Maria Ewing, Opera Singer and Sir Peter Hall’s Ex-Wife, Dies at 71 | Opera

Maria Ewing, a soprano and mezzo-soprano known for her intense performances who became the wife of director Sir Peter Hall and the mother of actress and director Rebecca Hall, has died at age 71.

Ewing died Sunday at his home in Detroit, spokeswoman Bryna Rifkin said Monday.

Born in Detroit to a Dutch mother and an African-American father, Ewing was the youngest of four daughters.

“She was an extraordinarily gifted artist who by the sheer force of her talent and will catapulted herself to the most rarefied heights in the world of international opera,” her family said in a statement.

Ewing made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1976 in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and played Blanche de la Force in a new John Dexter production of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites in 1977. She sang 96 performances at the Met until its end as Marie at Berg’s Wozzeck in 1997. a lapse that included a six-year hiatus caused by a dispute with the Met’s artistic director, James Levine.

Ewing met Hall in 1978 when he sang Dorabella in a performance of Così fan tutte at the Glyndebourne festival directed by Hall and directed by director Bernard Haitink. Ewing married Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company and later director of the National Theater, in 1982.

Four years later, her husband directed her at the Met, where she played the title role in a new staging of Bizet’s Carmen.

“Far from the usual attempt at being a sex freak, his Carmen was easily bored, surly even, and her innuendo was a challenge for men to pique their interest,” wrote Associated Press critic Mary Campbell.

But Ewing cut ties with the Met after the company scrapped a television broadcast of Carmen with her, and later aired a 1987 presentation of the production starring Agnes Baltsa. Ewing responded by withdrawing from appearances at the Ravinia festival outside Chicago, where Levine was music director.

“The Met has no manners,” Ewing and Hall told the Chicago Tribune.

Hall directed Ewing in 1986 in the title role of Strauss’s Salome at the Los Angeles Opera, in which she was completely undressed at the end of the Dance of the Seven Veils. The staging traveled in 1988 to the Royal Opera in London and the Lyric Opera in Chicago, and a broadcast of the production was commercially released on DVD.

“Maria Ewing, who ventured out to play the title role in Richard Strauss’s Salomé for the new Music Center Opera on Thursday night, is a Teatroviech“Wrote Martin Bernheimer in the Los Angeles Times, using a German word for” theatrical beast. ” “She is, indeed, an excellent and wonderful example of the rare breed. She is a charming, fragile, and seemingly nervous young woman blessed with a devastating pout, hypnotic eyes, and a seeing mind. It also goes on to command a fairly soft, slender and fluffy mezzo-soprano that tapers a bit on the extended top ”.

Hall also directed Ewing at Nozze in Chicago in 1987. They divorced in 1990 and Hall died in 2017 at age 87.

Rebecca Hall, born 1982, has starred in films including Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, ​​Ron Howard’s Frost / Nixon, and The Awakening. Her directorial debut, Passing, premiered last year.

Ewing is also survived by sisters Norma Koleta, Carol Pancratz, and Francis Ewing.