Felicity Lott: From gawky girl to one of Britain’s most feted sopranos

Felicity Lott abandoned her plans to become a teacher because she couldn’t bear the anxiety of performing in front of an audience. Despite that, she became one of Britain’s best loved sopranos, singing everywhere from Covent Garden to the New York Met, with two dozen appearances at the Proms and 15 seasons at Glyndebourne.

Lott also performed solo recitals at Wigmore Hall for 38 years, though admitted she found the experience as terrifying as having to stand naked on stage. Many performers affect false modesty but Lott seemed genuinely shy and self-deprecating about her talent.

“People got fed up with me apologising the whole time,” she said. There have been few leading ladies to whom the word “diva” applied less.

This may have developed through being a gawky young woman who wore glasses and at nearly 6ft didn’t fit the model of a soprano. Noted for her wit, she would joke that she “often bent my knees for a tenor” and that she wasn’t cast in La Bohème because “you can’t sing ‘your tiny hand is frozen’ when you’ve got a great mitt like I have”.

She had a majestic, silvery voice, though, and didn’t come across as awkward on stage. Oliver Mears, director of the Royal Opera, praised her “authenticity, extraordinary vocal talent and brilliantly understated stage presence”. She was widely known as Flott, a word that her long-term accompanist Graham Johnson observed means stylish in German.

While she was acclaimed for her German roles, especially the Marschallin in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and for singing lieder in recitals, and would tolerate Italian if it was Mozart, her greatest love was always French. She made many recordings of Gounod, Poulenc, Fauré and others. The critic Graham Spicer recalled being told by an elderly French woman at Wigmore Hall that Lott sang the language better than the French do.

“With her you can hear all the words,” she said. Lott was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 2001 to go with the damehood she received in 1996.

Felicity Ann Emwhyla Lott was born in Cheltenham in 1947. Her father was a talented pub pianist and her mother an amateur singer who had ambitions for her daughter. Aged two, Lott recorded Away in a Manger and Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer as a Christmas present for her grandmother, singing in tune. She studied the piano with a stern great-aunt who would rap her across the knuckles with a ruler, and had elocution lessons. She was encouraged to speak French over dinner once a week.

From Pate’s Grammar School she went to Royal Holloway College to read French and Latin, during which time she spent a year at a school in Voiron, in the Chartreuse mountains. Although she enjoyed teaching children how to play cricket, she struggled at the front of the class. While there, she attended the conservatoire in Grenoble, where it was suggested she might have a future in singing.

She went to the Royal Academy of Music, where she was paired with Johnson, beginning a relationship that lasted five decades. He recalled of their first meeting a “tall and beautiful woman with long blond hair, wearing a dress à la Mary Quant and carrying a purple handbag that matched her purple nail varnish,” adding: “From the moment this fair stranger began to sing, I was enchanted to be making music with her.”

While they never won a competition, she got the principal’s prize, although she claimed it was out of sympathy. She was a founding member of Johnson’s group, the Songmakers’ Almanac.

Despite her father’s comment that after her first production “at least you didn’t knock anything over”, a reflection on her awkwardness, she made a well-received professional debut in 1974 as Seleuce in Handel’s Tolomeo and the following year was a celebrated last-minute stand-in as Pamina for the ENO’s Magic Flute. She had to spend so long finding a dress that fitted her that she had no time to feel nervous.

After three rejections to join the Glyndebourne chorus, she was finally offered the role of Countess Madeleine in Strauss’s Capriccio in 1976. After that she appeared at the Sussex opera house almost annually until 1990 and returned in 1998 and 2002. Lott so loved the area that she moved to Newhaven with her husband, the actor Gabriel Woolf, whom she married in 1984. They had a daughter, Emily. She was previously married to the music writer Robin Golding.

Success flowed her way, taking her to Paris, Vienna, Munich and the US. She developed a talent for comic acting, having audiences in stitches when she played the title character in Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène, a role she described as “sexy and wriggly”. She also sang at the wedding of the then Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson in 1986 and at Princess Margaret’s memorial service in 2002 but kept returning to her happiest places at Glyndebourne and Wigmore Hall, where she gave a farewell solo concert in 2013.

Shortly before her death from cancer, she told The Observer that she would be auctioning the couture gowns in her concert wardrobe in aid of a hospice group in Sussex. This will happen in October. At the time of organising the auction she did not realise she would need to use the hospice herself so soon.

“The gallantry with which she prepared for her final journey was all of a piece with the elegance of the rest of her life,” Johnson said. “An awe-inspiring masterclass in grace, charm, bravery and gratitude.”

Felicity Lott, soprano, was born on 8 May 1947, and died on 15 May 2026, aged 79

Photograph by Donald Cooper/Alamy