There is a moment in Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss when time seems to stand still. The Marschallin looks at herself in the mirror, remembers the girl she once was, and understands, without fuss, that youth is slipping away. Felicity Lott —Flott to her colleagues and friends— sang that first-act monologue like no other soprano of her generation: with restraint, irony, and a tearless melancholy, at that exact point between elegance and acceptance that seemed written for her. Her performance was immortalized in the 1994 Vienna filming directed by Carlos Kleiber. And the Madrid audience will hardly forget her debut at the Teatro Real with that character, in March 2000.
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Just days before her death, in an interview with John Wilson for This Cultural Life on BBC Radio 4, Lott announced with the same serenity as her Marschallin that she was suffering from terminal cancer. She asked that no one be sad, because she had had a “great time.” She died on the night of May 15 to 16, a week after turning 79. With her passes one of the most beloved sopranos of her time and, above all, one of the great Mozart and Strauss interpreters of the last half-century.
Felicity Ann Emwhyla Lott was born in Cheltenham on May 8, 1947, in a modest but stimulating musical environment. Her father, an accountant, played piano in pubs and wrote sketches for post-war variety companies; her mother, an amateur singer, performed Madama Butterfly in local groups. Before deciding on singing, Lott studied French and Latin at Royal Holloway, where she graduated in 1969, and spent a year at the Conservatory of Grenoble.
That philological foundation, uncommon among singers, explains an authority over the mélodie and the Lied that few Anglo-Saxon colleagues of her generation would reach. Already at the Royal Academy of Music she won the Principal’s Prize and debuted at the 1974 City of London Festival as Seleuce in a Tolomeo by Handel, which she herself would recall without special enthusiasm.
The real beginning came the following year, when the English National Opera entrusted her with Pamina in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. In 1976 she participated in the world premiere of Hans Werner Henze’s We Come to the River at London’s Covent Garden. And after three consecutive rejections to join the Glyndebourne chorus, the festival offered her the Countess in Richard Strauss’s Capriccio for a tour.
Thus began a relationship with the Sussex festival that would last decades and grant her the roles where she forged her profile: the Countess in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Fiordiligi and Donna Elvira; Anne Trulove in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress; Helena in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and, in Strauss, Christine in Intermezzo, Arabella, and the Countess in Capriccio herself. Also Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier —a mezzo-soprano role— before becoming the reference of her time as the Marschallin.
Because if there is one character that already belongs to Felicity Lott, it is the Marschallin. She debuted it in 1986, at the reopening of La Monnaie in Brussels, with a production by Gilbert Deflo and musical direction by John Pritchard. A year later, during the dress rehearsal at Covent Garden, a man in an anorak came to her dressing room at the end of the first act: it was Carlos Kleiber, who came to congratulate her and propose they do the opera together. He fulfilled his promise at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1990 and at the Vienna State Opera in 1994, where it was filmed alongside Anne Sofie von Otter, Barbara Bonney, and Kurt Moll. She was the legendary Austrian conductor’s favorite Marschallin, and that interpretation remains one of the most valuable audiovisual documents of Richard Strauss’s most famous opera.
With equal naturalness, she could tackle Offenbach the next day —La belle Hélène or La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, the latter with a stage grace that reclaimed the lyrical dignity of operetta—, Rosalinde in Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus, or Hanna in Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow at Glyndebourne, and in the subsequent live recording for EMI/Warner Classics with Franz Welser-Möst and Thomas Hampson.
Her expressive range also reached more dramatic territories, such as Blanche in Dialogues of the Carmelites and, above all, the telephone monologue La voix humaine by Poulenc, where her theatrical instinct, almost cinematic, found an ideal outlet. She demonstrated this at the opening of the 2005-2006 season at the Teatro de la Zarzuela, in a production by Gerardo Vera that also included Cocteau’s theatrical version starring Cecilia Roth.
And then there was the recitalist. Lott formed with pianist Graham Johnson, her accompanist since her student days, one of the most prolific partnerships in the lieder repertoire. Together they founded The Songmakers’ Almanac in 1976 and recorded a series of albums for Hyperion dedicated to Chabrier, Fauré, Gounod, Hahn, Poulenc, and Schubert. For Chandos she recorded Lieder by Strauss and Wolf, as well as the Four Last Songs with Neeme Järvi that respected the original manuscript order. Her voice, lyrical and full-bodied but never opulent, was supported by impeccable text articulation and a musical intelligence that cannot be taught.
Spain knew her well. Besides her debut at the Teatro Real in 2000 as the Marschallin, she returned to that coliseum eleven years later with a recital entirely dedicated to the universe of Jacques Offenbach. At the Teatro de la Zarzuela she opened the 2005-2006 season with Poulenc and experienced some of her most memorable nights within the Lied Cycle of the CNDM, where she performed five times between 1996 and 2006. This was the case in 2002 with Night and Day, a program that covered all hours of the day in 24 songs, from Hector Berlioz and Robert Schumann to Maurice Yvain and Cole Porter, which was also heard at the Liceu in Barcelona.
In her later years, she devoted herself to teaching. She gave masterclasses at the Victoria de los Ángeles Foundation, the Museu de la Música, and Sant Pau in Barcelona, as well as at the Madrid Superior School of Singing, focusing precisely on Mozart, Strauss, Offenbach, and the Lied. Her last stage appearance was as the Duchess of Crackentorp in Laurent Pelly’s production of Donizetti’s La fille du régiment at the Paris Opera in October 2024, at 77 years old and with an intact comic vitality.
Dame of the British Empire since 1996, Bayerische Kammersängerin since 2003, officer of the Legion of Honor, and honorary doctorates from Oxford, London, Leicester, Sussex, Glasgow, and the Sorbonne, Lott was married to actor Gabriel Woolf and had a daughter, Emily. She leaves a fundamental discographic legacy in Strauss, Mozart, Britten, Poulenc, German Lied, and French mélodie. But perhaps she is best defined by the phrase with which she summarized her life to the BBC, near the end: how lucky I have been.
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