When asked a while back what the secret of her success was, Doris Soffel attributed it to her glowing health, her cool disposition and not taking things too personally. Add to these the qualities that Soffel omitted out of modesty – her ability to gauge her own abilities, the enormous energy she brings to her craft, her powerful onstage presence and an unmistakable voice that is as sturdy as it is versatile - and we have all the ingredients of a career that has lasted half a century. Only recently, Soffel demonstrated once more to audiences at the Deutsche Oper Berlin that she has lost none of her virtuosity: her Madame Louise in Detlev Glanert’s OCEANE and her Adelaide in Strauss’s ARABELLA were nuanced character studies that never once came close to making clichés of her subjects. In the same way that she conferred a distinguished golden-years melancholy on the hotel proprietor in Glanert’s opera, so she made of her Countess Waldner not a crotchety old matron but a woman whose worry on her daughter’s behalf has its quirky but also serious sides. We could go on and on in this vein, not least because Soffel, in the course of her fifty years on stage, has criss-crossed the entire repertoire of works for mezzo-soprano, regardless of whether sung in an operatic, concertante or lieder setting. Mozart, Rossini, breeches roles like her Octavian in ROSENKAVALIER that were a feature of her early years, Verdi, Wagner, and on to the great ‘grande-dame’ roles of the likes of Strauss’s Clytemnestra and Herodias, both of which she brought to the Berlin stage. The Deutsche Oper Berlin was an address to which she has returned regularly ever since her first appearance as Octavian in 1984. We remember her searingly intense portrayals of Judith in Bartok’s BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE, directed by Götz Friedrich, and her Kundry, the nurse in THE WOMAN WITHOUT A SHADOW. Doris Soffel, 75 years old? Hard to fathom, really. We send her our very best wishes and look forward to seeing her again soon.