Career
In 1983, Mattila won the first Cardiff Singer of the World competition. The same year she graduated from the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, where she studied singing with Liisa Linko-Malmio. She then continued her studies with Vera Rozsa in London.
In 1985, she made her Covent Garden debut with the Royal Opera as Pamina in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte.
In 1988, she was seen as Emma in the first ever televised production of Schubert's Fierrabras at the Vienna State Opera.
On March 22, 1990, she made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Donna Elvira in Mozart's Don Giovanni.
In 1994, she made her Spanish debut as Tatyana in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin in Madrid.
In 1996 followed important Paris debuts in Wagner's Lohengrin, Verdi's Don Carlos for which she received the François Reichenbach Prize Orphée du Lyrique and in Richard Strauss' Arabella in 2002.
In 1997, she was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award for her performance of Elisabeth in Don Carlos at the Royal Opera House and awarded the Evening Standard Ballet, Opera and Classical Music Award for “Outstanding Performance of the Year” in this production.
Mattila has won Grammy Awards for "Best Opera Recording" for Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in 1998 and for Jenůfa in 2004.
In 2001 The New York Times chose Karita Mattila as the best singer of the year for her performance in Fidelio at the Metropolitan Opera, and in the same year she was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award “Outstanding Achievement in Opera” for both Jenůfa and Lisa in The Queen of Spades at the Royal Opera House, London.
Dedicatee of Kaija Saariaho's song cycle Quatre Instants, which she created in April 2003 at the Châtelet Theatre and Barbican Centre.
Paris saw her first Salome in 2003 and she was honored with Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government as a recognition of her contribution to the arts.
In 2004, Mattila sang her first New York Salome at the Metropolitan Opera, which together with the subsequent Káťa Kabanová inspired the New York press to write: "When the history of the Metropolitan Opera around the time of the millennium is written, Karita Mattila will deserve her own chapter."
In 2005, she was named Musician of the Year 2005 by Musical America, which describes her "the most electrifying singing actress of our day, the kind of performer who renews an aging art form and drives the public into frenzies."
BBC Music Magazine named Mattila as one of the top 20 sopranos of the recorded era in 2007.
Worldwide audiences saw her Manon Lescaut live in movie theatres in 2008.
On September 23, 2008, she reprised Salome at the Metropolitan Opera, again broadcast worldwide in High Definition on October 11, 2008.
She opened the Metropolitan Opera's 2009-10 season with Tosca, which was seen live in HD worldwide on October 10, 2009.
In 2010 at Opéra National de Lyon, Mattila created the role of Émilie du Châtelet in Kaija Saariaho's monodrama Émilie, which was dedicated to her.
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