Elīna Garanča

Elīna Garanča (born 16 September 1976) is a Latvian mezzo-soprano. With a musical family background, she began to study singing in her hometown of Riga in 1996 and continued her studies in Vienna and in the United States. By 1999 she had won first Place in a significant competition in Finland and had begun a career in Europe. Worldwide engagements quickly followed her 2003 Salzburg Festival appearances.

Elīna Garanča was born in the Latvian city of Riga into a musical family: her father was a choral director, and her mother Anita was a lieder singer, a professor at the Latvian Academy of Music, an associate professor at the Latvian Academy of Culture, a vocal music teacher at the Latvian National Opera, and also a private voice tutor. Her brother Jānis (sometimes spelled Jaanis) Garančs, three years older than Elīna, started out in music studies, but is now an artist and consultant working with interactive computer-generated visual media. Since 2015 she has been continuing her vocal development with voice teacher Dale Fundling.

She entered the Latvian Academy of Music in 1996 to study singing with Sergej Martinov. She continued her studies in Vienna with Irina Gavrilovici and in the United States with Virginia Zeani. Garanča began her professional career at the Meiningen Court Theatre in Meiningen, Germany, and later worked at the Frankfurt Opera. In 1999, she won the Mirjam Helin Singing Competition in Helsinki, Finland.