Teresa Berganza Vargas was born in Madrid on 16 March 1933 and studied piano and voice at the Madrid Royal Conservatory, where her singing teacher was Lola Rodríguez Aragón and where she won first prize for singing in 1954. She gave her concert debut in Madrid in 1955 and her stage debut as Dorabella in Mozart’s Così fan tutte at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 1957, the same year as her first appearance at La Scala. Glyndebourne followed in 1958 as Cherubino, the Royal Opera House in 1959, and the Metropolitan Opera in 1967. She sang widely in Europe and the Americas for more than four decades and later taught at the Madrid Royal Conservatory. She died on 13 May 2022.

Berganza was central to the twentieth-century Rossini revival, restoring leading roles such as Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia and the title role of La Cenerentola to the mezzo-soprano register and helping bring less familiar Rossini operas back into circulation. Her Mozart trouser roles, especially Cherubino, and her later, deliberately unsensational Carmen were widely admired for their vocal agility, stylistic discipline and restraint. She appeared as Zerlina in Joseph Losey’s 1979 film of Don Giovanni and sang at the opening ceremonies of Expo ’92 in Seville and the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. She was also a noted recitalist in Spanish song and zarzuela, and left an extensive recorded legacy.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teresa_Berganza