Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter has performed on the world’s leading opera and concert stages for more than four decades. Her wide-ranging repertoire extends from Baroque, Mozart and Romantic works to contemporary music, song, cabaret and pop, and she has collaborated with conductors including Carlos Kleiber, Claudio Abbado and Giuseppe Sinopoli, as well as artists such as Elvis Costello, Brad Mehldau and Rufus Wainwright.
Among von Otter’s many operatic roles are Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier (the role in which she made her debut at the Royal Swedish Opera in 1988), Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro, the title role in Ariodante, Orfeo in Orfeo ed Euridice and Leonora in Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel, a role she created at the world premiere at the Salzburg Festival. In recent years, she has sung Madame de Croissy in Dialogues des Carmélites at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Marcellina in Le nozze di Figaro at the Bayerische Staatsoper, the Countess in The Queen of Spades at La Monnaie and Adelaide in Arabella at Teatro Real.
Contemporary music has an important place in her artistic career. Composer Mikael Karlsson wrote the song cycle So We Will Vanish for von Otter, and in 2023 she created the role of Gaby in the world premiere of his opera Melancholia at the Royal Swedish Opera. In the 2026/2027 season, she returns to the role when Melancholia returns to the Royal Swedish Opera. She also created the role of Justine in Karlsson’s Fanny and Alexander at its world premiere at La Monnaie in Brussels.
As a concert and recital singer, Anne Sofie von Otter has performed around the world in a repertoire encompassing composers including Bach, Berlioz, Mahler, Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, Stenhammar and Kurt Weill.
Von Otter has an extensive and multi-award-winning discography. For many years, she recorded exclusively for Deutsche Grammophon, including Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn with Claudio Abbado and several Handel operas with Marc Minkowski. Her collaboration with Elvis Costello resulted in the album For the Stars. The album Douce France received the 2015 Grammy Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album.
