Michael Borowitz
Mikael Eliasen
Marlena Malas
Craig Rutenberg
Susan Webb

Now in her 15th year on the music staff of the Metropolitan Opera as assistant conductor and prompter, Susan Webb was appointed by James Levine in 1986 for the new production of Der Ring des Nibelungen. Her repertory list of over one hundred operas includes such rarities as The Aspern Papers, which she conducted in San Francisco, Opera by Luciano Berio and We Come to the River by Hans Werner Henze, which she prepared for the Santa Fe Opera and Lear by Aribert Reimann which she prompted in San Francisco.

Her experience with the standard repertory of French, German and Italian operas has been enhanced by fluency in the three languages; she has lived for extended periods in all three countries.  However, in recent years, her interest in and experience with Russian and Czech opera has made her a much-sought-after coach and assistant for Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Prokofiev operas, and the Janácek and Dvorak repertoire.  Santa Fe and the Festival at Aix-en-Provence have used her transliterations for Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades.

Susan Webb has worked with Seiji Ozawa at the Tanglewood Festival on productions of Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades and Mozart’s Idomeneo, and at Symphony Hall on Strauss’s Salome.  Salome was also the opera she helped the artists of the Kirov Opera prepare in German for live television with Valery Gergiev in Oberammergau.  Her long-standing love for Wagner’s operas which she had the opportunity to study in San Francisco as an assistant under the General Directorship of Kurt Herbert Adler, her mentor, flourished in Bayreuth, where she was musical assistant and prompter for the Barenboim / Kupfer “Ring” in 1988-89.

Her close study of the Wagner, Strauss, Beethoven and Mozart libretti made Susan an ideal choice for the task of translating them.  David Stivender, chorus master of the Metropolitan Opera, recommended her to Paul Gruber, editor of the Metropolitan Opera Guild series and Susan translated nine libretti for him.  The Met Guild later published the Mozart libretti in a handsome hardback edition that included Susan’s Don Giovanni, Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Die Zauberflöte.  Conductor Sir Charles Mackerras chose the “Zauberflöte” libretto for the book to be included with his CDs of the opera.

Susan Webb has been recognized as a master teacher, and has been a faculty member of the Lake Placid Institute, the Vocal Arts Symposium, Colorado Springs, and Orvieto Musica/Opera Lirica in Italy.  She has judged, and prepared finalists for the Metropolitan Opera National Council and holds her own with formidable colleagues as a panelist on the Texaco Opera Quiz, a feature of the Met’s Saturday afternoon radio broadcast.

A native of Potsdam, New York, Susan Webb received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Music (Phi Beta Kappa) from the University of Rochester, and her Master of Arts degree in Music from Stanford University.  She studied piano with Jeanne-Marie Darré of the Conservatoire de Musique in Paris, Armand Basile at the Eastman School of Music, and Adolph Baller at Stanford University.  She also worked with the noted accompanist Gerald Moore at the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm, Sweden and studied opera prompting with Vasco Naldini, of the Teatro alla Scala, Milano.