Lorraine Hunt Lieberson

During the closing years of the twentieth century and the opening of the twenty-first, mezzo soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson earned both formal honors and extravagant praise from critics, becoming synonymous with the resurgence of Baroque vocal repertoire as well as an extraordinary ability to forge emotional connections with listeners. Those who attended her live performances often left convinced that she had not merely claimed operatic parts for herself but had channeled them toward personal disclosure and unflinching emotional honesty.

Lorraine Hunt entered the world in San Francisco in 1954 as the child of an opera conductor and a vocalist. Her father insisted she tune in to the weekly Saturday Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts and encouraged her vocal talent, yet for most of her early adulthood she concentrated on instrumental playing. After taking up violin and piano in childhood she turned to viola, later attributing the heightened awareness of ensemble texture that violists develop to her eventual vocal style. While pursuing a music degree at San Jose State University she continued both voice and viola study, but supported herself through a position with the San Jose Symphony and ultimately favored the string instrument. She immersed herself in the region’s adventurous musical circles, once relocating briefly to Mexico after her jazz-musician boyfriend was detained there on drug-related charges; she paid prison officials to allow her to share his cabin on the grounds of the facility.

A portrayal of Sesto in Peter Sellars’s staging of Handel’s Julius Caesar in 1985 drew notice for its ferocious intensity. Sellars’s 1987 production of Don Giovanni and the loss of her uninsured viola the following year nudged her further toward singing. Although she focused heavily on Baroque music, appearing regularly with leading period-instrument groups, she also performed with Les Arts Florissants in William Christie’s 1996–1997 account of Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie.

Hunt took part in the 1997 Santa Fe Opera premiere of Peter Lieberson’s Ashoka’s Dream. Two years afterward she married the composer. Shortly thereafter she received a breast-cancer diagnosis, and in 2000 her sister Alexis succumbed to the same illness. Following a double lumpectomy she confronted the diagnosis through performance, singing in Peter Sellars’s singular 2001 London presentation of the Bach cantatas Ich habe genug and Mein Herz schwimmt in Blut.

After she and her husband settled in Santa Fe during the early 2000s, Hunt Lieberson trimmed her calendar of public engagements yet continued to astonish audiences with the concentrated force of each appearance. Her comparative lack of widespread recognition relative to other mezzos of comparable ability stemmed in part from her preference for the immediacy of the stage over the controlled environment of the recording studio. Having kept details of her condition largely private, she died at home on July 3, 2006, an event that stunned the musical world.