Dame Felicity Lott (1947-2026)

The radiant English lyric soprano Dame Felicity Lott, who was as captivating in aristocratic Mozart and Strauss roles as she was in operetta, has died aged 79.

Born in Cheltenham in 1947, ‘Flott’ became involved in music at an early age, although she didn’t consider pursuing it as a career until she was in her early twenties. The daughter of keen amateur musicians, she learned the piano from the age of five and took her first voice lessons at twelve, going on to sing in her local church choir and appearing as Aline in a production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Sorcerer during her schooldays.

A gifted linguist and ardent Francophile, Lott studied French and Latin at Royal Holloway as an undergraduate, continuing to sing as a hobby and taking the role of Yum-Yum in a university production of The Mikado. Her degree programme included spending a year as a teaching assistant in Grenoble, where she took singing lessons with Elizabeth Maximovich at the city conservatoire; upon graduation, Lott enrolled at the Royal Academy of Music, where she sang the role of Rosmene in Handel’s Imeneo as part of the institution’s 150th anniversary celebrations and graduated with the Principal’s Prize in 1973.

Song repertoire, particularly French mélodie, played an enormous role in Lott's musical life: her natural communicative flair and facility with languages combined to spellbinding effect in recital, and shortly after graduation she made her solo debut at Wigmore Hall with the pianist Graham Johnson. The following year, Johnson invited her to be a founder member of The Songmakers’ Almanac alongside Ann Murray, Anthony Rolfe Johnson and Richard Jackson; the group first appeared at Wigmore in 1977, and soon established a strong presence across the UK.

The members recorded and performed prolifically together over the ensuing decades, both in recital and further afield: Lott sang Ellen Orford opposite Rolfe Johnson in the title-role on what BBC Music Magazine described as ‘the most beautifully sung and played [Peter] Grimes on disc’ and in 1996 she and Murray shared the honours in 'Rule, Britannia!' at the Last Night of the Proms, bringing the house down with a magnificently camp account of Rossini’s 'Cat Duet' earlier in the evening.

Lott’s early operatic engagements included Cleopatra in the first complete modern performance of Handel’s Giulio Cesare at the Barber Institute and Seleuce in his Tolomeo at the City of London Festival, but her big breakthrough came in 1975 when she substituted for an unwell colleague as Pamina in The Magic Flute at English National Opera. The following year saw her Covent Garden debut in the premiere of Hans Werner Henze’s We Come To The River, and her first engagement for Glyndebourne: Countess Madeleine in Strauss’s Capriccio, as part of the company’s autumn tour.

The latter engagement marked the beginning of longstanding relationships with both composer and company: despite having been turned down for the Glyndebourne chorus on three occasions, Lott scored a palpable hit in Capriccio and was invited to make her festival debut the following year as Anne Trulove in The Rake’s Progress.

She went on to appear at Glyndebourne every season for the next fourteen years, in roles including Mozart’s Fiordiligi, Donna Elvira and Countess Almaviva, Helena in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Elle in Poulenc’s La Voix humaine (where her idiomatic ease with the French language paid real dividends), and Strauss’s Arabella, Christine (Intermezzo), and Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier. From the mid-1980s, Lott and her second husband Gabriel Woolf made their home just up the road from Glyndebourne in the village of Seaford, where she cultivated a beautiful garden and revelled in the proximity to the sea.

In a 2022 interview with Opera News, Lott reflected that she ‘had a whale of a time’ as Octavian (which she sang almost forty times at Glyndebourne), but it was in her subsequent appearances as his older lover that she really broke hearts. An aristocratic but never chilly presence on stage, Lott brought an ideal combination of elegance, sensuality and piquant playfulness to Strauss’s Marschallin, which she sang to great acclaim at houses including Covent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera, and the Wiener Staatsoper; Carlos Kleiber, who conducted her in performances at the latter two houses, considered her his ideal in the role.

The wit, warmth and sheer vocal and physical glamour which made Lott’s Marschallin so special also played out beautifully in operetta: from the 1990s onwards, she had huge successes as Hanna Glawari in Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe, Rosalinde in Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus, and in the title-roles of Offenbach’s La belle Hélène and La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein: the eponymous aristocrat’s breathless paean to the joys of men in uniform became a favourite party-piece, featuring on her programme for the Last Night of the Proms. A lover of musical theatre, she also appeared as former showgirl Heidi Schiller in the National Theatre’s production of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies in 2019.

Lott attributed her vocal longevity to simply choosing her roles carefully, resisting the lure of Italian repertoire and rarely pushing her silvery lyric soprano beyond its natural comfort-zone: her few judicious forays into heavier repertoire included Eva in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger and the indomitable Lady Billows in Britten’s Albert Herring for Glyndebourne in 2002. (Lott ruefully remarked that she sang the latter role ‘with great difficulty’, although The Guardian declared her lady of the manor ‘formidable yet not ridiculous’ and The Independent noted that ‘she surprises with the imperiousness of her chest register’).

Lott was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1996, shortly before her appearance at the Last Night of the Proms; her other awards and honours included the Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and Chevalier de l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur, the title of Bayerische Kammersängerin, a swathe of honorary doctorates, The Wigmore Hall Medal in 2010 (which reflected her work as a trustee as well as her many superb recitals at the venue), and Gramophone’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023.

Although she declined offers of formal teaching positions with institutions, Lott supported countless young singers through her work on competition juries, in masterclasses and on Wigmore Hall’s French Song Exchange Programme; her kindness, charm and readiness to both laugh and cry endeared her to students and colleagues alike.

Lott made her final operatic appearance in 2024, as the Duchess of Crakentorp in La fille du régiment at the Opéra Bastille, and gave her last recital at the Théâtre de l’Athénée in May of last year (where her programme included Poulenc’s La dame de Monte-Carlo and songs by Richard Rodgers, Noel Coward, Cole Porter and Reynaldo Hahn). In an interview with Radio 3’s John Wilson which was broadcast last week, Lott revealed that she had received a terminal lung cancer diagnosis; she died surrounded by family on Friday 15th May. 

Dame Felicity Lott - a selected discography