STOCKHOLM — Elisabeth Soderstrom, 82, a Swedish soprano greatly admired for her refined, delicately shaded voice, died Friday of a stroke.
In a career of more than 50 years, Soderstrom was renowned for the subtlety of her performances and was considered one of the foremost actors on the operatic stage.
She had a wide-ranging repertoire that included more than 50 roles in 10 languages. Highly regarded for her interpretations of dramatic works by Tchaikovsky, Leos Janacek and Richard Strauss, she also had a superb sense of comedy that allowed her to excel in lighter fare, such as Rosalinde in “Die Fledermaus” by Johann Strauss II.
“All my life I have striven to show that it is not in the slightest unnatural to express yourself in song,” she wrote in her 1978 autobiography. Her goal was “to find a balance between music, words and gestures (to achieve) the work of art.”
Soderstrom gained international acclaim in the 1950s, after debuts in Salzburg, Austria, and at England’s Glyndebourne Festival. When she gave her first performance at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1959, as Susanna in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro,” a New York Herald Tribune critic called her “simply a darling, with a bright, delectable and accurate soprano that carried the treble like a crystal flute.”
From 1959 to 1963, she often appeared at the Met as Marguerite in Charles Gounod’s “Faust,” Adina in Gaetano Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore” and Musetta in Giacomo Puccini’s “La Boheme.”
She then vanished from U.S. stages for more than a decade, and many American admirers assumed she had retired. But, with three young sons at home, she temporarily confined her singing career to Sweden and northern Europe.
In 1999, at the age of 71, she came out of semi-retirement to appear as the Countess in Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades” at the Met.
