Sona Cervená

Operatic mezzo-soprano singer and actress Soňa Červená was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia on September 9, 1925. Her parents were imprisoned by the Nazi regime during the Second World War and her mother died in a communist prison in 1948. Soňa Červená turned to acting and singing and began performing in musical comedies at the age of 18. After working to raise money for voice lessons, she took singing lessons before joining an operetta troupe in Prague. She made her debut for the Janáček Opera (Brno) in 1954 and stayed with the opera company until 1957. She came to prominence there for her performance in the title role of Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier. In 1958, she made her Berlin State Opera (Germany) debut in the very same role. Further productions included operas composed by Mozart, Handel, Gluck, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Borodin, and others. In 1961, her performance in Bizet’s Carmen was recorded and the role became one of the defining moments of her career and she went on to perform in the title role more than 100 times. Escaping the Eastern Bloc in 1962, she landed in West Berlin and performed at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and the Oper Frankfurt, before performing in other major European cities such as Milan (Italy), Amsterdam (The Netherlands), and Paris (France). Soňa Červená then traveled to the United States, where she performed on stages in Los Angeles and San Francisco, California and Chicago, Illinois. In the 1960s, she also performed at major festivals in Great Britain – the Edinburgh and Glyndebourne festivals - and in Germany at the Bayreuth Festival. Her repertoire continued to expand throughout the rest of the 1960s and into the 1970s. Soňa Červená retired from the opera stage and moved to Hamburg, Germany in 1989. She turned her attention to acting and appeared in several productions by American stage theater director and playwright Robert Wilson. After the end of the Cold War in 1991, she returned to her home country and began taking roles in theater productions including Čapek's The Makropulos Case, which was performed at the National Theatre in Prague. One of her last public appearances was on September 29, 2022, at the Lateran Basilica in Rome, Italy, where she performed in a production of Dvořák's Saint Ludmila. Soňa Červená died on May 17, 2023, at the age of 97. She left behind a musical legacy that included releases such as her 1960 performance in Bizet’s Carmen (sung in German) as well as Hvězda Opery i Melodramu (2015), Soňa Červená Chante Mahler: Kindertotenlieder (2017), Vycpálek: Sonata in D Major "Lob der Geige" - Pauer: Sonatina for Violin and Piano (2018), and Recital: Ostrčil, Vycpálek, Janáček, Eben (2018).