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The soprano Mary Ewing, ex-wife of director Peter Hall and mother of actress and director Rebecca Hall (‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’, ‘Godzilla vs. Kong’) has died at the age of 71 after a “brief illness”, as reported her family, who describe her as “an extraordinarily gifted artist, who by sheer force of her talent and will catapulted herself to the heights of the world of international opera.”
Ewing has died at her Detroit home, where she was born as the fourth child to a Dutch mother and an African-American father, both amateur painters and musicians. Between 1968 and 1970 he studied with Eleanor Steber at the Cleveland Institute of Music and later continued his training with Jeannie Tourel in New York.
He made his debut as an artist at the 1973 Ravinia Festival with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, then conducted by James Levine, and three years later he performed for the first time at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York with Mozart’s ‘Le Nozze di Figaro’. In 1977 she played Blanche de la Force in a production of Poulenc’s ‘Dialogues des Carmélites’, directed by John Dexter, and in 1978 she met Peter Hall, who directed a montage of Mozart’s ‘Cosi Fan Tutte’ in the British Glyndebourne Festival, in which she played Dorabella. They married four years later, in 1982.
Hall, one of the founders of the Royal Shakespeare Company and later director of the Royal National Theater, opened the doors for him to perform again at the Met, where he performed Bizet’s ‘Carmen’. There he would go on to act almost a hundred times until 1997 (including a six-year period in which he fell out with the artistic director, his old acquaintance James Levine), when he fired playing Marie in Alban Berg’s ‘Wozzeck’. Under the direction of her husband, Ewing starred in one of the most notorious and controversial moments of her career in 1986, when playing the title role of Strauss’s ‘Salomé’ at the Los Angeles Opera, she completely stripped at the end of the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’.
He made his European debut in Debussy’s ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ at the Scala in Milan, and visited other great coliseums in cities around the world including San Francisco, London or Vienna; In the late nineties she made some appearances to sing jazz, one of them as a guest of the Kymaera band at the famous Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London. In his recording career, albums such as ‘Don Giovanni’, with Bernard Haitink; ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’, under the baton of Myung-Whun Chung; Mozart’s ‘Requiem’ with Leonard Bernstein, ‘Le nozze di Figaro’ with Karl Böhm, ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ with Claudio Abbado, or ‘Shéhérezade’, by Ravel, with Simon Rattle, among others.
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