R.I.P. Shirley Verrett

[Reza]

'Beguiling' opera singer Shirley Verrett dies
By Times Wire

NEW YORK - Shirley Verrett, an acclaimed American mezzo-soprano and soprano praised for her blazing intensity during a career that spanned four decades, died Friday (November 5, 2010) in Ann Arbor, Mich. She was 79.

Ms. Verrett, one of the top black opera singers of the 1970s and 1980s, had been suffering from heart trouble, said Jack Mastroianni of IMG Artists.

Born in New Orleans, she battled racial prejudice in a predominantly white European-centered art form during a 40-year biracial marriage, according to her autobiography.

Ms. Verrett studied at the Juilliard School in New York and was a 1961 winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions.

Known early in her career as Shirley Verrett-Carter, she made her professional debut in 1957 and a year later appeared for the first time at the New York City Opera as Irina in Weill's Lost in the Stars.

A debut followed at London's Royal Opera in 1966 as Ulrica in Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera, and two years later she made her Metropolitan Opera debut in the title role of Bizet's Carmen, a role she has sung to acclaim at the Spoleto Festival in 1962.

"She is good-looking, and she has a beautiful voice that moves smoothly from low tones to high and plays around freely in the treacherous middle without audible shifting of vocal gears," Allen Hughes wrote in the New York Times.

"She also has an attractive stage manner and personality. She laughs easily and convincingly, flirts beguilingly and registers changes of attitude and feeling without hamming or posing."

Ms. Verrett's Met career lasted until 1990, and she sang soprano roles that included Puccini's Tosca (opposite Luciano Pavarotti), Bellini's Norma, Leonore in Beethoven's Fidelio and the title role in Verdi's Aida and Desdemona in Verdi's Otello.

She joined the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance in 1996 and was its James Earl Jones Distinguished University Professor of Music when she retired last May.