Biography
Elisabete Matos was born in Caldas da Taipas, Guimarães, Portugal and she began her first musical studies in at the Conservatório de Música Calouste Gulbenkian de Braga. Firstly she started to study violin and then singing, alongside.
After she finished the Conservatory, Matos won a scholarship from the renowned Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation which allowed her to finish her studies in Madrid, Spain.
A second place in a European Singing Contest made her be noticed and her international career was launched by the roles of Donna Elvira in Mozart's opera Don Giovanni and Alice Ford from Verdi's Falstaff at the Hamburg Opera.
Shortly after that, in the year of 1997, she made a triumphal debut in Madrid at the reopening of the Teatro Real as an opera house, interpreting the leading role of Marigaila in the opening of Divinas Palabras, by Antón García Abril, with Plácido Domingo in the tenor part. Her performance impressed him very much and he invited her to sing with him Massenet's Le Cid (Chimène) and Dolly from Sly, by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari with José Carreras.
After all these successes, Elisabete Matos has sung in many major opera houses around the world, like the Gran Teatre del Liceu, La Fenice, Teatro Nacional de São Carlos (Lisbon), Teatro Real, La Scala, Maestranza de Sevilla, Teatro Regio di Torino and the Teatro di San Carlo (Naples). She has made appearances too at the Macerata Festival and the Mérida Festival, Japan, Washington, Chicago and all around Spain.
In 2001, Matos participated in the commemorations of the centenary of Giuseppe Verdi's death, singing again with Plácido Domingo, José Carreras and other names, under the musical direction of Zubin Mehta, in Rome. Currently she lives in Madrid and is considered the greatest and most internationally known Portuguese opera singer.
In January 2009 she sang the title role of La Gioconda in Tokyo for the Fujiwara Opera.
Elisabete Matos portrayed Minnie in two performances of Puccini's La Fanciulla del West at the Metropolitan Opera during the 2010-2011 season. She received excellent reviews.
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