During a 38-year career with the Metropolitan Opera, he sang 1,001 performances, drawing notice for his performances in Wagner, Verdi and Mozart. More

She was a beloved interpreter of Strauss, Mozart and Wagner roles, but equally admired for her rendition of art songs.Christa Ludwig, who poured a lustrous voice into dramatically taut performances of opera roles — especially those of Mozart, Strauss and Wagner — and intimately rendered art songs as one of the premier mezzo-sopranos of the second half of the 20th century, died on Saturday at her home in Klosterneuburg, Austria. She was 93.Her death was confirmed by her son, Wolfgang Berry.Ms. Ludwig commanded a broad range of the great mezzo-soprano parts, including Dorabella in Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte,” Cherubino in his “Le Nozze di Figaro,” Octavian in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” Bizet’s Carmen and numerous Wagner roles. Often, critics were reduced to calling her the greatest mezzo-soprano of her time.But like many mezzos, Ms. Ludwig strove to lay claim to higher-voiced — and higher-profile — soprano roles. So she took on, most successfully in that category, characters including the Marschallin in “Der Rosenkavalier,” the Dyer’s Wife in “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” and Leonore in Beethoven’s “Fidelio.”She was an equal master of the intimate song — especially the works of Brahms, Mahler and Schubert. Her artistry put her in the pantheon of postwar lieder singers that included Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Elly Ameling and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.Ms. Ludwig made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Cherubino (a trouser role, a type she said was not her favorite) in 1959, took on Octavian and Amneris in Verdi’s “Aida” at the house that year as well and sang regularly at the Met until the end of her career.Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, left, and Ms.  Ludwig in a recording studio in 1962. Both were renowned lieder singers.Erich Auerbach/Hulton Archive/Getty Images,She was associated for decades with the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival, and worked especially closely with the conductors Karl Böhm, Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan.Ms. Ludwig rose from straitened origins in a shattered wartime Germany to the height of the singing world, aided by a sense of discipline instilled by her strong-willed mother — her only real teacher and a constant presence throughout her career.She also displayed traits of the pampered diva, with a preference for elegant gowns and opulent hotel suites (partly inspired by the hardships of her youth), fanatical attention to any hint of illness and the state of her vocal cords, and reverential fans who followed her from house to house. On performance days, she would communicate with whistles or by writing on a pad.But onstage, Ms. Ludwig brought a striking combination of acting ability, charisma and vocal beauty. Her voice had range and power, a security through all the registers and a broad array of colors.“Her unmistakable, deep-purple timbre envelops the listener in a velvet cloak,” Roger Pines wrote in Opera News in 2018, reviewing her collected recordings. “She excelled equally in intimate, legato-oriented lieder and the largest-scale operatic repertoire, where her sound expanded with glorious brilliance.”Critics often took note of her wit and comic deftness, and a personality that could fill a hall even when she sang softly. “Her presence on the Met stage was a synthesis of the dramatic arts all by itself — her voice, her wonderfully natural diction and her shadings of facial expression and gesture all conspiring to express with great emotional breadth the singular message of this singular music,” The New York Times critic Bernard Holland wrote of a “Winterreise” performance in 1983. Ms. Ludwig sang that searing Schubert song cycle some 72 times, even though it was composed for a male voice.Ms. Ludwig in 1963. She favored elegant gowns and opulent hotel suites and paid fanatical attention to the state of her vocal cords.Harry Croner/ullstein bild via Getty ImagesMs. Ludwig was born on March 16, 1928, in Berlin. Her parents lived in Aachen in western Germany, but her mother, Eugenie Besalla-Ludwig, wanted the child to be born in her family home in the capital.In Aachen, Christa’s Viennese father, Anton Ludwig, a former tenor who had sung with Enrico Caruso at the old Met, was the opera house stage director and manager; her mother sang in the company, and performed several roles under an up-and-coming conductor named Herbert von Karajan. Christa saw those performances and many others. “I practically lived in the theater,” she said in her 1993 memoir, later published in English under the title “In My Own Words.”Her mother gave her singing lessons as a girl and remained her lifelong coach, going to her rehearsals and performances and living most of her life with Ms. Ludwig. “I really owe everything to her,” she said. But Ms. Ludwig also described her mother as an inflexible and sometimes suffocating presence who dominated her life before she felt able to cut ties only at age 60.During the war, a half