Teresa Berganza studied at the Madrid Conservatory under the direction of Lola Rodrígues Aragón.
Beranza made her debut in Madrid in 1955. In 1957 she performed the role Dorabella in Cosi fan 
Tutte at the festival d’Aix-en-Provence and in 1958 she performed at the Glyndebourne Festival in the 
role of Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro In the same year she made her debut at La Scala. 
When performing Teresa Berganza her voice is filled with skill and artistry, demonstrating her full 
understanding of the music’s style. She possesses a rare voice that suits the roles in operas by 
Handel, Purcell, Mozart, and Gluck but she is particularly renown for her performaces in opers by 
Rossini: Rosina in Le barbier de Séville, Cinderella in La Cenerentola, and Isabella in L'italiana in 
Algeri. Her repertoire includes: Zerlina in Don Giovanni, Sesto in La clemenza di Tito, Charlotte in 
Werther, Salud in La Vida breve, Dulcinea in Don Quixote and Carmen in Carmen. 
Teresa Berganza's voice has been heard in the Grand Opera , the Weiner Staatoper, La Scala, 
Covent Garden, Teatro di Roma, Buenos Aires's Teatro Colón, The Metropolitian Opean, 
and opera theaters in Dallas, Chicago, San Francisco, Hamburg, Stockholm where she was under 
the baton of Carlo Maria Giulini, Herbert von Karajan, sir Georg Solti, Zubin Metha, Claudio Abbado, 
Daniel Baremboim, Riccardo Muti, Kurt Adler, Richard Boning, Michel Plasson, Lorin Maazel and the 
scenic precision of Franco Zeffirelli, Rennert Ponelle, and Giorgio Strehler.
Berganza often performs with a chamber orchestra and places special attention on early aria’s and 
the music of Spanish composers.
Teresa is the only female member of academic rank in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de 
San Fernando.
 “One sings as one is: and Teresa Berganza is inwardness, musical delicacy, sensuality and fantasy 
made poetry,” wrote Alfonso Sanz Valdivieso. “That is Berganza's style. A style minted from that day in 
Aix-en-Provence, in which French critics announced the birth of an epoch-making mezzo-soprano; 
confirmed in Salzburg, to reach its peak in Edinburgh; when Teresa assumes the difficult and 
transcendental commitment of facing Carmen, a woman that places freedom and love before her 
own life... After all Teresa Berganza is more than a mezzo-soprano. Teresa is a way of feeling and 
being, a vibrating style full of charisma and the majesty of a goddess.” 



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