Anja Silja

A native of Berlin, Anja Silja began with vocal studies already at the age of six. At the age of 10, she gave her first concert at the Titania-Palast in Berlin, and many other concerts followed at home and abroad.

At the age of 16, she started her career on stage in Braunschweig with roles like Rosina, Zerbinetta and Micaëla. In 1958, engagements by the State Opera Stuttgart and Frankfurt Opera followed, and in 1960 Wieland Wagner brought her to Bayreuth, where she debuted with Senta. Until Wieland Wagner’s death she sang in almost all of his productions in Bayreuth and Europe the most important Wagnerian roles such as Isolde, Brünnhilde, Eva, Elisabeth, Elsa, Venus. Her repertoire also included roles from Königin der Nacht, Fiordiligi, Konstanze through to Santuzza, Leonore (Fidelio and La Forza Del Destino), Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, Lulu and Marie from Wozzeck, i.e. almost the whole current opera repertoire.

In recent seasons, Anja Silja performed in Vienna, Zürich, Barcelona, Berlin, Hamburg, New York, London, Paris, Aix-en-Provence and at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera mainly in the great female characters of Leos Janacek like Kostelnicka from Jenufa and Emilia Marty from The Makropulos Case. For her interpretations she got the Prize of the Year by England’s critics and the Grammy award. Her repertoire also includes Ortrud from Lohengrin, Amme from Die Frau Ohne Schatten and Klytämnestra from Elektra, as well as Mère Marie and Madame de Croissy from Dialogues Des Carmélites, which she has sung at La Scala Milan under the baton of Riccardo Muti. Equally last year she performed with James Levine and Pierre Boulez in New York, Boston and Aix-en-Provence Erwartung and Pierrot Lunaire by Schönberg as well as Erwartung with Daniel Barenboim and Staatskapelle Berlin at Lucerne Festival and, as a double bill, with Robert Wilson’s The Murder Of Deafman Glance at Berlin State Opera. With phenomenal success she also performed Kostelnicka from Jenufa at the Metropolitan Opera New York and at La Scala Milan, Herodias from Salome with Marc Albrecht and the Philharmonic Orchestra Strassburg in Strassburg and at Salle Pleyel in Paris and Kabanicka from Katja Kabanova at Theater an der Wien.