Gundula Janowitz must be one of the greatest singers of the century, and has a particularly devoted following of fans, not to mention her own website. She is even mentioned in the first line of a novel, entitled Of Dismal Ravens Crying (quotation from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas).

A friend of mine once compared Janowitz's voice to someone playing a saw with a violin bow, and she has since been known as 'the saw lady'. This, in case you haven't realised, is meant entirely as a compliment (if you've never heard anyone play the saw, it makes a sort of otherworldly, ethereal singing noise). She has a uniquely pure, instrumental timbre to her voice which is quite unlike anyone else's and, whereas the voice isn't particularly large, it is still seamless down to the lower register where so many light sopranos turn chesty. Janowitz is one of the handful of singers who can cope successfully with the role of Ariadne. She has a way of reaching up and quietly stroking her high notes which you never tire of - her final scene on Karl Böhm's recording of Capriccio demonstrates this beautifully, and her whole performance on this disc is as near to flawless as you're ever likely to get. Some have found her singing cool and uninvolved, and it is true that she isn't a great vocal actress, but it seems to be an inevitable criticism of any extraordinarily beautiful voice. Her performances are not devoid of emotion at all, and probably the worst criticism that can be levelled against her is that her diction is sometimes a little indistinct.

Janowitz was basically born to sing Strauss, which she makes sound effortlessly easy. She also sang Mozart and Wagner though. She was first acclaimed internationally following her recording of Pamina under Klemperer (on which recording Lucia Popp also launched her recording career as the Queen of the Night), and was a successful Countess, Donna Anna and Ilia. Her first Wagner role was as a flowermaiden in Parsifal, but she later went on to sing Sieglinde for Karajan. This might seem dangerously heavy for her, but unusually Karajan seems to have shown some sensitivity (his studio account of Die Walk¨re has been dubbed the 'chamber music Ring' because of the lightness of his orchestral accompaniment) and did not persuade her to force the voice or undertake roles that were too much for her (unlike he did with so many others, e.g. Katia Ricciarelli, José Carreras, Dunja Vejzovic etc.). Other roles she undertook include Leonore, Arabella, the Empress, Eva and the Marschallin.

Janowitz also sang quite a lot of Bach and Haydn. I don't find her well-suited to music such as The Creation or Bach oratorio, however. One thing she didn't really have was agility, and as soon as she encounters runs she tends to slide around. In The Creation there is one difficult place where all the soloists sing long scale passages over the chorus, and on Karajan's recording, where Janowitz is the soprano soloist, he has to slow down to a ridiculous tempo to enable her to sing it. It's a very small criticism of a great singer though.