Carola Darwin

Carola Darwin combines a career as an opera and concert singer with research and writing about music. She took her first degree in Natural Sciences (Chemistry) at Cambridge, before gaining an M Mus (Perf.) in singing from the Royal Northern College of Music. At the Oxford Lieder Festival 2019, she premièred Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful: a song-cycle on texts about evolution and the environment, commissioned with funds from the Arts Council.

Operatic roles include Fox (The Cunning Little Vixen, Surrey Opera), Countess (The Marriage of Figaro, Opera! Festival, Netherlands), Berta, (The Barber of Seville, Opera East), Sofia (I Lombardi, UCOpera), Annina (La Traviata, Hampstead Garden Opera). She has also sung Elettra (Idomeneo), Governess (The Turn of the Screw) Mimi (La Bohème) Donna Elvira (Don Giovanni), Pat Nixon (Nixon in China). Her multi-media one-woman show The Vienna Show: Music and Gender in fin-de-siècle Vienna has been seen in Winnipeg, Canada and also in London, Sheffield and Liverpool. Concert work includes a series with the Hermitage String Quartet, Héloise in Maconchy’s Héloise and Abelard and solos for Park Lane Group’s Celebration for Elizabeth (Purcell Room). 

Carola works at the Royal College of Music, lecturing in the History of Music. Her research interests include history and theory of opera, music and gender, the relationship between musicology and performance and the history of vocal music in Vienna and London in the twentieth century. In 2018 her research into the Viennese composer Johanna Müller-Hermann was chosen by BBC Radio Three for their project Five Women Composers.