Jane Eaglen - Background

Background

Jane Eaglen was born 4 April 1960 in Lincoln, England, in the East Midlands. It was a neighbour who first spotted Jane's musical interest, and she started piano lessons at the age of five, continuing until she was sixteen. Her piano teacher then suggested she take singing lessons, and for a year she studied with a local teacher. "One day you will sing Norma and Brünnhilde", her teacher told her to which Jane asked "Are they good?" "Yeah, yeah", her teacher replied, "they're pretty good". Eaglen confesses she didn't know anything about opera back then. She just knew her voice sounded like a choirboy's - sweet and pure - and that the sound wasn't suited to pop music.

After having been turned down by the Guildhall School in London, Jane auditioned at age eighteen for Joseph Ward, the voice professor at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. Ward recognized her potential, and took Ms. Eaglen on as a student. Within weeks Ward had directed her toward the roles such as Norma and Brünnhilde. "He spotted four or five notes in the middle of my voice that sounded like something", Eaglen recalls. "He believed that I'd sing the opera of Bellini and Wagner eventually, so we might as well start finding a way to make my voice travel by beginning to learn the music and the styles. We worked on bits from Bellini and Wagner from the time I was 18. But it was only the bits I could sing - lines from 'Casta Diva' from Norma or Sieglinde's music from Die Walküre, but without the high notes" Said Ward, "It's better to learn the style of what you will sing, even if you don't have the notes".

In 1984 she joined the English National Opera, and spent a couple of years singing the First Lady in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte and Berta, the servant in Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia. Other roles included Leonora in Verdi's Il Trovatore. When she was cast as Santuzza in Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana, audiences went wild.

Eaglen broke into the major opera scene when she was cast as Donna Anna in Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Scottish Opera. She went on to sing Brünnhilde and the title roles in Tosca and Norma with that company. She made her American debut as Norma in 1994 with Seattle Opera as a last-minute replacement for Carol Vaness, and followed, two weeks later with Brünnhilde at Opera Pacific, a last-minute replacement for Ealynn Voss.

Her first Isolde came in 1998 with the Seattle Opera, a company she has returned to consistently. She repeated the role in 1999 in Chicago and in 2000 at the Metropolitan Opera.