After permanent engagements in Hanover and at the Semperoper Dresden at the beginning of her career, Camilla Nylund has become one of the most sought-after singers of her voice type internationally and is a regular guest at all major opera houses and festivals — including the Vienna State Opera, the Bavarian State Opera Munich, the Metropolitan Opera New York, La Scala Milan, the Opéra Bastille in Paris, the Berlin State Opera and the Hamburg State Opera, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Bayreuth and Salzburg Festivals, and in Barcelona, Valencia, Zurich, Helsinki, Cologne, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Tokyo, and San Francisco.

Her repertoire encompasses all the major roles of the classic-romantic repertoire, and Camilla Nylund has repeatedly set artistic standards in particular through her interpretations of Richard Wagner’s roles — Elisabeth, Venus, Elsa, Sieglinde, Senta — and Richard Strauss’s — the Marschallin, Arabella, the Countess in Capriccio, Chrysothemis, the Empress (Die Frau ohne Schatten), Ariadne, Salome, and Daphne. Roles such as Marie (Wozzeck), a Woman (Erwartung), the title roles in Jenůfa and Rusalka, Tatiana (Eugene Onegin), as well as Katerina (Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk), which she sang for the first time to great acclaim in a new production at the Hamburg State Opera in 2023, further enrich the repertoire of this versatile artist. She also enjoys great success in Italian repertoire, especially as Tosca and Turandot, but also as Elisabetta (Don Carlos) and Desdemona (Otello).

Coming from the lyric-dramatic soprano repertoire, Camilla Nylund has in recent seasons successfully taken on her first dramatic soprano roles. After Isolde (Tristan und Isolde), she made her debut at Zurich Opera House in all three Brünnhildes (Siegfried, Die Walküre, Götterdämmerung) and has since performed these roles on the most important opera stages, including La Scala Milan, the Vienna State Opera, the Bayreuth Festival, and the Semperoper Dresden.

For many years now, Camilla Nylund has had a particularly strong association with the Bayreuth Festival. She made her debut on the “Green Hill” in 2011 as Elisabeth in Tannhäuser and has since portrayed nearly all the Wagner roles of her repertoire there, such as Sieglinde (Die Walküre), Eva (Die Meistersinger), Elsa (Lohengrin), as well as Isolde and Brünnhilde, the latter in summer 2026, the year of the Bayreuth Festival’s 150th anniversary.

In the 2026/27 season, Camilla Nylund can be heard in nearly all facets of her extensive repertoire. Rosalinde (Die Fledermaus) at Zurich Opera House at the start of the season will be followed by a guest appearance by Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Shanghai with Der Rosenkavalier. At the Semperoper Dresden, she will appear as Marietta (Die tote Stadt), followed by Die Walküre in Zurich and Tristan und Isolde in Berlin. A special highlight will be a tour by Zurich Opera House with concert performances of Wagner’s Ring, in which Camilla Nylund will sing Brünnhilde in Paris and at Carnegie Hall in New York. In the second half of the season, she returns in the title role of Turandot to the Deutsche Oper Berlin and will be heard as Senta (Der fliegende Holländer) at the Vienna State Opera. The season concludes with a highlight in her native Finland, where Camilla Nylund will make her debut as Maddalena (Andrea Chénier) at the Savonlinna Opera Festival.

Alongside her busy international opera schedule, she is also a regular guest in all major concert halls — the Berlin Konzerthaus and Philharmonie, the Herkulessaal Munich, Munich’s Isarphilharmonie, the Gewandhaus Leipzig, the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the Vienna Musikverein, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, the Tonhalle Zurich, Rome, the BBC Proms, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Boston, and many others.

Camilla Nylund works in both opera and concert repertoire with many of the leading maestros of our time — including Zubin Mehta, Sir Simon Rattle, Christian Thielemann, Andris Nelsons, Daniel Barenboim, Philippe Jordan, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Vladimir Jurowski, Gianandrea Noseda, Riccardo Muti, Marek Janowski, Kent Nagano, Karina Canellakis, Simone Young, Susanna Mälkki, Omer Meir Wellber, and Lahav Shani.

Chamber music and song recitals have always played an important role in her artistic work. Her recital programs are devoted especially to romantic German song literature and to composers from her Scandinavian homeland.

In addition to guest concerts with the Staatskapelle Berlin featuring Strauss’s Four Last Songs at the Alte Oper Frankfurt and in Asia under the direction of Christian Thielemann, she will appear in Salzburg in the 2026/27 season — likewise under his direction — in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Further concert engagements take her to Tokyo and Osaka, where she will sing several gala concerts with a mixed program of opera and operetta arias together with Klaus Florian Vogt under the direction of Fabio Luisi. She has also accepted an invitation from the Paris Opera for a concert of Strauss’s Hymns under the direction of Mikko Franck, will return with the Staatskapelle Berlin for further orchestral songs by Richard Strauss in Berlin, Dresden, and at the Vienna Musikverein, and will return to Bergen for concerts with Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony. Accompanied by Helmut Deutsch, she will also give a song recital in Valencia with a demanding and varied program ranging from Antonín Dvořák and Lili Boulanger to Jean Sibelius and Richard Strauss.

The versatile artist revealed hitherto unknown facets during the coronavirus pandemic. Based on an idea by André Heller, whom she met during a new production of Der Rosenkavalier at the Berlin State Opera, the project “Great American Songbook” was created. In this concert film recorded for ORF III, she performs, together with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Marin Alsop, love songs in the spirit of American show business from the 1930s to the 1970s, in varied arrangements ranging from small combo instrumentation to full symphony orchestra. A DVD and CD of the project were released by Naxos in December 2022. She first sang songs from the “Great American Songbook” before an audience in March 2024 at the sold-out Elbphilharmonie Hamburg.

In recognition of her artistic achievements, Camilla Nylund has received numerous awards. Since November 2022, she has been the recipient of the Lotte Lehmann Memorial Ring — one of the world’s most important honors for opera singers. In September 2022, she was honored with the European Cultural Prize in Zurich’s Tonhalle alongside other distinguished recipients. In recognition of her many years of artistic association, the Vienna State Opera awarded her the title of Austrian Kammersängerin in 2019. The Semperoper Dresden has also named Camilla Nylund a Saxon Kammersängerin. As early as 2000, she received the Semperoper’s Christel Goltz Prize there. In her native Finland, she has been honored with the Finnish State Music Prize (2019), the Grand Cultural Prize of the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland, and the Pro Finlandia Medal, awarded by the President of Finland (2013).

Camilla Nylund was born in Vaasa, Finland. She first studied with Eva Illes and later in the opera and song class at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. Since 2003, she has worked with Irmgard Boas in Dresden. In recognition of her outstanding achievements, she was awarded the Lilli Lehmann Medal by the International Mozarteum Foundation in December 1995.