AMERICA’S TOP OPERA PERFORMER, MARIA DIES AT 71 IN DETRIOT

MARIA EWING

 “The voice reaches a certain peak in your mid-thirtiess and from then on is the real singing. That’s when the real life happens, too,” Maria Ewing once told the Los AngelesTimes. 

“As your life progresses, it affects your work. Whatever emotion you’re going through, you can use all of it. I think that’s what theater is about.”

One of the most charismatic and versatile opera singers, Maria Ewing noted for her capability of summoning beguiling comic charm or dramatic intensity with equal authority, is dead. 

Maria reportedly died at home, in her native Detroit, at 71 years of age. Detriot sources say.

One of her generation’s best particularly, Maria Ewing made her debut in her native city of Detriot in 1970, as Rosina in an English-language Barber of Seville, the first full-length production by what would become Michigan Opera Theatre.

Growing up, her family was steeped in music, her father playing piano and her mother singing. (She was Dutch, and he was African–American, the son of a former slave.) “We’d all dance around the room when he was playing,” Ewing told the Los Angeles Times. “Music was always a part of my life. I didn’t wake up one morning and say I’m going to be a singer of opera. It came to me. I didn’t go to it.”

As a teenager, Maria met James Levine at music summer camp, and after high school, she studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music. She performed with Levine at the Ravinia Festival in 1973, and she made her Met debut in 1976, as Cherubino in Le Nozze di Figaro. 

Over the next decade, Maria Ewing sang seventy-eight times with the Met, in New York. And, on tour as Blanche de la Force in the house debut of Dialogues des Carmélites (her most frequent role there, assumed thirty-two times), Dorabella, in a new production of Così Fan Tutte, Rosina in Barbiere, Zerlina in Don Giovanni, The Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos and Carmen.

That last role began to cause some tension between her and Levine. 

Her performance, in a new production in 1986 staged by her husband, Peter Hall, was panned. OPERA NEWS reported Ewing’s singing was “willful, distorting the line, eschewing anything sensual in her delivery, stressing rather growls, shrieks and crooning in alley-cat fashion—an Édith Piaf-style cabaret Carmen.” The 1987 television broadcast of the Hall staging, originally planned for Ewing, was given instead to Agnes Baltsa. That was “a craven, cowardly act,” Hall said. After another run as Blanche de la Force in the spring of 1987, Ewing took a break with the Met.

In 1979, when she was at Glyndebourne to sing Dorabella, Ewing had met Hall, the director. They fell in love, despite Hall’s being married, and, after his divorce in 1981, Ewing became his third wife on February 14, 1982. That year they had a daughter, the actress and director Rebecca Hall. The couple separated in 1986 and divorced in 1990. 

After her break with the Met, Ewing found success with Los Angeles Music Center Opera, for which she sang a Salome in 1986 that was as celebrated as her Met Carmen had been criticized. The New YorkTimes declared Hall’s production ingenious (after its 1989 revival). “But its real fame derives from Ms. Ewing’s striking singing and acting, along with the notoriety of her Dance of the Seven Veils. She carries the dance to its logical conclusion of full-frontal nudity.” (Hall had suggested she wear a G-string. “But I think that’s dishonest, and I think it’s vulgar,” she told the BBC.)

The production was eventually released on DVD. Ewing leaves behind about two dozen recordings, ranging from Dido and Aeneas to Pelléas et Mélisande, Don Giovanni to Andrea Chénier, Carmen to Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Her Habanera, recorded in Glyndebourne in 1985, is certainly eyebrow-raising, but decades later refreshingly so. It’s excitingly naturalistic, earthy, a little sarcastic and world-weary, a welcome shock to the era’s clichés. The voice jazzily swoops around the line, reinterpreting the score without violating it.

She had more success in Los Angeles, including Tosca, before making up with Levine. The two bumped into each other at Salzburg in 1991, “and all the old warmth was there,” she later told OPERA NEWS. “My heart jumped with real happiness when we met again.” Ewing returned to the Met in December 1993 as Didon in six performances of Les Troyens, conducted by Levine. The next season she sang the title role in the house debut of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. She performed “My man’s gone now,” from Porgy and Bess, at Levine’s 1996 twenty-fifth anniversary gala and then ended her Met career as Marie in a new production of Wozzeck, paced by Levine, in February 1997. She largely retired thereafter, remembered well for her compelling performances. 

“The voice reaches a certain peak in your mid-thirtiess and from then on is the real singing. That’s when the real life happens, too,” she once told the Los AngelesTimes. “As your life progresses, it affects your work. Whatever emotion you’re going through, you can use all of it. I think that’s what theater is about.” —Henry Stewart.

Culled from Opera News