Deborah Voigt

Deborah Voigt (born August 4, 1960) is an American dramatic soprano who has sung roles in operas by Wagner and Richard Strauss.

Debbie Joy Voigt was born into a religious Southern Baptist family in 1960 and raised in Wheeling, Illinois, just outside Chicago. At the age of five, she joined the choir at a Baptist church and began learning the piano. Her mother sang and played piano at church while her two younger brothers sang in rock music bands. Those early experiences in church inspired her interest in music. When she was 14, her family moved to Placentia in Orange County, California. It was traumatic to Voigt, then in her teens, to adjust to Southern California, "land of endless sunshine and impossibly perfect bodies."

She attended El Dorado High School, where she was a member of El Dorado's Vocal Music and Theater programs, starring in musicals including Fiddler on the Roof, The Music Man and Mame. At that time, Voigt recalled in an interview, she did not seriously consider becoming an opera singer and was unaware of the existence of the Metropolitan Opera. Upon graduation in 1978, she won a vocal scholarship funded by the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California so that she could enroll in the voice program at California State University, Fullerton, where she met the voice teacher Jane Paul Hummel, under whom she trained for about eight years. Voigt was the finalist of the Met National Council Auditions for Young Singers in 1985. She won awards from many prestigious singing competitions (see below) and made her Carnegie Hall debut in 1988. Named an Adler Fellow, she apprenticed at San Francisco Opera's Merola Program for two years, studying seven major roles. There, she also took a class from Leontyne Price, the internationally acclaimed, American soprano.