The Welsh soprano Dame Margaret Price, specialist in Mozart and Richard Strauss, has died aged 69.

Dame Margaret Price has died at her home near Cardigan in Wales aged 69. Her pure, warm, lyric soprano will always be associated with the music of Mozart, a composer whose music ran through her career like a thread. In 1962 she made her stage debut as Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro for Welsh National Opera and, as a young singer at Covent Garden later that year, she took over the role from an ailing Teresa Berganza: her career took off overnight. Her first major recording was as Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte under Otto Klemperer (EMI). And she would go on to perform and record the roles of the Countess (Figaro), Pamina (Die Zauberflöte) and Donna Anna (Don Giovanni). She also sang the soprano part on Peter Schreier’s Gramophone Award-winning recording of the Requiem (a disc that had critic Robin Golding commenting that she sang the part “more beautifully than I can remember ever hearing it”).

Though her career took to the world’s great houses, her dislike of travel meant that she always preferred to make her base with a particular company, first Covent Garden, then the Cologne...