Anna Netrebko

Biography

Anna Netrebko was born in Krasnodar and studied music at the St Petersburg State Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatoire (class of T. Novichenko). In 1994 she made her Mariinsky Theatre debut as Susanna in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro.

In 1999-2000 Anna Netrebko appeared in the operas Le nozze di Figaro, Betrothal in a Monastery, Idomeneo and La bohème at the San Francisco Opera.

In 2002 she made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Natasha Rostova (War and Peace). This role, one of the finest in her repertoire, has also been performed at the Mariinsky Theatre, Madrid's Teatro Real, Milan’s La Scala, London’s Royal Opera House and the Moscow Easter Festival. Moreover, in 2002 Anna Netrebko made her debut at the Philadelphia Opera as Giulietta (I Capuletti e i Montecchi), and in summer that year she made her first appearance at the Salzburg Festival as Donna Anna (Don Giovanni).

Since her triumphant Salzburg Festival debut in 2002, Netrebko has gone on to appear with nearly all the world’s great opera companies, including the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, London’s Royal Opera House, Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, Vienna State Opera, Paris Opera, Zurich Opera, Berlin State Opera, and Munich’s Bavarian State Opera. She frequently returns to the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg to collaborate with her longtime mentor, conductor Valery Gergiev.

As well as Mozart’s Susanna, Netrebko’s other signature roles past and present include Puccini’s Mimì (La bohème) and Manon Lescaut; Verdi’s Violetta (La traviata), Lady Macbeth (Macbeth) and Giovanna d’Arco; Bellini’s Giulietta (I Capuleti e i Montecchi), Elvira (I puritani), and Amina (La sonnambula); Mozart’s Donna Anna (Don Giovanni); Donizetti’s Norina (Don Pasquale), Adina (L’elisir d’amore), Lucia (Lucia di Lammermoor), and Anna Bolena; the title role in Massenet’s Manon; Juliette in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette; Tchaikovsky’s Tatiana (Eugene Onegin) and Iolanta.

Anna Netrebko performs with leading conductors such as Valery Gergiev, James Levine, Seiji Osawa, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Zubin Mehta, Colin Davis and Claudio Abbado at the world's leading opera venues. She can also be heard at such legendary concert halls as New York’s Carnegie Hall, London’s Barbican Centre and the Royal Albert Hall and stadiums where she sings for tens of thousands. Anna Netrebko's open-air concerts together with Plácido Domingo and Rolando Villazon at Berlin’s Waldbühne at football’s World Cup and at Vienna’s Schonbrunn during the European Football Cup were broadcast on TV to millions of viewers throughout the world. Netrebko sang the Olympic Hymn live at the internationally televised opening ceremony of the 2014 Olympic Winter Games in Sochi.

2013 finds Anna Netrebko venturing into bold new repertoire and embarking on a new phase of her career. This summer, she sang act one of Verdi’s Otello at the Verbier Festival, her first performance as Desdemona, and reunited with Plácido Domingo for her role debut as the eponymous heroine of Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco at the Salzburg Festival. Also at the Salzburg Festival, she joined Thomas Hampson, Ian Bostridge, and the Orchestra dell’ Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia under Antonio Pappano for a single performance of Britten’s War Requiem, later recorded by the same artists and released on Warner Classics.

In September 2013, she made history as the first soprano to headline three consecutive Metropolitan Opera opening-night galas, when she made her american role debut as Tatiana in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin.

Season 2014/15 saw the soprano take the Metropolitan Opera by storm with her american role debut as Lady Macbeth. She also performed  as Mimi in La Bohème (Royal Opera House, Covent Garden), Iolanta (Opéra de Montecarlo), Tatiana in Eugene Onegin (Münchner Opernfestspiele), Leonora in Il trovatore (Salzburger festspiele).

In the 2015/16 season she made her staged title role debut under the baton of Riccardo Chailly in La Scala’s new, season-opening production of Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco. She portrays Leonora in a revival of David McVicar’s Goya-inspired Il trovatore (Metropolitan Opera); performed the title role in Manon Lescaut (Salzburger festspiele). She gives her first performances as Elsa in Wagner’s Lohengrin (Mariinski Theatre and Dresden’s Semperoper).

In 2016 she appeared at the Bolshoi Theatre as Manon in new production of Manon Lescaut (conductor Jader Bignamini, director Adolf Shapiro). In 2020 she returned to Moscow for her debut in the role of Elisabeth in Don Carlo.

Her current repertory includes the title roles of Aida (Salzburg Festival, Metropolitan Opera), Lady Macbeth (Royal Opera House, Berlin State Opera, Metropolitan Opera), Leonora in Il trovatore (Royal Opera House) and Leonora in La forza del destino (Arena di Verona), Elizabeth of Valois in Don Carlo (Semperoper Dresden), Tosca (Metropolitan Opera, Teatro alla Scala), Turandot (Bavarian State Opera), Maddalena di Coigny in Andrea Chénier (La Scala, Hungarian State Opera, Vienna State Opera), and Adriana Lecouvreur (Vienna State Opera, Metropolitan Opera, Deutsche Opera Berlin, Salzburg Festival).

Anna Netrebko has a vast series of recordings, including solo albums as well as complete operas on CD and DVD. The success of her solo discs with Deutsche Grammophon – Opera Arias, Sempre Libera, Russian Album, Verdi, Verismo and Diva – surpassed all expectations and created a true furore, as did recordings of La traviata, Le nozze di Figaro, La Boheme, Manon and the DVD Anna Netrebko: The Woman. The Voice. Today in Germany and Austria, all of the singer’s albums have attained platinum status. The disc Duets, recorded with her regular stage partner Rolando Villazon, took first place in the USA’s Billboard classical ratings.