Posted April 23, 2016

Posted April 23, 2016

Richard Wagner Award for Waltraud Meier

http://www.mdr.de/kultur/themen/waltraud-meier-erhaelt-richard-wagner-p…

The mezzo-soprano Waltraud Meier receives this year’s Richard Wagner Award of Leipzig. In the view of the Chairman of the Richard Wagner Foundation, Thomas Krakow, Waltraud Meier is “the most important of our time Isolde”. As justification for the award he continued, Meier had rendered outstanding with her artistic work and her whole personality to the music of Wagner. She was a great soprano, vocal intensity clubs with high representational intelligence. Without their “Kundry” in Wagner’s “Parsifal”, the opera world is hardly conceivable. Waltraud Meier will accept the award at a ceremony at the Leipzig Richard Wagner festival days, on May 22 from the hands of Mayor Jung.
Worldwide acclaimed opera singer

The mezzo-soprano Waltraud Meier was born in 1956 in Würzburg, where she got a contract at the opera at 19 years. At 24, she made her international debut in the “Walküre” in Buenos Aires. Later she worked with conductors such as Daniel Barenboim, Claudio Abbado and Christian Thielemann and directors such as Luc Bondy, Harry Kupfer or Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. In addition to operas of Wagner, she sang many more games on CD, as in Beethoven’s “Fidelio”, the “Gurre-Lieder” by Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Strauss’ “Elektra”. For her work Waltraud Meier was awarded many prizes.
The Leipzig Richard Wagner Foundation awards the € 10,000 Richard Wagner Award since 2013. It is a 35 centimeter high sculpture, which is modeled on a designed by Max Klinger monument that was ultimately never completed. Another prize for young artists hits this year to the young bass-baritone Alexandros Stavrakakis.