Soprano Anne Schwanewilms emerged in the late 1990s as a promising young singer in dramatic roles. She has sung major Wagner parts and has become known as an important interpreter of the music of Richard Strauss. Schwanewilms was invited to the Bayreuth Festival in 1996 to appear in Wagner's Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung. Schwanewilms is an enthusiastic interpreter of lieder by Strauss and others, working with top-notch accompanists such as Malcolm Martineau and Roger Vignoles. Schwanewilms appeared on several operatic recordings in the late 1990s and made her solo debut in 2000 in the cantata Around the Curve of the World by Francis Grier. Her debut at New York's Metropolitan Opera came in 2013 in Strauss' Die Frau ohne Schatten. By that time, she had added major Strauss operatic roles to her repertory. In 2021, she appeared on a recording of Mahler's Symphony No. 8 ("Symphony of a Thousand").