brother was killed on the Eastern front. Food was rationed and Christa was sent to work on a farm. The family’s home and belongings in Giessen, where Mr. Ludwig had become director of the municipal theater, were destroyed in an Allied bombing raid, leaving them homeless. With the arrival of American troops, Ms. Ludwig recounted in her memoir, she and her parents were assigned an abandoned apartment with a piano that had been used as a toilet.Christa’s mother gave voice lessons. “Studying singing was a wonderful way to forget the wretched way we lived, the ruins, the still-smoldering coal cellars, and the stink of ashes,” Ms. Ludwig wrote.The young singer soon found work singing popular tunes at the American officers club, wearing a dress she had made from a Nazi flag. She was paid in cigarettes and stole whatever food she could. Once her father, who had been a member of the Nazi party, was denazified, he was given back his job and organized variety shows around town in which his daughter was featured.Ms. Ludwig received her first major contract in 1946, at the Frankfurt Opera, and made her stage debut as Prince Orlofsky in “Die Fledermaus.” Her mother, recently divorced from her father, moved in with her in the city in an unheated room, and they began daily lessons.Along with her opera work, she sang many concerts of contemporary music amid a wave of creative freedom unleashed by the fall of the Reich. “I was cheap,” she told The Guardian in 2004. “I learned things easily and I had a good voice.” It was a shrewd move: Critics got to know her before she became famous.Ms. Ludwig as Fidelio (Leonore) in the first act of the Beethoven opera “Fidelio” at the Salzburg Festival in August 1968.Gerhard Rauchwetter/picture alliance via Getty ImagesStints in the opera houses of Darmstadt and Hanover followed, until she was summoned to audition for Mr. Böhm, the director of the Vienna State Opera. He took her on in 1955, and she quickly became a mainstay. Engagements at the world’s major opera houses followed. She met the bass-baritone Walter Berry at the Vienna opera in 1957 when they were cast in “Le Nozze di Figaro.” They married three months later and had a son, Wolfgang, who survives her, along with a grandson and a stepson, Philippe Deiber. The couple frequently appeared together in operas and joint recitals. In interviews, Ms. Ludwig said they felt occasional rivalry and were at odds in preparing for performances (she needed quiet, he less so; he liked small hotel rooms and she liked large suites).The couple divorced in 1970, though they continued to perform together. (Mr. Berry died in 2000.)Soon after her divorce, Ms. Ludwig met the actor and stage director Paul-Emile Deiber while he was preparing a production of Massenet’s “Werther” at the Met, and they married in 1972. He died in 2011.Ms. Ludwig came of age at the dawn of the postwar golden era of recordings, and her LP legacy is vast, from a 1961 “Norma” with Maria Callas to a 1962 “St. Matthew Passion” conducted by Otto Klemperer, to two complete and classic Wagner “Ring” cycles. She appears on five “Rosenkavalier” recordings, including a beloved rendition with Ms. Schwarzkopf, conducted by Mr. von Karajan.In the realm of song, critics took note of her sensitivity, smooth lines, intimacy, control and mastery of the text. “She is perhaps the reigning feminine expert at making us feel good about lonely teardrops and thwarted bliss,” The Times critic Donal Henahan wrote in 1979.Despite the care that she took with her voice, Ms. Ludwig suffered damage to her vocal cords in the early 1970s that forced her to cancel numerous performances, and even parts of whole seasons. She recovered but cut back on opera appearances. She gave a series of farewell performances in the 1993-1994 season before retiring.A few years after her vocal crisis, Ms. Ludwig made clear the pragmatic view she had about a singer’s voice.“It’s like a raw egg,” she once said. “Once it’s kaputt, it’s kaputt.” More

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The ‘Anaconda’ hitmaker has previously stated that she has ‘a mind of their own’ after she was criticized for working with the snitching rapper on his 2018 track ‘FEFE’.
Jun 11, 2020
AceShowbiz – Nicki Minaj was unapologetical when she worked with 6ix9ine back in 2018 and she has proven it by re-teaming up with the New York City artist once again on his upcoming music. As with their previous collaboration “FEFE”, their new project “TROLLZ” has been met with backlash after they announced its release date.
Critics took to social media to ask the Harajuku Barbie to remove her photos promoting the song and cancel the collaboration altogether. “Post a pic without him queen,” one of her followers wrote in a comment of her tweet announcing the song.
Labeling 6ix9ine a pedophile, a second user wrote, “Queen please stop working with this pdf file.” Another added, “nicki sweetie…. its not too late to accidentally trip and delete the collab. we can pretend it never happened.”
“i never heard Fefe in full and im not boutta listen to this either,” one person declared, referring to Nicki and 6ix9ine’s previous collaboration, while someone else compared her to her nemesis Cardi B, “Cardi would’ve never worked wit a Snitch Smh.”
