Maria Ewing, opera singer revered for her dramatic talents who thrilled Covent Garden with her portrayal of Richard Strauss’s Salome – obituary

Maria Ewing, the opera singer, who has died aged 71, was that rare combination of gifted singer and outstanding actress; if her voice lacked the full power of a great dramatic soprano, her keen musical intelligence and arresting appearance meant that her performances on stage were seldom less than mesmerising.

Maria Ewing sang both soprano and mezzo roles and in 1988 she took Covent Garden by storm when she made her debut there in the title role in Salome, Richard Strauss’s lurid tale of lust, jealousy, neurosis and necrophilia. The production was directed by her then husband Sir Peter Hall, a founder of the RSC and director of the National Theatre.

The role requires the singer to perform an erotic Dance of the Seven Veils, and most productions before Maria Ewing took it on contrived to preserve their soprano’s modesty with at least a body stocking – and often a good deal more.

Maria Ewing, however, started off wearing nothing but the veils, and by the end all seven had been discarded to leave her completely naked on stage.

Typically, it was her own determination to get to the truth of her character that led her to strip off. “The first time I did the dance I wore a gold lamé G-string, but I felt it was actually cheap and vulgar and dishonest,” she recalled. “Removing everything just seemed more natural.

“[Salome] is a crazed 16-year-old girl, dangerous, with a violent physical need in her to dance, to preserve her virginity although she is overcome with sexual desire.”

The Daily Telegraph’s reviewer Michael Kennedy conceded that there were moments when Maria Ewing’s voice was under-powered, but concluded: “In deployment of vocal colouring, lustrous beauty of tone in soft high passages, characterisation and, last but far from least, physical allure, Miss Ewing was the Salome of one’s dreams (or nightmares!)”

Maria Ewing’s deeply serious attitude to her work, her passionate concern with the psychological truth of her characters, and her ferocious powers of concentration led her to acquire a reputation for being difficult to work with. The word “compromise” was not in her vocabulary.

Although she sang some 96 performances with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, beginning with her operatic debut in 1976, as a charmingly androgynous Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro and ending in 1997 as Marie in Berg’s Wozzeck , for six years she refused to have anything to do with the company, or her former mentor James Levine, after it scrapped a television broadcast of her Carmen and screened a 1987 performance of the production starring Agnes Baltsa instead.

Her relationship with Hall, whose third wife she became, also had an operatic intensity, and for a time she was as famous for her marriage as for her singing.

The pair had met in 1978 when Hall, who was on his second marriage, directed her in her Glyndebourne debut as a headstrong Dorabella in Così fan tutte. Before long, as Maria Ewing recalled, they had become “completely obsessed with each other”.

Hall later wrote in his autobiography: “Within a year the passion unleashed was so violent that I ceased to be so desperately anxious either about my family or public pressure.”

He divorced his second wife Jacqueline Taylor and on St Valentine’s Day 1982 married a pregnant Maria (their daughter is the actress and director Rebecca Hall).

Hall directed her in some of her most memorable roles, including as a darkly mesmerising Carmen, eschewing flirtiness and flamenco to emphasise an austere fatalism, in a richly atmospheric production for Glyndebourne, as well as in Figaro and other operas at the Met, Covent Garden, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

But as Maria Ewing later recalled, their relationship was “like Così fan tutte ... very emotional,” and as Hall wrote later: “We were together for 10 years of passion, highs and lows, excitement and despair. It was a turbulent life, gloriously happy and acutely miserable.”

By the late 1980s it was all but over, ending in a bitter divorce in 1990 after Hall began an affair with his assistant Nicki Frei, who would become his fourth wife, though he and Maria patched things up and remained friends until Hall’s death in 2017.

Maria Louise Ewing was born on March 27 1950 in Detroit, Michigan, the youngest of four daughters of Norman Ewing, an engineer of African American and white European descent, and his Dutch-born wife Hermina, née Veraar. Despite her father’s mixed-race background, he “passed” as white and the girls were brought up in a white suburb of Detroit.

Maria grew up wanting to be a pianist but her mother realised that she had a good singing voice and got her lessons. Her father, whom she adored, died in 1968 just before her first concert.

From Finney High School, Detroit, she went on to the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she studied with the conductor James Levine, who became her mentor at the Met. Three years after her debut at the New York opera house she made her European debut at La Scala as Mélisande in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.

Maria Ewing went on to sing with the world’s leading conductors and ranged from box-office favourites like Don Giovanni, The Barber of Seville and Tosca to concert performances of less well-known works such as Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle. In 1990 she gave a concert performance, with Simon Rattle and the CBSO, of Ravel’s Shéhérazade, the conductor describing her performance as “easily the most X-rated Shéhérazade you can imagine”.

But she was perhaps always best in roles of psychological complexity requiring the skills of an actress as well as those of a singer. As well as Salome these included a mesmerising performance at the Opéra-Bastille in Paris in 1993, in Shostakovich’s savage opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.

“She does bored, sexually frustrated and tender with equal intensity,” Michael Kennedy wrote of her performance as the title character who falls in love with one of her husband’s factory workers and is driven to murder.

Maria Ewing, who based herself in Britain for many years, had parallel talents as a singer of jazz standards and popular songs. She made appearances at Ronnie Scott’s, and in 1996 became the first artist to perform a programme of Broadway hits at the Last Night of the Proms in Hyde Park, alternating popular operatic arias with numbers by Gershwin and Noël Coward.

By the turn of the century she had retired from big operatic productions, her vocal cords beginning to show the strain. When she gave a song recital at the Wigmore Hall in 2003, one critic noted a “blown out” quality to her voice and described her performance as “sadly unsatisfying”.

In 2008 as Queen of the Fairies in a Carl Rosa Opera Company production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe at the Gielgud Theatre, she stole the show in slinky black Lurex and toting a long cigarette holder, but critics noted a voice that had lost its former richness of tone.

In an interview with The Guardian in 2003 Maria Ewing acknowledged that she had sometimes been difficult to work with: “I’m not the most patient person when it comes to standards, I guess I have pretty high ones, and I care desperately about maintaining those and working hard ... If I didn’t like something someone did, or if a conductor was doing something I didn’t understand, I would just bloody well say it.” But, she insisted, “Most people I’ve got on fantastically well with.”

Her daughter Rebecca survives her.

Maria Ewing, born March 27 1950, died January 9 2022