Woe to anyone who dared show a lack of respect in dealing with their charges. Then you could experience the whole passion of Daphne Evangelatos with which she had delighted the opera audience for decades. Evangelatos headed the musical theater course at the Bavarian Theater Academy August Everding for a long time, and in 1993 she had already become a singing professor at the Munich University of Music and Theater. Now it is part of the training at the academy that the young students appear in staged productions, some of them in the big house of the Prinzregententheater. It could happen that directing projects were shattered by the iron will of Evangelatos, that she did not find some young singers ready for a certain role. And if she found that, then that was right. Evangelatos was a teacher out of conviction – one of her students is the soprano Juliane Banse.
Daphne Evangelatos was born in Athens, her father was the conductor and composer Antiochos Evangelatos. There is some uncertainty about the year of her birth, even in official sources, most likely the year 1946. After her training in Greece and Vienna, she came to the opera studio of the Bavarian State Opera and, after short trips to the state theaters of Kassel and Karlsruhe, was born in 1971 Wolfgang Sawallisch brought into the ensemble. She was permanently engaged until 1983, until 1995 she continued to appear as a guest at the State Opera, as one of Munich’s most popular singers. Her warm, lyrically enchanting mezzo was beguiling, but her voice was agile enough in the high altitudes to take on soprano roles as well.
“I don’t want to lose my European identity as a Greek.”
Her international career began in the 1980s, she sang at the Salzburg Festival and in Edinburgh, at many major theaters in Europe, and worked with the conducting stars of her time such as Carlos Kleiber and Claudio Abbado. With grandeur she embodied roles such as Fenena in “Nabucco” (her last appearance at the State Opera in 1994), Cherubino in “Le Nozze di Figaro” or Waltraute in “Valkyrie”. Her repertoire ranged from operas and oratorios to songs and symphonic music, from Monteverdi to contemporary composers such as Ernst Krenek, Luigi Nono and Hans Werner Henze.
She always remained connected to her Greek homeland, performed at the Epidauros Festival in Athens, sang music by Greek composers, and received the “Grand Music Award” from the “Union of Greek Theater and Music Critics” in 2006. In the run-up to the referendum in 2015, in which the Greeks voted on whether they should accept the conditions imposed by European creditors and thus safely remain in the EU, she said it was better to deal with the difficulties than to leave. “I don’t want to lose my European identity as a Greek.”
On November 18, Daphne Evangelatos died of cancer in Munich.