June Card

June Card is an American soprano and stage director born on April 10, 1937, in Dunkirk, New York. She trained as a singer under May Browner at the Mannes College The New School for Music and built a career spanning Broadway, opera, concert performance, and stage direction.

Card's professional life began on Broadway, where she performed as an ensemble member in three original productions between 1959 and 1961. Her first credit was the original Broadway production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music, which opened in 1959, and in which she performed through 1960, including on opening night. She subsequently joined the ensemble of Meredith Willson's The Unsinkable Molly Brown for its original run in 1960–1961. Her final Broadway appearance came in the original 1962 production of The Gay Life, in which she was also the understudy to Barbara Cook in the role of Liesl.

Card's transition into opera began in 1963, when she made her professional operatic debut at the New York City Opera as the Southern Girl in the world premiere of Jerome Moross's Gentlemen, Be Seated! She followed that with the role of Valencienne in Die lustige Witwe at the same company, appearing opposite Beverly Sills. She then relocated to Germany, where she held successive engagements at Theater Regensburg from 1965 to 1967 and at the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz from 1967 to 1980. Beginning in 1969 and continuing into the 2000s, she maintained a partnership of more than thirty years with the Oper Frankfurt.

Throughout her operatic career, Card accumulated more than 120 leading roles. Among them were Brünnhilde in Wagner's Götterdämmerung, Leonore in Beethoven's Fidelio, the Marschallin in Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, Violetta in Verdi's La traviata, Marguerite in Gounod's Faust, Minnie in Puccini's La fanciulla del West, and the title roles in Aida, Madama Butterfly, Tosca, Salome, Lulu, Jenůfa, and Káťa Kabanová, among many others. In Frankfurt's production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, staged by Ruth Berghaus and conducted by Michael Gielen, she sang the roles of Freia and Gutrune. In 1980 she performed the Duchess of Parma in Ferruccio Busoni's Doktor Faust at the Oper Frankfurt, in a production staged by Hans Neuenfels with Günther Reich in the title role and William Cochran as Mephistopheles. Her 1985 debut at the Metropolitan Opera came in the role of Marie in Alban Berg's Wozzeck.

Card appeared in several world and national premieres. These included Mark Lothar's Der widerspenstige Heilige in 1968, Hans Zender's Stephen Climax in 1986, John Cage's Europera I and Europera II in 1987, and Volker David Kirchner's Erinys in 1990. In 1988 she sang in the United States premiere of Europera I and Europera II at the Pepsico Summerfare. She also guest-performed at a wide range of major international venues, including the Bavarian State Opera, the Berlin State Opera, the Vienna State Opera, the Hamburg State Opera, the Royal Opera in London, the Salzburg Festival, the Edinburgh Festival, the Holland Festival, La Fenice, La Monnaie, the Liceu, the Palais Garnier, the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, the Teatro di San Carlo, the Staatsoper Stuttgart, and the Zurich Opera. At the 2001 Salzburg Festival, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, she appeared as The Old Burya in Jenůfa, a role she also performed in Frankfurt in 2005. In 2022, Opera Depot released a live recording from Frankfurt of Card as Chrysothemis in Elektra, conducted by Klauspeter Seibel.

In the concert repertoire, Card gave the 1980 premiere of Wilhelm Killmayer's Französisches Liederbuch at the Schwetzingen Festival, performing alongside baritone Philippe Huttenlocher and the Südwestdeutsches Kammerorchester under conductor Paul Angerer. Both Frankfurt and Munich awarded her the title of Kammersängerin. In addition to her performing career, Card has worked as a stage director for opera productions in Germany, France, and the United States, and has been active as a voice teacher and master class instructor.