Wagnerheldinnen

Isolde and Brünnhilde are endlessly fascinating personalities and, like most Wagnerian heroines, are equally powerful in their love. This book pays homage to thirteen outstanding interpreters of these roles from different eras, all of whom left their imprint of high artistic standards on the Bayreuth festival. Kirsten Liese portrays each soprano individually through text and images which include unpublished photos from private archives: Frida Leider, Kirsten Flagstad, Martha Mödl, Astrid Varnay, Birgit Nilsson, Ludmila Dvorákova, Anja Silja, Catarina Ligendza, Dame Gwyneth Jones, Hildegard Behrens, Deborah Polaski, Waltraud Meier und Nina Stemme; the living artists all collaborated exclusively with the author on their chapters. With a Foreword by the brilliant Wagnerian conductor Christian Thielemann.

Kirsten Liese, born in Berlin in 1964, studied music education and German philology, followed by an apprenticeship at a daily newspaper and further studies in broadcasting. Since 1994 she has worked as an independent journalist and author specializing in opera, concerts, and cinema for the German broadcast network ARD (Deutschlandfunk, WDR, SWR, BR, MDR), newspapers (Berliner Morgenpost, Rhein Neckar-Zeitung, Nürnberger Nachrichten), magazines (Das Orchester) and online publications (BR Online, Kinofenster). She also edits sheet music for Bärenreiter in Kassel and Doblinger in Vienna. In 2007 her book Elisabeth Schwarzkopf: from Flower Maiden to Marschallin was published in Germany and Austria, followed the next year by a revised American/UK edition (Amadeus Press, New York).