Maria Ewing.Photo: Jack Mitchell/Getty
Maria Ewing, an acclaimed opera singer and the mother of actressRebecca Hall, died at her home outside Detroit on Sunday following a brief illness. She was 71.
Ewing, a soprano and mezzo-soprano, made her debut at theMetropolitan Operain 1976 as Cherubino in Mozart’sLe Nozze di Figaro, and after nearly 100 performances, gave her last show on the highly regarded stage in 1997, as Marie in Berg’sWozzeck.
“In a way, [becoming a singer] was decided for me,” she told theBBC in 1990. “My mother was the one to say to me, ‘You have a voice, you should do something about it.’ I really had no choice. I simply had no choice.”
She had a temporary, six-year falling out with the New York City-based company in the 1980s, after they pulled a television broadcast of her performance in Bizet’sCarmen, and aired a performance that starred Agnes Baltsa instead, the BBC and theGuardianreported.
“The Met has no manners,” she reportedly told theChicago Tribuneat the time.
Ewing met the British Hall in1978, when she performed inCosì fan tutteat a festival he was directing, according to theGuardian.
After marrying in 1982, and welcoming their daughter Rebecca that same year, he went on to direct her in various different performances, including a 1988 production of Strauss’Salomein which Ewing finished the Dance of the Seven Veils naked.
Ewing and Hall divorced in 1990, and he died in 2017 at the age of 87.
Their daughter Rebecca, 39, has since gone on to enjoy a successful career as an actress and film director. Her directorial debut,Passing, told the story of two light-skinned Black women, one of whom “passes” as a white woman.
The plot was personal for Hall, as her mother grew up in a white, working-class neighborhood with a white mother and a father of mixed African and European heritage.
“To me, she always looked Black. Certainly growing up in the English countryside and going to a very white private school, I was aware of her difference,” Hall toldNPRlast year. “But it was a thorny subject matter, not because she wouldn’t give me answers. She couldn’t. She didn’t really have access to the information, either. So I would ask her, I would say, ‘What are we? What’s our heritage? Tell me about your father.’ And she would say, ‘I don’t really know. It’s possible that he was a bit Black or a bit Native American. I don’t really know.'”
Hall said that after Ewing watched the movie, she was full of praise.
“She called me and she was very emotional and very proud,” she told theGuardian. “She said that she felt that it was like a huge release for her father – of what he could not say – and, in turn, her, and it was like being given a late-in-life gift.”
source: people.com
