Elinor Ross, Met soprano with illness-shortened career, dies at 93
The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Thursday, December 12, 2024


Elinor Ross, Met soprano with illness-shortened career, dies at 93
Elinor Ross performs in the title role of Puccini’s "Turandot" at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1974. Ross, a soprano who made a dramatic Metropolitan Opera debut in 1970 as a last-minute replacement, but whose career was over by the end of the decade, cut short by an illness that paralyzed her facial muscles, died on March 6, 2020 in Manhattan. She was 93. James Hefferman/Metropolitan Opera Archives.

by Neil Genzlinger



NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Elinor Ross, a soprano who made a dramatic Metropolitan Opera debut in 1970 as a last-minute replacement in the title role of “Turandot,” but whose career was over by the end of the decade, cut short by an illness that paralyzed her facial muscles, died March 6 in Manhattan. She was 93.

Her son, Ross Lewis, said the cause was renal failure.

Ross, who began singing professionally in the late 1950s, was best known in regional houses and overseas until June 6, 1970, when she stepped in at the Met for Birgit Nilsson, who was sidelined by a virus.

“There are few sopranos in the world who could or would choose the title role of Puccini’s ‘Turandot’ for a Metropolitan Opera debut,” Allen Hughes wrote in The New York Times, “but Elinor Ross made her first appearance with the company on Saturday night in the spectacular part (with its triply spectacular costume) and managed the feat pretty well.”

She’d had just two days of rehearsal in a practice room, without the heavy costume, which had an elaborate headdress. Her entrance was on a staircase she had never trod.

“My toes did a lot of work that night, feeling for each step,” she told Classical Singer magazine in 2012. “The director, Nathaniel Merrill, was in the wings saying, ‘Walk here, go there.’ It was terrifying, but you do it.”

She encountered a very different kind of terrifying in 1979 while singing at the Met.

“During a performance of ‘Aida,’ I couldn’t understand why I felt so strange,” she recalled in a 2008 interview with Opera News. “I woke up the next day with Bell’s palsy” — a paralysis of the muscles in the face.

“So that was my final opera performance,” she continued. “I couldn’t open my mouth for a couple of years. My voice was there — I had just started working on Isolde — but I couldn’t open one side of my mouth.”

In between the Met debut and that final performance, Ross had a nice run at the house, singing numerous roles over nine years in the company. She stepped in several more times when another singer was unable to perform, including in June 1972, when Martina Arroyo, in the title role of “Aida,” fainted after the first scene.

Ross, the standby, was in the house not expecting to go on; she was there to watch her son, then 15, make his debut as an extra — a spear carrier. In a telephone interview, Lewis recalled that someone had the foresight to give him some warning.

“They called me backstage,” he said, “because my mom showed up in the triumphal scene and they didn’t want me to scream out, ‘Mom, what are you doing here?’”

Elinor Marilyn Rosenthal (she made her surname Ross when she started performing professionally) was born on Aug. 1, 1926, in Tampa, Florida. She started singing as a girl.

“I sang everywhere — several churches in town and the synagogue,” she told The Staten Island Advance in 2013.

After graduating from Henry B. Plant High School in Tampa, she attended Syracuse University, thinking she might follow two uncles into the medical profession. But her voice sidetracked her.

“Every time they had something to be sung in the music department, they called me,” she recalled in the interview with Classical Singer. “They told me I had talent, and I believed them.”

So she moved to New York, where William Herman, a noted teacher, took her on as a student. Her professional debut came in 1958 with the Cincinnati Opera, in a summer production of “Il Trovatore,” in which she twice sang Leonora. That led to the first instance in which she was called on to be an emergency fill-in: In the fall of 1958 the Chicago Lyric Opera brought her in to sing the role when Eileen Farrell fell ill.

“The third time I’d walked on any stage, it was in Chicago with Bjorling, Simionato, Bastianini,” she recalled — Jussi Bjorling, Giulietta Simionato and Ettore Bastianini, all veteran stars. “And there was little ol’ me from Tampa, Florida, up on that stage singing.”

