Maria Ewing
Maria Louise Ewing (March 27, 1950 – January 9, 2022) was an American opera singer. In the early part of her career she performed solely as a lyric mezzo-soprano; she later assumed full soprano parts as well. Her signature roles were Blanche, Carmen, Dorabella, Rosina and Salome. Some critics regarded her as one of the most compelling singing actresses of her generation.[1]
Maria Ewing
January 9, 2022 (aged 71)
Opera singer
Bazabeel Norman (great-great-great grandfather)
Early life and education[edit]
Maria Louise Ewing was born in Detroit, Michigan, on March 27, 1950.[2] She was the youngest of four daughters of Hermina Ewing, née Veraar, a Dutch-born homemaker, and Norman Isaac Ewing, an electrical engineer at a steel company.[2][3] Her father claimed to be of Sioux descent,[2][3] but he was the son of parents who were both part European, part African; an episode of the genealogical television show Finding Your Roots devoted to Ewing's daughter, the actress Rebecca Hall, revealed that he was the son of John William Ewing, born into slavery, a prominent figure in the African-American community of Washington DC, and a descendant of Bazabeel Norman, a notable African-American veteran of the American Revolutionary War.[4] (Rebecca Hall's interest in her mother's ethnicity inspired her to make a film, Passing, the protagonist of which is an African-American woman whose skin is light enough for her to be perceived as white.[2]) According to Ewing's former husband, her father's African roots caused her family so much anxiety that a particularly dark-skinned relative of theirs was forbidden from visiting their home during the hours of daylight.[5] Ewing herself was unembarrassed by her racial make-up, regarding her African roots not with shame but with pride.[5]
Ewing's parents were both musical enthusiasts: her mother was a keen collector of classical recordings, and her father played the piano well enough to attract an audience of admiring neighbors.[6] Ewing's own musical education began with piano lessons when she was thirteen.[6] As well as playing solo piano pieces, she sometimes acted as an accompanist for one of her sisters, Frances, occasionally singing duets with her; their mother was sufficiently impressed by her voice to encourage her to complement her keyboard work by studying singing too.[6] Coached by a local voice teacher, Ewing joined the alto section of the chorus at her Detroit high school—Jared W. Finney High School[3]—and was soon participating in and winning singing competitions.[6] When she was seventeen, she became a pupil of Marjorie Gordon, a coloratura soprano (not to be confused with an English Gilbert and Sullivan soprano of the same name).[6] After only a year of teaching her, Gordon suggested that she should apply to take part in Oakland University's Meadow Brook Music Festival.[6] She auditioned for the role of Maddalena in a production of Rigoletto that was to be conducted by a young James Levine.[6] Their meeting proved to be wonderfully serendipitous: Levine was so struck by her expressive power that he assured her that she had the potential to become a major artist,[6] while for her part, she found in him a teacher, mentor, guide, champion and friend.[6] It was in order to study with Levine that she sought and won a scholarship at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where her other instructors included the soprano Eleanor Steber.[6] And after her graduation in 1970, it was at Levine's urging that she continued her training in New York City as a private pupil of the great mezzo-soprano Jennie Tourel, supporting herself by working in offices and clothing stores.[6]
Personal life[edit]
Ewing's relationship with the English director Peter Hall began when they worked together in a production of Così fan tutte at Glyndebourne in 1978.[5] He found her "delightful, provocative and very, very attractive; formidable too, but wonderfully funny".[26] For her, "it was a meeting of minds and sympathies".[6] "We played piano duets", Hall recalled, "and found that we both hated the dead conventions, the laziness and the silliness of much opera production".[26] When Hall visited her in New York the following year, their friendship metamorphosed into romance:[28] "I am deeply in love with Maria Ewing", he confided to his diary on Christmas Day. "We plan to make our life together in the new year when she will come to London".[29] They married on Long Island on Valentine's Day, 1982.[6] Their only child, Rebecca, was born three months later.[30] Hall described his time with Ewing as "years of passion, of highs and lows, excitements and despair".[28]"Her blazing integrity and refusal to compromise do not make her an easy person to live with", he wrote.[28] "The mixture of our two volatile natures and our two careers... made for a turbulent life, sometimes gloriously happy, sometimes acutely miserable".[31] They separated in 1988 and Hall began a relationship with Nicki Frei, a press officer at London's National Theatre.[3] Hall and Ewing were divorced in 1990.[32]
Ewing never remarried, but in her later years she had a platonic relationship with Amir Hosseinpour, a Tehran-born director and choreographer.[3]
In 2003, Ewing lived in Sussex, England.[33]
Reputation[edit]
Opinions of Ewing were extremely diverse. Lotfi Mansouri thought her "highly gifted", but described her conduct in San Francisco Opera's 1993 production of Salome as "a nightmare...She became difficult, stubborn, and wrongheaded. In the easier sections, she would drag the rhythms, then rush like crazy in the more difficult parts... Married to Sir Peter Hall at the time, she expected to be addressed as 'Lady Hall', then put a sign on her dressing room saying that she was not to be spoken to at all".[17] The critic and musical historian Peter G. Davis condemned her 1986 Metropolitan Opera Carmen as "a loopy Gypsy who might have just landed from the moon as she lurched spastically from one scene to the next without allure, consistency, credibility, or vocal distinction. That Ewing continued to be taken seriously over the next decade in the face of ongoing vocal collapse, whooping and scooping through one part after another, only indicated how decadent the Farrar-Garden tradition had become".[34] On the other hand, Simon Rattle praised her as "the most interesting singing actress of the stage",[6] and despite a six-year hiatus in their friendship when he broke a promise to cast her in a new production of Carmen at the Met,[6] James Levine never ceased to admire her: "She had the whole gift: brilliant on the stage, brilliant musician, brilliant linguist, very striking timbre. Maria started off with maybe the most full-scale and versatile gifts of any artist I ever worked with, able to sing every language, every style, recital, oratorio, opera, the whole business".[15] Peter Hall too always remained as enthusiastic about Ewing's art as he was when he first collaborated with her. "Her whole being is about performing, and truthful performing. She can only work with complete commitment and honesty... Her performances are incandescent. Even if you don't like them you cannot ignore them... Some people cannot take her highly personal approach; they say she pulls the music about, remaking it in her own image. This is not true; she is a meticulous musician. But her need to express leads her to emphasise and inflect outside the well-bred norm...She is a disturbing performer, a star".[28] "She is not a well-mannered artist and does not live her life calmly. I love her for that."[31]