Soprano who brought sensuality to her roles as Lulu and Salome
KARAN ARMSTRONG, who has died aged 79, was an American-born operatic soprano known as “the girl of the golden west”; she played the title role in Berg’s Lulu at the Royal Opera House in February 1981, the first time the full three-act version completed by Friedrich Cerha had been seen in this country.
It made for a long and taxing evening, which she described as “like singing three Salomes on the same night and then Brünnhilde on top”. Yet it resolved Berg’s story of how a mysterious young woman falls from being a well-kept mistress in Vienna to street prostitute who dies in London at the hands of Jack the Ripper.
Karan Armstrong’s powerful and virtuoso performance in this fiendishly difficult role, performed in part wearing very little clothing, was rewarded with copious cheers on opening night, not least because she had hurt herself in rehearsals and suffered further injury during the first act. However, according to Norman Lebrecht’s history of the Royal Opera, she did neither herself nor the opera any favours by telling a newspaper that Lulu was a girl “who liked her orgasms”.
Her comparison of Lulu with Salome was appropriate given that she made several appearances around Europe as the latter. At times her emphasis on the depraved girl’s unbridled sensuality, which often involved removing almost everything in the Dance of the Seven Veils, triumphed over her vocal delivery.
“The eye, it is said, wants its due, and that is only right, but on condition that the ear does not suffer too much,” said Opera magazine after her performance in Genoa in 1980.
Karan Armstrong was born in Havre, a tiny town in Montana, on December 14 1941; her mother, Pearl, was a teacher and she had no memory of her father, Matthew, a tenor who was killed in the Second World War. She played clarinet and piano but switched to singing at Concordia College, Minnesota. “That got my piano professor mad,” she said.
She studied with the German soprano Lotte Lehmann in Santa Barbara, California, paying her way by working as a bookkeeper. She gave that up when she got her first role, as Gretel in Hänsel und Gretel for a local opera guild, before touring as a soloist with the Roger Wagner Chorale then making her professional debut in 1965 as Musetta in Puccini’s La bohème in San Francisco.
After winning the Metropolitan Opera’s annual auditions in 1966 she had small parts with the company in New York in Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten and Verdi’s
Rigoletto, though she never graduated to major roles and did not return after 1969.
The Met’s loss was Europe’s gain and in 1974 she made her European debut as Micaela in Bizet’s
Carmen in Strasbourg. She returned to Covent Garden for Wagner’s Ring Cycle in 1991, singing Sieglinde in
Die Walküre and Gutrune in
Götterdämmerung, and was often heard in Los Angeles.
Karan Armstrong’s repertoire included many of the great female figures of 20th-century opera, including Mariette in Korngold’s Die tote Stadt, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtensk and Janacek’s powerful women in Katya Kabanova, Jenufa and The Makropulos Affair.
She was also no stranger to the 19th-century repertoire, such as Beethoven’s Fidelio, nor to more recent works by Giuseppe Sinopoli and Luciano Berio. As recently as 2010 she tackled the Queen of Hearts in Unsuk Chin’s
Alice in Wonderland in Geneva.
In 1980 Karan Armstrong married Götz Friedrich, the German director and head of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. He died in 2000 and in 2015 she poignantly took the role of Larina in his production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, her opening line, “I too used to sing”, drawing an almost audible smile from the audience. They had a son, Johannes.