Much of her early performing experience was in regional houses — she sang in Pittsburgh, Houston, New Orleans and many other cities — and in Europe and South America. Ross did not record much, but one performance, of “Norma” in 1967 at La Fenice in Venice, was captured on film by German television.

Ross made her debut at La Scala in Milan just two months before her Met debut. It was a bittersweet, and exhausting, occasion.

She had married Jerome A. Lewis, a lawyer, in 1954, but by 1970 a heart condition had made it difficult for him to travel. He nonetheless went to Italy from New York for the occasion, but the trip left him hospitalized.

“She was having to be a diva by night and his caregiver by day,” Ross Lewis recalled.

They returned to New York in time for her to fill in for Nilsson at the Met, but her husband’s condition worsened. He died six weeks after her Met debut.

Ross, though, did not have much time to pause; by the end of that year she had made her debut in several other major roles, including Aida and Tosca.

“She sang with style and spirit,” Raymond Ericson wrote of one of her performances in “Tosca” in The Times, “and in the last act — vocally the most grateful for the soprano — she was quite affecting. She also has an appealing personality. She went through Tosca’s melodramatics with sincerity and without fuss.”

Ross married Aaron M. Diamond in 1976. He died in 1989.

In addition to her son, she is survived by two stepsons, Mitchell and Stuart Diamond; two granddaughters; and two stepgrandchildren.

After her illness struck, Ross had surgery and eventually was able to give occasional concerts. In 1996, at a gala for the Giulio Gari Foundation, which supports young classical singers, she sang “Summertime,” from “Porgy and Bess.”

In the Met’s recent production of that opera, a young tenor named Tshombe Selby was in the chorus. He had befriended Ross while working as an usher at the opera house, chatting with her during rehearsals, which she would sometimes visit.

“She saw me,” Selby said at her funeral ceremony March 8 at Central Synagogue in Manhattan, “and she accepted me as a singer. She said: ‘Stop calling me Miss Ross. I’m Elinor. We’re colleagues.’ ”

© 2020 The New York Times Company










Today's News

March 18, 2020

Art galleries respond to virus outbreak with online viewing rooms

Amazon bans, then reinstates, Hitler's 'Mein Kampf'

Burglary at Christ Church Picture Gallery

London's cultural landmarks shutter amid coronavirus threat

Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna publishes a research project on the burial of Emperor Frederick III

Show must go on: Classical music goes free to console virus-hit music lovers

Boost in amount of finds discovered by public in another highly successful year

Lyndsey Ingram announces representation of celebrated British artist Tom Hammick

Andrew Kreps Gallery presents Kevin Jerome Everson's exhibition Westinghouse

Handmade visions on the crafts trail in Mexico

Group exhibition celebrates the 10-year anniversary of Paradigm Gallery + Studio

Elinor Ross, Met soprano with illness-shortened career, dies at 93

Fondazione Prada expands its cultural program on digital channels

Taschen publishes a companion volume to Peter Lindbergh's first self-curated exhibition

Off Paradise opens an exhibition of new work by New York-based artist Maximilian Schubert

Russian writer, political activist Limonov dies

New Reproductions: Annet Gelink Gallery opens a group show

British dinosaurs to feature on UK money for the first time

Kristen Lorello opens a solo exhibition of new dyed plywood sculptures by Bayne Peterson

Unicorn Publishing releases new book of photographs by Fran Forman

Bruce Silverstein announces the representation of world-renowned artist Elger Esser

Pair of paintings by Robert Daughters sell for a combined $35,670 at Neue Auctions

Tonie Marshall dies at 68; French filmmaker took on sexism

6 Smart Invoicing Tips that Improve Cash Flow

Roulette Wheel Layout Explained




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez
Writer: Ofelia Zurbia Betancourt

Attorneys
Truck Accident Attorneys
Accident Attorneys
Houston Dentist
Abogado de accidentes
สล็อต
สล็อตเว็บตรง
Motorcycle Accident Lawyer

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site Parroquia Natividad del Señor
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful