Anja Silja

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Anja Silja, German soprano, born April 17, 1935 in Berlin.

Anja Silja began her operatic career at a very early age. She sang Rosina in Rossini's Barbiere di Siviglia at the Berlin Städtische Oper in 1956. Her worldwide career took up when she sang the Queen of the Night in Mozart's Magic Flute at the 1959 Aix-en-Provence Festival. She had an affair with Wieland Wagner, who left his family for her and made her one of his New Bayreuth stalwarts from 1960 to Wieland's death in 1966. By then, she was already romantically involved with French conductor André Cluytens, himself a married man to whom she had been introduced by Wieland. Cluytens died in 1967, and she subsequently married German conductor Christoph von Dohnányi.

Among her many roles are Salome and Herodias in Strauss's Salome, Elektra in his Elektra, Isolde in Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Senta in his Flying Dutchman, Elisabeth and Venus in his Tannhäuser, Elsa and Ortrud in his Lohengrin, Freia and Brünnhilde in his Nibelung's Ring, Mère Marie in Francis Poulenc's Dialogues des carmélites, Marie in Alban Berg's Wozzeck, Lulu and Gräfin Geschwitz in his Lulu, Kostelnička in Leoš Janáček's Jenůfa, Emilia Marty in his Věc Makropulos, Fiordiligi in Mozart's Cosi fan tutte, Desdemona in Verdi's Otello, Prince Orlovsky in Johann Strauss II's Die Fledermaus, Anna Glawari in Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow, etc.

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