Margaret Tynes, an American soprano who was acclaimed in Europe however uncared for in america at a time when Black singers had been newly breaking into the operatic world, died on March 7 in Silver Spring, Md. She was 104.
Her nephew Richard Roberts stated she died in a nursing house.
Within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s Ms. Tynes’s incendiary, full-throated voice was heard in roles like Aida and Salomé at opera homes in Vienna, Prague and Budapest, incomes excessive reward on the continent — “an distinctive voice, intense in each coloring, vibrant and dramatic,” Milan’s Corriere della Sera newspaper wrote — even whereas U.S. critics had been cooler. The Süddeutsche Zeitung of Munich wrote of her efficiency in Benjamin Britten’s “The Struggle Requiem” that “what Britten expects of a girl’s voice can solely be achieved by a singer of Margaret Tynes’s caliber.”
However she didn’t make her Metropolitan Opera debut till 1974, when she was 55, in a run of three performances within the title function of Janacek’s “Jenufa.” That run each started and ended her profession there.
Ms. Tynes grew up within the segregated South and gained a measure of American fame within the Nineteen Fifties — recording “A Drum Is a Lady” with Duke Ellington, singing heartfelt renditions of “Negro spirituals” on “The Ed Sullivan Present” and showing with Harry Belafonte within the musical “Sing, Man, Sing.” She additionally sang on the funeral of W.C. Useful, the musician often called “the daddy of the blues,” and toured the united statesS.R. with Mr. Sullivan’s present in 1958.
Her breakthrough in opera, the style that outlined her profession, got here in Europe in 1961, when she sang Salomé in Luchino Visconti’s manufacturing on the Spoleto Pageant in Italy. Time journal described her as “shifting concerning the stage with catlike grace, her wealthy, ringing voice zooming with ease by way of the excessive, precarious traces,” and as a “woman with veins of fireside.”
American opera would show to be a more durable hurdle for Ms. Tynes.
Within the historical past of Black American opera singers, Ms. Tynes was “from a misplaced era,” Naomi André, a College of North Carolina musicologist and opera specialist, stated in an interview.
Born 22 years after Marian Anderson, who didn’t make her debut on the Metropolitan Opera till age 57 in 1955, Ms. Tynes was nonetheless older than Black opera stars like Leontyne Value, Grace Bumbry, Shirley Verrett and Jessye Norman.
These singers entered their prime because the marches and demonstrations of the civil rights motion had been bringing down racial limitations. Ms. Tynes, in contrast, was already in Europe.
She was thus “an attention-grabbing bridge” between Ms. Anderson and the newer era of Black opera singers, stated Ms. André, who has written about Black opera singers. Ms. André famous that Ms. Tynes, her neglect however, had an “unbelievable” voice, and instructed that her success in Europe was a sworn statement to her singular expertise.
Her one main recital on disk, a blistering assortment of arias by Verdi and Richard Strauss, was launched by the Qualiton label in Hungary in 1962. In a 2021 episode of the podcast “Counter Melody” that was dedicated to her, the American singer Daniel Gundlach famous that Ms. Tynes reached the sulfurous excessive C of the Aida aria “O Patria Mia” with ease.
A recording of Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater” earned a good evaluate in 1972 in Gramophone journal, the place she was praised for her “creamy-voiced soprano,” although the publication stated she “sounds uneasy within the excessive notes” and “is just not all the time precise in pitch.”
However her main recordings, although hardly broadly identified, have earned unstinted reward from connoisseurs. In an e mail, Peter Clark, the previous archivist on the Metropolitan Opera, known as them “spectacular singing by any customary,” including, “Her expressivity and dramatic involvement is thrilling to listen to.”
Within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, Ms. Tynes sang for seven seasons with the State Opera in Vienna, for eight seasons with opera firms in Prague and Budapest, and in Barcelona for an additional 4, in keeping with Mr. Roberts and the singer Kevin Thompson, a good friend of Ms. Tynes’s. “As soon as she was invited to carry out in Europe, her talent and recognition grew,” Mr. Roberts stated.
She was seen in “Norma,” “Tosca” and “Carmen” and performed Woman Macbeth in Verdi, in addition to Leonora in “La Forza del Destino,” amongst different roles. In Hungary and Czechoslovakia, she was all the time “greeted fairly warmly,” Mr. Roberts recalled. The Budapest weekly Movie Szinhaz Muzsika (Movie Theater Music) stated of her Aida performances, “She is a uncommon, singular phenomenon on the operatic stage.”
The reception was completely different in america. Of her efficiency on the Met, the New York Occasions critic Donal Henahan wrote: “It could be nice to have the ability to report that Miss Tynes, an American soprano who has had appreciable success in European homes, swept all earlier than her. Sadly, she appeared critically miscast, and solely intermittently might one detect actual high quality within the voice or a lot proof of dramatic grasp.”
Ms. Tynes was unfazed by her foreshortened U.S. profession, Mr. Roberts stated, as a result of “the trail to efficiency in Europe was so properly paved.” In her period, Mr. Thompson stated, “you needed to go to Europe,” including that “racism is actual.” She continued to carry out into her 70s.
Margaret Elinor Tynes was born on Sept. 11, 1919, in Saluda, a small city in east Virginia, one in all 10 youngsters of Joseph Walter Tynes, a pastor at Windfall Baptist Church in Greensboro, N.C., and Lucy (Wealthy) Tynes, a schoolteacher. Ms. Tynes grew up in Greensboro, sang within the church choir and had received a singing competitors by the age of 6.
She attended Dudley Excessive College in Greensboro and earned a bachelor’s diploma from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State College in 1939 and a grasp’s diploma in music schooling from Columbia College in 1944. Her first break got here in 1946 when she sang Bess for a U.S.O. (United Service Organizations) manufacturing of “Porgy and Bess.”
In 1961, she married Hans von Klier, a German aristocrat and industrial designer. They lived in Milan and on Lake Garda till his dying in 2000, when she moved again to america.
She is survived by nieces and nephews, together with Mr. Roberts, a retired federal choose.
Whether or not her U.S. profession was stymied for racial causes, “I by no means heard Aunt Margaret complain she had doorways slammed in her face,” Mr. Roberts stated. “I keep in mind her saying she went from alternative to alternative.”
