Maria Ewing is no more. She died Sunday in Detroit, her hometown. She was only 71 years old. Her warm and powerful voice was not necessarily the most beautiful, but the opera in video, in particular, allowed her to be anchored in the memories.
What will be his posterity? How not to realize that it is already imposed, imperious and indelible. Maria Ewing is forever “the” Cherubino (Figaro’s wedding) of the Metropolitan Opera. She was filmed at the age of 26 in this role on the sidelines of performances in Salzburg by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle for the Unitel video directed by veteran Karl Böhm. And who saw Maria Ewing embodying Carmenou Salomé cannot forget it …
Exalted heroines
The poster was enough: seeing her name the music lover knew in advance that he was not going to regret his evening, because Maria Ewing, incandescent soprano, outstanding actress, burned the boards. For her incarnations she gave everything, leaving the chastened style to others.
So obviously we see her, logically, as a tigress pouting as Katerina Ismaïlova on the cover of the CD of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District by Shostakovich in the version of Myung-Whun Chung at DG, his greatest discographic incarnation. She is remembered in the video of Salome directed by her husband Peter Hall in London in 1992, in a Carmen of earth and fire in Glyndebourne in 1985 which makes the choice of Julia Migenes for the film by Francesco Rosi (1984) even more incomprehensible.
But it would be a mistake to reduce Maria Ewing to the roles of exalted heroines. Upon news of his disappearance, the Metropolitan Opera posted on YouTube an excerpt from his Blanche de la Force in John Dexter’s legendary 1977 production of Dialogues of the Carmelites de Poulenc, the last one in New York before Yannick Nézet-Séguin puts the work back on display. Maria Ewing was also the Mélisande in the Pelléas and Mélisande by Claudio Abbado on record and she played several Mozartian heroines, notably Zerlina and Dorabella.
A tandem
Maria Ewing, born in Detroit in 1950 to a Dutch mother and an African-American father, becomes, in Cleveland, the pupil of the soprano Eleanor Steber. Noticed in 1973 by James Levine, she made her debut in 1976 in Salzburg and at the Metropolitan in Figaro’s wedding by Mozart (role of Cherubino). Levine entrusted Blanche de la Force to him the following year. Her last role in New York will be Marie in Wozzeck de Berg in 1997.
In 1978, Maria Ewing met director Peter Hall, famous director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, as she sang Dorabella in Così fan tutte from Mozart to Glyndebourne, conducted by Bernard Haitink. The singer married Peter Hall in 1982. They had a daughter, actress Rebecca Hall.
The couple will often work together. At the Met in Carmen and especially in Salome in 1986 in Los Angeles, a production that will make Maria Ewing famous, because, during a torrid dance, she sheds the seven veils there until she is naked. Among the other collaborations of the Hall-Ewing tandem, we will see the singer in Dido in the large production of Trojans by Berlioz at the Met in 1993. It will then be a comeback after six years of total quarrel with the New York institution and especially with James Levine, who had chosen Agnes Baltsa for the shooting, in 1987, of the production of Carmen on video.
Maria Ewing and Peter Hall will divorce in 1990 and the singer will give up the scene at the end of the 90s. Peter Hall, him, died in 2017 at the age of 87 years.