Margaret Tynes, Soprano Who Soared in Verdi and Strauss, Dies at 104
Because there were few opportunities for Black singers in the U.S., she became a powerhouse in Europe, performing in operas like “Tosca” and “Carmen.”
Margaret Tynes, an American soprano who was acclaimed in Europe but neglected in the United States at a time when Black singers were newly breaking into the operatic world, died on March 7 in Silver Spring, Md. She was 104.
The death was confirmed by her nephew Richard Roberts, who said Ms. Tynes died in a nursing home.
In the 1960s and ’70s Ms. Tynes, with her incendiary, full-throated voice, in roles like Aida and Salomé, sang at opera houses in Vienna, Prague and Budapest, earning high praise on the continent — “an exceptional voice, intense in every coloring, vibrant and dramatic,” Milan’s Corriere della Sera newspaper wrote — even while U.S. critics were cooler. The Süddeutsche Zeitung of Munich wrote of her performance in Benjamin Britten’s “The War Requiem” that “What Britten expects of a woman’s voice can only be achieved by a singer of Margaret Tynes’s caliber.”
But she did not make her Metropolitan Opera debut until 1974, when she was 55, in a run of three performances as the title role in Janacek’s “Jenufa” that began and ended her career there.
Ms. Tynes grew up in the segregated South and gained a measure of American fame in the 1950s, recording “A Drum Is a Woman” with Duke Ellington, singing heartfelt renditions of “Negro Spirituals” on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and appearing with Harry Belafonte in the musical “Sing, Man, Sing.” She also sang at the funeral of the musician W.C. Handy and toured the U.S.S.R. with Mr. Sullivan’s show in 1958.
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Her breakthrough in opera, the genre that defined her career, came in Europe in 1961, when she sang Salomé in Luchino Visconti’s production at the Spoleto Festival in Italy. Time magazine described her as “moving about the stage with catlike grace, her rich, ringing voice zooming with ease through the high, precarious lines,” and as a “girl with veins of fire.”
American opera would prove to be a tougher hurdle for Ms. Tynes.
In the history of Black American opera singers, Ms. Tynes was “from a lost generation,” said Naomi André, a University of North Carolina musicologist and opera specialist, in an interview.
Born 22 years after Marian Anderson, who was not able to debut at the Metropolitan Opera until age 57 in 1955, Ms. Tynes was nonetheless older than Black opera stars like Leontyne Price, Grace Bumbry, Shirley Verrett and Jessye Norman.
Those singers entered their prime as the marches and demonstrations of the civil rights movement were bringing down racial barriers. Ms. Tynes, by contrast, was already in Europe.
She was thus “an interesting bridge” between Ms. Anderson and the newer generation of Black opera singers, said Ms. André, who has written about Black opera singers, and who noted that Ms. Tynes, her neglect notwithstanding, had an “incredible” voice. Ms. André suggested that Ms. Tynes’s success in Europe was a testimony to her singular talent.
Her one major recital on disk, a blistering collection of arias by Verdi and Richard Strauss, was released by the Qualiton label in Hungary in 1962. In a 2021 episode of the podcast “Counter Melody,” that was devoted to her, the American singer Daniel Gundlach noted that Ms. Tynes reached the sulfurous high C of the Aida aria “O Patria Mia” with ease. A recording of Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater” earned a favorable review in 1972 in Gramophone magazine, where she was praised for her “creamy-voiced soprano” though the publication said she “sounds uneasy in the high notes” and “is not always exact in pitch.”
But her major recordings, though hardly widely known, have earned unstinted praise from connoisseurs. In an email, Peter Clark, the former archivist at the Metropolitan Opera, called them “impressive singing by any standard. Her expressivity and dramatic involvement is exciting to hear.”
In the 1960s and ’70s, she sang for seven seasons with the State Opera in Vienna, for eight seasons with opera companies in Prague and Budapest, and in Barcelona for another four, according to Mr. Roberts and the singer Kevin Thompson, a friend of Ms. Tynes’s. “Once she was invited to perform in Europe, her skill and recognition grew,” Mr. Roberts said.
She sang in “Norma,” “Tosca” and “Carmen” and played Lady Macbeth in Verdi, as well as Leonora in “La Forza del Destino,” among other roles. In Hungary and Czechoslovakia, she was always “greeted quite warmly,” Mr. Roberts recalled. The Budapest weekly Film Szinhaz Muzsika (Film Theater Music) commented about her Aida performances, saying, “She is a rare, singular phenomenon on the operatic stage.”
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The reception was different in the United States. Of her performance at the Met, the New York Times critic Donal Henahan wrote: “It would be pleasant to be able to report that Miss Tynes, an American soprano who has had considerable success in European houses, swept all before her. Unfortunately, she seemed seriously miscast, and only intermittently could one detect real quality in the voice or much evidence of dramatic grasp.”
Ms. Tynes was unfazed by her foreshortened U.S. career, Mr. Roberts said, because “the path to performance in Europe was so well paved.” In her era, “you had to go to Europe,” said Mr. Thompson, adding that “racism is real.” She continued to perform into her 70s.
Margaret Elinor Tynes was born on Sept. 11, 1919, in Saluda, a small town in east Virginia, one of 10 children of Joseph Walter Tynes, a pastor of Providence Baptist Church in Greensboro, N.C., and Lucy (Rich) Tynes, a schoolteacher. Ms. Tynes grew up in Greensboro, sang in the church choir, and won a singing competition by the age of 6.
She attended Dudley High School in Greensboro, earned a bachelor’s degree from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in 1939 and a master’s degree in music education from Columbia University in 1944. Her first break came in 1946 when she sang Bess for a U.S.O. (United Service Organizations) production of “Porgy and Bess.”
In 1961, she married Hans von Klier, a German aristocrat and industrial designer, and they lived in Milan and on Lago di Garda until his death in 2000, when she moved back to the United States.
She is survived by nieces and nephews, including Mr. Roberts, a retired federal judge.
Whether her U.S. career was stymied for racial reasons, “I never heard Aunt Margaret complain she had doors slammed in her face,” Mr. Roberts said. “I remember her saying, she went from opportunity to opportunity.”
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