She grew up in Reggio Emilia and studied at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. She sings regularly with Europa Galante, and has appeared at festivals including Tage Alte Musik, Regensburg, Stuttgart Barock, the Bologna Festival and the MITO SettembreMusica, Milan. Recordings include Caldara’s Morte e sepoltura di Cristo under Biondi (Glossa). Her operatic appearances include Smeton (Anna Bolena) for La Scala, Milan, Teatro Regio di Parma and with Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante at Reate Festival, Isaura (Tancredi) for Palau de les Artes Reina Sofía, Valencia, L’Oracolo in Messenia in London and Japan, Enrichetta (I puritani) and Lola for the Teatro Comunale, Florence, Lola for The Royal Opera in London, Claudio (Handel’s Lucio Cornelio Silla) at Vienna’s Konzerthaus (also recorded) and Federica (Luisa Miller) for the Teatro di San Carlo, Naples. Plans include Lola (Rome Opera).

Her future engagements include Miseria e Nobiltà (Gemma) by Marco Tutino at the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genova (world premiere), Cavalleria Rusticana at the Teatro dell’Opera in Roma, Anna Bolena at Teatro Filarmonico in Verona.

With an unique personal narrative beginning in Fairbanks, Alaska, and an international career now spanning more than two decades, mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux beguiles audiences and critics alike with her charisma, dedication, and astounding vocal technique. After noting that she “has stage presence in spades,” Clive Paget wrote in Australia’s Limelight Magazine that Vivica "demonstrated complete mastery with her exemplary phrasing and effortless vocal dexterity. Add to that a voice of great richness, easy at the top, yet with an ability to plunge at will into a beefy bottom register, and you have what can only be described as the real deal."

During 2018, Vivica’s concert and recital itineraries take her to Europe, Asia, and the USA. Duelo Barroco partnered her with Ann Hallenberg, Orquesta Barroca de Sevilla, and Diego Fasolis in performances in Spain of music by Händel and Vivaldi. Concerts featuring music made famous by Farinelli and Senesino, the latter’s music being interpreted by Sonia Prina, transport Vivica to Denmark, France, Germany, and London’s Wigmore Hall. A collaboration with Les Accents and Thibault Noally scheduled to be premièred in Paris’s

Salle Gaveau, Deux genies en Italie explores arias composed by Alessandro Scarlatti and the young Händel. After visits to Chicago and Miami, Vivica ends 2018 in Australia with her rôle début as Mandane in Johann Adolf Hasse’s Artaserse with Pinchgut Opera.

Particular joys amongst Vivica’s recent endeavours are teaching engagements that have allowed her to deepen her commitment to sharing her enthusiasm and expertise with young artists. In 2017, she founded and led the inaugural course of V/vox Academy, in addition to leading well-received masterclasses in Rome and Weimar.

Vivica’s professional début was in 1994, when she interpreted Isabella in a Florentine Opera production of Gioachino Rossini’s L’italiana in Algeri (Milwaukee), a part that she reanimated to great acclaim in 2015 for Opera Fairbanks. Her 1997 début at New York’s Metropolitan

Opera was in her most-performed rôle, Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia, and she returned to the Met for more Rosinas in 2002. In the wake of those milestones, Rossini rôles have taken Vivica to theatres throughout the world. Her Angelina in La Cenerentola has been heard in her native USA in cities including Charlotte (North Carolina), West Palm Beach (Florida), and Washington, DC, and internationally in locations ranging from the prestigious Grand Théâtre de Genève, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, and Wiener Staatsoper to Bremen (Germany), Rieti (Italy), and Santiago (Chile). In addition to Angelina, she has sung another pair of Rossini rôles for Washington Concert Opera, Falliero in Bianca e Falliero (2008) and Arsace in Semiramide (2015), as well as singing music from La donna del lago and Maometto secondo in the 2016 gala concert celebrating WCO’s thirtieth anniversary. Singing both female heroines and male travesti rôles, Vivica has amassed a repertory of nine Rossini characters, one of her favorites among whom, Malcolm in La donna del lago, she revisited in concert at the Salzburger Pfingsfestspiele in June 2017.

Alongside her bel canto credentials, Vivica has been widely lauded for her performances of the music of Georg Friedrich Händel, Antonio Vivaldi, and their contemporaries. A cornerstone of Vivica’s extensive Baroque repertory is the music of Johann Adolf Hasse, whose works she champions in performance and on disc. In 2017, the rôle of Piramo in Hasse’s Piramo e Tisbe took her to Budapest, Vienna, and Valencia for performances with Europa Galante. 2017 also witnessed her rôle débuts as Lepido in Händel’s Lucio Cornelio Silla, presented in concert with Europa Galante at Wiener Konzerthaus in January and recorded and released on CD on the Glossa label; as Eternità and Diana in Francesco Cavalli’s La Calisto at Opéra national du Rhin; and as Arsamene in Händel’s Serse at Opéra de Versailles.

Other recent additions to Vivica’s operatic repertoire include Emilia in Antonio Vivaldi’s Catone in Utica and Junon in Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Actéon, the latter sung in a double bill with Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, presented by Les Talens Lyriques in Beaune, France, Acre, Israel, and Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in September and October 2016.

On the concert platform, highlights of recent seasons include the début of a new programme featuring music composed for the mythological singer Orpheus by Gluck, Händel, Hasse, Porpora, Ristori, and Wagenseil; the continuation of Rival Queens, Vivica’s traversal with soprano Simone Kermes of arias and duets composed for Eighteenth-Century divas Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni, documented on CD by Sony Classical and revived in Turkey, Switzerland, and Malta in January 2017; a return to Chicago in February 2017 for three concerts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; and the much-anticipated première of Vivica & Viardot, a multimedia recital devoted to the life and legacy of Pauline Viardot, in November 2017.

Some of Vivica’s most memorable engagements in recent seasons include participating in the world première of Piet Swerts’s Le sack de Louvain in August 2014, commemorating the centennial of the destruction of Louvain at the start of World War One; a rapturously-received portrayal of Händel’s Giulio Cesare in Shanghai in 2014; her rôle début as Ruggiero in Händel’s Alcina in Moscow in January 2015; singing the title rôle in the modern première of Francesco Cavalli’s Veremonda, l’amazzone di Aragona at the 2015 Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina; her Brisbane Baroque début in April 2016; a tour of Asia with the Academy of Ancient Music in May 2016; and concert performances of Bellini’s I Capuleti ed i Montecchi with Europa Galante and Fabio Biondi, recorded and released on CD by Glossa.

The winner of coveted prizes including a 1997 ARIA Award, New York City Opera’s 2007 Christopher Keene Award, and Pittsburgh Opera’s 2008 Maecenas Award, Vivica is the 2017 recipient of the City of Halle’s prestigious Händel-Preis, which was formally awarded in June 2017. She is frequently featured in broadcasts and CD and DVD/Blu-ray recordings, expanding an impressive discography that documents the whole span of her career to date, and she continues to expand her concert and opera repertories, the latter of which now extends to more than 60 roles.