About

Mezzo-soprano Marie Engle’s career spans opera, art song, chamber music, concert production, improvisation and teaching. Operatically, She made a smash with her debut as Dorabella at OperaDelaware in 2022, where she was lauded for “excellent mugging.” Marie has also graced the stage as Donna Elvira at the Wichita Grand Opera, Ramiro in La finta giardiniera at the Juilliard Opera, and Romeo in I Capuleti e i Montecchi and Mercédès in Carmen at the Chautauqua Institution. Marie was a young artist at Opera Delaware in 2020 after spending two summers at the Chautauqua Voice program. 

Marie sang two summers at the Marlboro Music Festival and School, performing Hindemith, Loeffler, Schumann, Reger, and Brahms in the Potash Hill Concert Hall. In 2019, Marie joined Matthew Polenzani and Julius Drake in their Carnegie Hall recital performance of Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared and later that year, made her orchestral debut of Mahler’s “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” with the Chautauqua Festival Symphony Orchestra. Marie won awards from the Gerda Lissner and Grand Stage song competitions and performed on WQXR’s Midday Masterpieces. In 2018 she sang her first Pierrot Lunaire at Juilliard’s Chamberfest. In 2023, she dazzled Halifax audiences performing the same piece with Inner Space Concerts.

Striving to expand her performances beyond the concert hall and standard recital practice, Marie uses narrative, comedy and improvisation to elaborate art songs concerts in homes, churches and other intimate venues. Her performance of a six movement, improvised chamber piece following excerpts from her own childhood diary was the capstone of her graduation recital at the Juilliard School. In 2021, Marie debuted her musical autobiography, From a Bulb: Regrowth after Loss at the Dyck Arboretum in Hesston, Kansas. This two-act concert-drama, combined monologues, chamber choir, string quartet, musical theater and art song.

Marie completed her undergraduate studies at Northwestern University. Thereafter, she lived in Vienna for two years, studying German and Lieder, and attending the Franz Schubert Institute. Marie then returned to complete her graduate studies at the Juilliard School with Marlena Malas. Paris was her next stop: for a year of French study at the Sorbonne and musical study pianist Susan Manoff. Marie participated in the Academie Royaumont-Orsay in 2022, under the tutelage of Véronique Gens and Manoff, performing at the Royaumont Abbey and the Musée d’Orsay. 

Since 2018, Marie has been teaching singing to a diverse body of students focusing on everything from choral repertoire to Japanese Pop to Greek Orthodox church music. In 2021, Marie’s students, sibling trio Girl Named Tom, won NBC’s reality singing competition The Voice. In her free time, Marie loves to cook, go thrift-shopping, drink fancy Japanese tea and take improv comedy classes.