart's Countess and, later, as the Marschallin in 1980 and 1982.

Along with her stage work, Harwood was an important concert artist, appearing with numerous orchestras and under the direction of the leading conductors of her time. Two singular oratorios were captured on recording, each led by musicians uniquely qualified to bring these compositions to life. With Mackerras, she sang the soprano arias in a restudied edition of Messiah, a recording which has remained in the catalog since 1966. Under Benjamin Britten, Harwood sang Gretchen in Schumann's Szenen aus Goethe's Faust together with the Faust of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and the Mephisto of John Shirley-Quirk. Harwood also recorded Titania in Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream with the composer leading the performance.