Shirley Verrett, 79, an acclaimed American mezzo-soprano and soprano praised for intensity during an opera career that spanned four decades, died Friday in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Verrett, one of the top opera singers of the 1970s and 1980s, had been suffering from heart trouble, said Jack Mastroianni of IMG Artists, who was notified of her death by the Metropolitan Opera Guild.
Born in New Orleans, she was renowned for a blazing intensity in her performances as a mezzo for much of her career and a soprano in her later years.
Michael Seifert, 86, a former Nazi SS prison guard known as “the beast of Bolzano” for his cruelty, died Saturday in an Italian hospital, officials said.
The Ukrainian-born Seifert was serving a life sentence at the Santa Maria Capua Vetere prison in southern Italy. In 2000, he was tried in absentia by a military tribunal in Verona and convicted of nine counts of murder while he was an SS guard at a prison transit camp in Bolzano, in Italy’s Alpine South Tyrol area.
He acknowledged being a guard at the SS-run camp but denied being involved in atrocities.
Charles McDowell, 84, a retired columnist for The Richmond Times-Dispatch who brought a folksy manner to his stint on the PBS program “Washington Week in Review” and to a prominent role in Ken Burns’ PBS series “The Civil War,” died Friday. The cause was complications of a stroke, according to his wife.
McDowell’s nationally syndicated column ran from 1954 until his retirement in 1998.
Television viewers knew him from frequent appearances on a variety of PBS programs, including “Summer of Judgment: The Watergate Hearings,” for which he was the writer, narrator and host.
Denver Post wire services
