Kathleen Deanna Battle is an American operatic soprano known for her distinctive vocal range and tone. Born in Portsmouth, Ohio, Battle initially became known for her work within the concert repertoire through performances with major orchestras during the early and mid-1970s. She made her opera debut in 1975. Battle expanded her repertoire into lyric soprano and coloratura soprano roles during the 1980s and early 1990s, until her eventual dismissal from the Metropolitan Opera in 1994. She later has focused on recording and the concert stage. After a 22-year absence from the Met, Battle performed a concert of spirituals at the Metropolitan Opera House in November 2016, and again in May 2024.
Fiorenza Cossotto is an Italian operatic mezzo-soprano.
Eleanor Steber was an American operatic soprano. Steber is noted as one of the first major opera stars to have achieved the highest success with training and a career based in the United States.
Vivica Genaux is an American coloratura mezzo-soprano. She was born in Fairbanks, Alaska. She has sung in major operas such as The Barber of Seville at the Metropolitan Opera, L'italiana in Algeri at Opéra National de Paris, and La Cenerentola with Dallas Opera and the Bavarian State Opera.
Marianne Brandt was an Austrian operatic singer with an international reputation.
Rosalind Elias was an American mezzo-soprano who enjoyed a long and distinguished career at the Metropolitan Opera. She was best known for creating the role of Erika in Samuel Barber's Vanessa in 1958.
Julia Claussen was a Swedish mezzo-soprano.
Louise Beatty Homer was an American operatic dramatic contralto who had an active international career in concert halls and opera houses from 1895 until her retirement in 1932.
Margaret Matzenauer was an Austria-Hungary-born, later resident in the United States, mezzo-soprano. She had an opulent timbre and wide range. She performed key works from both the Italian and German operatic repertoires in Europe and the United States.
Viorica Cortez is a noted Romanian-born mezzo-soprano, later French by naturalisation. Starting her operatic and concert career in the mid-1960s, she went on to become one of the most prominent female performers of the '70s and '80s. An example of professional longevity, she is present on some of the most prestigious European opera scenes.
Isabel Leonard is an American mezzo-soprano opera singer based in New York City. She is of Argentine ancestry on her mother's side.
Joyce DiDonato is an American opera singer and recitalist. A coloratura mezzo-soprano, she has performed operas and concert works spanning from the 19th-century Romantic era to those by Handel and Mozart.
Hanna Schwarz is a German mezzo-soprano and contralto singer in opera and concert. In 1976 she performed the roles of Fricka and Erda in the centenary Jahrhundertring production at the Bayreuth Festival, directed by Patrice Chéreau.
Eugenia Mantelli was an Italian opera singer who had a prolific career in Europe, the United States, and South America from the 1880s through the early part of the twentieth century. She possessed a flexible warm voice with a wide vocal range that, while focusing mostly within the mezzo-soprano repertoire, enabled her to sing roles normally associated with contraltos and sopranos. Indeed, during her lifetime she was often identified as either a mezzo-soprano or a contralto by music critics without much consistency. While she had an excellent vocal technique and an exceptionally beautiful tone quality, her gifts as an actress and interpreter were only mediocre.
Betty Allen was an American operatic mezzo-soprano who had an active international singing career during the 1950s through the 1970s. In the latter part of her career her voice acquired a contralto-like darkening, which can be heard on her recording of Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky with conductor Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. She was known for her collaborations with American composers, such as Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Ned Rorem, and Virgil Thomson among others.
Margarethe Siems was a German operatic dramatic coloratura soprano and voice teacher. A Kammersängerin of the Dresden State Opera, between 1909 and 1912 Siems created leading roles in three operas by Richard Strauss: Chrysothemis in Elektra, the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, and Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos.
Margaret Harshaw was an American opera singer and voice teacher who sang for 22 consecutive seasons at the Metropolitan Opera from November 1942 to March 1964. She began her career as a mezzo-soprano in the early 1930s but then began performing roles from the soprano repertoire in 1950. She sang a total of 39 roles in 25 works at the Met and was heard in 40 of the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts. She was also active as a guest artist with major opera houses in Europe and North and South America.
Margarita González Ontiveros was a Mexican-born mezzo-soprano and contralto. She combined a bel canto technique with interpretation in French, Russian Spanish, Italian, German and Nahuatl. An extremely versatile singer, her repertoire ranged from classical opera seria to the bel canto music of Salvador Moreno Manzano, and Carlos Jiménez Mabarak; further, to the works of Blas Galindo, Manuel Ponce and Tata Nacho. In her career she took challenges as to sing many Mexican pieces of Sonido 13, a microtonal system invented by Julián Carrillo in 1925.
Martha Lipton was an American operatic mezzo-soprano and music educator who is best known for her career performing at the Metropolitan Opera from 1944-1961. A native of New York City, she began her training as a vocalist with her mother who had a brief career as a concert soprano under the name Estelle Laiken. She later studied both privately and at the School of Musicianship for Singers, Inc and the Juilliard School. She made her professional concert debut while still a student in 1933 at Carnegie Hall, performing in a concert of light opera excerpts with the New York Light Opera Guild. In 1936 she began working as a church vocalist at both Riverside Church and Temple Emanu-El of New York.
Linda Watson is an American dramatic soprano and academic voice teacher. She made her career based in Germany where she studied and began as a mezzo-soprano at the Theater Aachen. She has performed worldwide, including at the Vienna State Opera, La Scala, the Metropolitan Opera and the Bayreuth Festival. She focused on dramatic roles by Wagner, including Brünnhilde and Isolde, and Strauss, including Ariadne and the Dyer's Wife. She was awarded the title Kammersängerin in Germany in 2004 and in Austria in 2020.