But some others showed their loyalty to Nicki and came to her defense amid the backlash. “I LOVE THE FACT THAT YALL HAVE ANOTHER SONG TOGETHER,” one excited fan wrote. Another exclaimed, “We ready sis Fire you look tf good!”
Hitting back at the critics, someone else wrote, “The same ppl running they mouths are the same ones that will sing every word to Fefe when it comes on.”
Nicki has previously declared that she’s not worried about what others think about her, because she has a mind of her own. “You don’t have to defend me. I’m not afraid of internet trolls, blogs, artists. I don’t jump on band wagons. Many will never know what it feels like to have a mind of their own,” she tweeted back in December 2018, after 6ix9ine was arrested on racketeering, conspiracy to murder, armed robbery and firearms charges.
The 24-year-old rapper co-operated with the investigators and as part of his plea deal, he got two years behind bars after testifying against the Nine Trey Gang. He’s currently serving the remainder of his jail term in house arrest after he’s released early from prison in April due to the coronavirus pandemic.

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For her English National Opera debut, the company’s new artistic leader, Annilese Miskimmon, has chosen a work she hopes can bring in a new audience.LONDON — Annilese Miskimmon, the British opera director, looked tired and frazzled when she appeared on a recent video call. She was taking a short break from rehearsing “The Handmaid’s Tale” — the first production at English National Opera she is directing since taking over its artistic leadership in the middle of the pandemic. Those rehearsals had not been running smoothly, Miskimmon said, and had been hit by a recent surge in coronavirus cases in England. For a few weeks, the production had been rehearsing partly online.“This is Zoom stress more than opera stress,” she added, with an awkward laugh. She had already canceled two nights of the run, which now consists of just four performances, from April 8 through Apr. 14.Miskimmon said she chose “The Handmaid’s Tale” for her English National Opera debut because the company was founded on the idea of “opera for everyone.” The novel it is based on, by Margaret Atwood, is well known here, and its popularity has only grown thanks to the recent TV adaptation. Both of these, and the opera, by the Danish composer Poul Ruders, imagine a near future in which women are seen as little more than birthing machines. The story felt politically urgent, Miskimmon added. “Every day it’s getting more and more dangerous in some parts of the world to be a woman,” she said.A rehearsal for English National Opera’s produciton of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” The production’s run, which begins April 8, has been cut to just four performances.English National OperaFor opera watchers, Miskimmon’s decision to start with a dystopia may seem appropriate. In recent years, English National Opera has been hit by crises both real and imagined. Those have included funding cuts and resignations, as well as complaints about a dwindling number of performances each season. To raise revenue, the company — which only performs in English — now rents out its West End home, the Coliseum, to musical productions each summer.Miskimmon’s 2019 appointment was a surprise. The announcement came shortly after the American director Daniel Kramer resigned as the opera’s artistic director, two weeks after announcing his second season. Kramer had a never held a senior position at an opera house before joining the company, and many critics felt he wasn’t up to the job.Hugh Canning, an opera critic for several British newspapers, said he was “puzzled” that Miskimmon had left a job running the well-funded Norwegian Opera and Ballet in Oslo to take up the reins at English National Opera, also known as ENO. “Maybe she enjoys controversy,” he said.Others in Britain’s opera world agreed that Miskimmon had taken on a tough job. “Running any opera house is hard, but ENO is even harder,” said Gus Christie, the executive chairman of the Glyndebourne opera festival. As London’s “second” opera house, ENO was always competing for audiences with the much-better funded Royal Opera House, just a few blocks away, he added. (The British government gives the Royal Opera House about $32 million a year; ENO gets around half as much.)“If she can turn things around there, hats off to her,” Christie said.John Allison, the editor of Opera magazine, said that Miskimmon had gotten off to “a very good” start. During the coronavirus pandemic, she kept things at ENO moving when most British opera houses were shut, with a series of original ideas that raised the company’s profile. Those included a drive-in staging of Puccini’s “La Bohème” (featuring breakdancers and ice cream trucks), a made-for-TV performance of Mozart’s “Requiem” and a community outreach program in which ENO singers offered vocal lessons to people whose breathing had been affected by Covid.But most of the productions in Miskimmon’s first season had been planned before her arrival, including a staging of Wagner’s “Die Walküre” that will play at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 2025. “A lot is riding on this ‘Handmaid’s Tale,’” Allison said. “It’s her first big calling card.”The opera opens in the year 2195, with a lecturer describing the horrors of the Republic of Gilead, a theocracy in which women have no rights and where “handmaids” are forced to bear children for the ruling class.Annemarie Woods, the production’s designer, said that the creative team had researched totalitarian systems and thought about how artifacts of those regimes and their atrocities were preserved. The Coliseum’s stage will look like an exhibition space, Woods said, with items of clothing — including around 50 of the handmaids’ famous red hooded cloaks — suspended and lit like items in a Holocaust museum. Other “exhibits” will include a chunk of a wall where handmaids are executed, displayed like segments of the Berlin Wall.Kate Lindsey, an American mezzo-soprano who plays Offred, the opera’s main character, said she was enjoying rehearsing with Miskimmon, who “made every effort for people to have a voice in the room artistically.”