It was as the fearless, vengeful warrior Brünnhilde, in Harry Kupfer’s 1988 staging of Wagner’s Ring in Bayreuth, that Deborah Polaski emerged as one of the world’s great dramatic sopranos. Polaski had not quite come from nowhere – there had been appearances at La Scala, Munich, Berlin, and in a handful of smaller houses after completing her studies in America, where she was born – but this was her international breakthrough. Bayreuth took her to its heart: she went on to sing the role there more times than any other soprano since before the Second World War. And in the twenty or so years since her Bayreuth debut, she has sung in all the world’s major opera houses: Paris, London, New York, Chicago, Sydney, Barcelona, Leipzig, Cologne, Dresden, Vienna and Salzburg among them.
Although Brünnhilde was for a while Polaski’s calling-card, she has other big Wagnerian roles in her repertory: the young, deluded Senta, the role with which she made her professional debut in 1976; the capricious Venus; the scheming sorceress Ortrud, determined to bring down Lohengrin; the incestuous Sieglinde, who enjoys Brünnhilde’s protection; the wild Kundry. These are some of the most complex and difficult operatic roles ever written, and Polaski invests each of them with a mixture of steeliness, vulnerability, and lyric beauty.
Polaski is also renowned as one of the great Isoldes of her time, the proud king’s daughter who grapples with duty, then love, betrayal, and bereavement. She first sang the role in 1983, and returned to it in Amsterdam and Stuttgart in the 1980s. Yet it was with the 1995 Dresden performance that she really made it her own. Since then she has sung the role in Salzburg (Abbado), Florence (Mehta), Tokyo (Abbado), Berlin (Barenboim), Barcelona (de Billy), and Hamburg (Young). She has recorded excerpts from the opera on Oehms, and, as with many of her Wagner roles, her performance is captured on DVD.
Wagner is by no means her only repertory. She is an extraordinary Elektra – tough, mad with grief and anger, strangely dignified as she extracts her revenge. Since her role debut in 1984, Polaski has sung Elektra with some of the most important conductors and directors. She has recorded it twice, with Barenboim and Bychkov, and her 180-odd performances of it have been seen in Berlin (where she lives), Paris, Sydney, Munich, Chicago, Dresden, Milan, Florence, Leipzig, Cologne, Dresden, Salzburg, London, Zurich, New York, and Vienna. In recognition of her contribution to Viennese cultural life, in 2003 the Austrian government appointed her Kammersängerin. Other roles include Marie in Wozzeck, the hardnosed Kostelnička in Jenůfa, Cassandre and Didon in Les Troyens, Leonore in Fidelio. To each of these Polaski brings integrity and dramatic flair, completely inhabiting these often damaged characters, extracting every little meaning from the words they sing. She continues to add new roles to her repertoire, including most recently Ariane in Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-Bleue and Die Frau in Schoenberg’s Erwartung.
Her concert work includes performances with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in Carnegie Hall (Maazel), the Berlin Philhamonic (Abbado), and collaborations with Mehta, Levine, Bychkov and Märkel. Her relationship with Barenboim has included concerts with the Staatskapelle Berlin in the Philharmonie, and appearances in Carnegie Hall and in Paris. With Barenboim she has also appeared as a recitalist, although mostly she works with pianist Charles Spencer. Together they have appeared in some of the world’s finest recital halls.
In recognition of her contribution to the cultural life in vienna, she received in 2003 the special title of "Kammersängerin" from the austrian government. In 2010 she received her "Honorary Doctorate in Performing Arts" from the University of Cincinnati.