Almost as soon as she was born, Mireille Delunsch started playing piano. After obtaining a degree in musicology, she made her debut as a lyrical soprano in Boris Godounov at the Rhin Opera. She established herself within a large repertoire: from Monteverdi to Varèse, roles like Folie in Rameau’s Platée, important Mozart roles (Pamina, Dona Elvira, Fiordiligi, Vitellia, The Countess), Italian opera such as La Bohème, La Traviata, or Verdi, French opera roles such as Armide or Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride (recorded with Marc Minkowski), Carmen, Pelleas and Mélisande (recorded with Jean-Claude Casadessus), Lalo’s Le Roi d’Ys or Ropartz’s Le Pays (recorded with Jean-Yves Ossonce); German opera with Agathe in Weber’s Der Freischütz, with Elsa in Wagner’s Lohengrin, and with Cleopatra in Haendel’s Guilio Cesare ; and finally Russian Opera with Tatiana in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Oneguine, and Britten’s masterpiece, The Turn of the Screw.
Since 1998, she has been a regular at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence where she has performed in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea directed by Klaus Michael Grüber, in Don Giovanni directed by Peter Brook, in Le Tour d’écrou directed by Luc Bondy, in La Traviata directed by Peter Mussbach, in Wagner’s Das Rheingold directed by Sir Simon Rattle, and more recently in Mozart’s Idomeno directed by Marc Minkowski.
She has also performed four female parts: in Hoffmann’s Tales in Lausanne and Lyon, Mélisande at the Scala in Milan and Manaus ; in Haendel’s Theodora (directed by Peter Sellars) in Strasbourg ; in Don Giovanni directed by Michael Haneke as Louise ; in Wagner’s Lohengrin as Elsa at the Opera de Paris ; and in Strauss’s Arabella at Royal Opera of Walonnie. She has recently started directing plays such as Berlioz’s La mort de Cleopatre. Her most recent interpretations include Peter Eötvös’s Lady Sarashina in Lyon, Antigone at the Monnaie de Bruxelles, The Martyr of Saint-Sebastien in Lucerne, Elettra in Mozart’s Idomeneo at Aix-en-Provence directed by Olivier Py and Queen Margaret in P.Boesmans’s Yvonne directed by Luc Bondy.