“That’s a real sign of a confident director, and a really, really confident leader,” Lindsey said.Miskimmon said she wanted to turn ENO into a “truly national company” that collaborates with regional opera companies to stage major productions. Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesMiskimmon’s route to the heights of British opera is far from typical. Born in 1974, she grew up in Bangor, a small town outside Belfast, Northern Ireland, during the sectarian conflict that is known as “the Troubles.”She saw her first opera at 10 years old, when her father performed in an amateur production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” in a church hall. It was a distinctly lo-fi production: Her father’s costume for the role of Papageno was “a flat cap and some pan pipes on a string around his neck,” Miskimmon said.Yet Miskimmon soon fell hard for the art form. As much as opera was an escape from the violence of the Troubles, part of its appeal was that it also somehow reflected them, she said: At the time, Northern Ireland was a place where people didn’t feel they had much control over their destiny, since they could “go out for an ordinary day’s work, and be blown up.” In opera, Miskimmon said, “the characters are relentlessly driven toward heaven and hell,” without much agency, either. It felt “a much more honest, artistic representation of life.”At Cambridge University, where she studied English literature, Miskimmon directed some student productions. But she never thought she would become a professional director, she said, until she was invited to assist the British director Graham Vick at Glyndebourne. After working on seven productions there, she landed a job as the artistic director of the Opera Theater Company, Ireland’s national touring opera, before eventually moving to the Danish National Opera in Aarhus, and, later, the Norwegian Opera and Ballet in Oslo.Andrew Mellor, an opera journalist who specializes in the Nordic countries, said that Miskimmon was successful in Denmark, with several innovative productions that became talking points. Her take on Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in Aarhus offered audiences two productions — one traditional, one contemporary — and began each night with a vote to decide which would be staged. Equally attention-grabbing was an opera Miskimmon commissioned there called “Brothers,” about Danish soldiers dealing with post-traumatic stress after fighting in Afghanistan.Her time at Oslo was more “turbulent,” Mellor said. The Norwegian company’s music director, Karl-Heinz Steffens, left before Miskimmon even started, and she “had a fight with its ensemble system” when she wanted to use more guest singers, Mellor said. Amid the conflict, Miskimmon staged several acclaimed productions, including one of Britten’s “Billy Budd” that featured a huge submarine onstage.“She’s no shrinking violet, and when she has an idea she pursues it,” Mellor said.Miskimmon said her “memories of working in Oslo are not ones of turbulence,” and added that, in her opinion, it had been “a very positive working experience.”Whatever happened in Norway, Miskimmon’s experiences of dealing with tough situations will hold her in good stead for her role at ENO, especially given the challenges the company has ahead.At the end of March, the company canceled a production of Michael Tippet’s “King Priam” that had been set to run in the 2022-23 season. Ella Baker, an ENO spokeswoman, said in an email that this was “with financial prudence in mind,” given the ongoing impact of the pandemic.The company also faces perhaps more significant financial challenges. Over the past year, Britain’s government has focused on a program called “leveling up,” designed to boost the fortunes of areas outside London. Although “leveling up” includes all sectors of Britain’s economy, arts funding has been a particular focus. Government subsidies for London-based arts organizations like ENO are set to be cut by a total of 15 percent later this year, so more money can be spent elsewhere. The government has said that some organizations may lose their funding entirely.Allison, the Opera magazine editor, said some British lawmakers have “always had ENO in their sights,” because funding opera is thought to be bad at the ballot box. With the Royal Opera House more prominent, ENO had “always looked vulnerable,” he said.During the hourlong interview, Miskimmon did not seem concerned by that threat, insisting that ENO already had plans to present more work outside London. Since starting at the company, she said she had been discussing how to turn ENO into a “truly national company” that collaborates with regional opera companies to stage major productions.Miskimmon added that she had a favorite saying: “A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.” She had repeated the adage so many times at ENO, including in rehearsals for “The Handmaid’s Tale,” that people must be getting sick of it, she said. But it suited her vision for the company, she added.“It’s about art, and it’s about life,” Miskimmon said. “We’re prepared to take big steps forward, because that’s what opera needs.” More