Sound bites.(Biography)

Robin Johannsen says her favorite color these days is red. The Philadelphia-born soprano, who sings Papagena at Deutsche Oper Berlin this month, explains that as a DOB fest contract artist, "I get my schedule very late. The theater needs to know where we are all the time, so we need a color-coded permission slip to leave town. There are green ones and yellow ones, but it's the red ones that mean you are really free. I try to make sure that mine are always red!" Johannsen will need some of those red permission slips this spring, when she'll juggle Bayreuth rehearsals for the Shepherd in Tannhauser and for Siegfrieds Forest Bird with an increasingly busy schedule in Berlin, where she lives with her husband, Rem, an American schoolteacher.

Johannsen, who "never considered" a European career during her student days at Carnegie Mellon and Cincinnati Conservatory, calls her engagement by Deutsche Oper Berlin "a total fluke." A New York audition for the American Berlin Opera Foundation won the twenty-something Johannsen a berth as a DOB stipendiatin (young artist) for the 2002-03 season, but her high-energy performing style and pearly lyric-coloratura voice soon caught the eye and ear of Generalmusikdirektor Christian ...