Mignon Dunn
Mignon Dunn
Adjunct Professor, Voice
Mignon Dunn has sung the leading mezzo-soprano roles in the most important opera houses of the world. In Europe, she has sung at La Scala (Milan); the Vienna Staatsoper; London's Royal Opera, Covent Garden; the Paris Opéra; Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre; Teatr Wielki (Warsaw, Poland); the Hamburg Staatsoper; the Deutsche Oper Berlin; and the opera companies of Frankfurt and Dusseldorf. In South and Central America, she has performed at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, Argentina; the Opera Nacional in Chile; Mexico City's Bellas Artes; and the Opera of Puerto Rico. In Canada she has performed with the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto and the Opéra de Montréal. In the United States she sang at the Chicago Lyric Opera, the San Francisco Opera, the Santa Fe Opera, the Opera Company of Boston, the Opera Theater of Detroit, and the New Orleans and Miami operas. At the Metropolitan Opera in New York she sang more than 650 performances over a span of 35 years.
Dunn is known especially for her portrayals of the dramatic Italian roles such as Amneris in Aida, Azucena in Il trovatore, Eboli in Don Carlo, both Laura and La Cieca in La gioconda, the Princess in Adriana Lecouvreur, and Santuzza in Cavalleria rusticana. Her French repertoire includes Dalila in Samson et Dalila and Giulietta in The Tales of Hoffmann as well as Dulcinée in Don Quichotte and Carmen, which she has sung over 400 times in four different languages.
Her German repertoire has embraced the leading mezzo roles in different productions of Wagner's Ring, Ortrud in Lohengrin, Kundry in Parsifal and Venus in Tannhäuser. She has also given many performances of Strauss' operas: Klytämnestra in Elektra, Herodias in Salome, and the Nurse in Die Frau ohne Schatten. She has sung Kostelnicka in Jenufa, Jezibaba in Rusalka, and Kabanicha in Katya Kabanova in Czech as well as Marina in Boris Godunov in Russian. Her Spanish repertoire includes Goyescas and La vida breve.
Dunn has performed recitals all over Europe and the United States and has sung with many major symphony orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic and the orchestras of Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Cincinnati, Hamburg, and Vienna. Her varied repertoire has especially featured the works of Mahler, Ravel, and Verdi. She has recorded for EMI, Erato, and Deutsche Grammophon. She has conducted master classes extensively in the United States, Germany, Austria, Italy, Israel, China, and Japan.
She is widely known as a professor of voice and has taught on the faculties of the University Texas at Austin, the University of Illinois, Northwestern University, Brooklyn College, and for many years at Manhattan School of Music.
Dunn was married to the late conductor Kurt Klippstatter and lives in New York.
