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PRAGUE (AP) — Soňa Červená, a Czech opera singer best known for her performance as Carmen and more than 110 roles in San Francisco and other opera houses behind the Iron Curtain, has died. She is 97 years old.
The Prague National Theater said Cervina died at a hospital in the Czech capital on Sunday while she was being treated for an unidentified illness.
Born in Prague on September 9, 1925, Cervena was a guest singer at the Unter den Linden Opera in Berlin and at the Berlin State Opera when he moved to West Berlin in January 1962 through Berlin’s last open border crossing. The new Berlin Wall.
“Without freedom, I cannot live and sing,” she once told Czech Public Radio.
The Iron Curtain kept her away from her country for 30 years.
In the West, Cervina is based at the Frankfurt Opera House, but she is known for her guest performances at numerous opera houses in Europe and the United States, including in Vienna, Milan, Paris, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Chicago and Bayreuth and Green De Boon and many others.
She collaborated with conductors such as Raphael Kubelik, Herbert von Karajan, Pierre Boulez, Charles Mackerras and Francesco Molinari Pradelli perform together.
In 1962, Cervina began an 11-year regular collaboration with the San Francisco Opera in her signature role as Georges Bizet’s Carmen.
Others followed, including Azucena in Giuseppe Verdi’s “Il trovatore” and Dame Quickly’s “Falstaff,” Richard Strauss’s “Salome” as Herodias, Igor Stravisnky’s Mother Goose in “The Rake’s Progress,” and many more . In 1980, she returned to San Francisco again.
After retiring from the opera, she moved to the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, Germany, where she worked as an actress with American director Robert Wilson.
After Cervina returned home after the collapse of communism in 1989, Cervina starred in Wilson’s production at the National Theater in Prague. These include Karel Capek’s “The Makropulos Case” and Leos Janacek’s mute character Fate in the opera of the same name. Janacek is one of her favorite 20th-century composers.
On September 29 last year, Cervena performed Jan Zastera’s oratorio “Santa Ludmila” at Rome’s Lateran Cathedral to mark the Czech Republic’s EU presidency.
Among her awards, she received the Gold Medal for the Arts from the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington in 2013 and the Czech State Order of the Order in the same year.
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