Frederica von Stade

Frederica von Stade OAL (born June 1, 1945) is a semi-retired American opera singer. Since her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1970, she has performed in operas, musicals, concerts and recitals in venues throughout the world, including La Scala, the Paris Opera, the Vienna State Opera, the Salzburger Festspielhaus, Covent Garden, Glyndebourne and Carnegie Hall. Conductors with whom she has worked include Abbado, Bernstein, Boulez, Giulini, Karajan, Levine, Muti, Ozawa, Sinopoli, Solti and Tilson Thomas. She has also been a prolific and eclectic recording artist, attracting nine Grammy nominations for best classical vocalist, and she has made many appearances on television. A mezzo-soprano equally at home in lyric music and in coloratura, she has assumed fifty-seven operatic roles on stage and eight more in concert or on disc, progressing from minor parts to romantic leads – both male and female – and, latterly, character parts. She is especially associated with the Mozart, Rossini and French repertoires and with contemporary American music, particularly the works of Dominick Argento and Jake Heggie. She has participated in nine world premieres. Among her signature roles are Penelope, Rosina, Angelina, Charlotte, Lucette, Mélisande, Hanna Glawari and Mrs de Rocher, and, in trousers, Cherubino, Hänsel, Chérubin and Octavian. Since stepping back from full-time performing in 2010, she has become increasingly involved in charitable work, principally in aid of ventures fostering musical education or supporting people enduring homelessness. The institutions that she has supported include the Dallas Street Choir, the Young Musicians Choral Orchestra and three entities in Oakland that have now been dissolved—the Sophia Project, the People's Choir of Oakland and St Martin de Porres School. Her divorce from her first husband, Peter Elkus, was important in the development of American family case law, establishing the principle that when the marriages of performing artists are dissolved, the courts can attribute an economic value to their celebrity status and treat it as marital property to be shared with their former spouses.

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