Martina Arroyo, a soprano whose rich voice carried with ease through the scores of Giuseppe Verdi and who was one of the first Black singers to have a major operatic career, died on Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 89.
The death was confirmed by her representative, Miracle Management.
Ms. Arroyo and other artists of her generation, like Leontyne Price, Grace Bumbry, Shirley Verrett and George Shirley, broke color barriers in the opera world in the 1950s and ’60s, becoming stars at important houses.
At the Metropolitan Opera, Ms. Arroyo made her debut in a small role in 1959, but her big break arrived six years later, when Rudolf Bing, the company’s general manager, called and asked her to replace an ailing colleague as Verdi’s Aida.
Ms. Arroyo, whose career had been building slowly in Europe, initially assumed it was a prank. The evening, though, was a triumph. She was offered a contract; sang later that year as Elisabetta in Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” Leonora in his “Il Trovatore” and Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly”; and starred in three season-opening nights in the early 1970s.
Reviewing her in “Il Trovatore” at the Met in 1969, the New York Times critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote that she “always had a big, soaring voice. Now she sings with color, knows how to pace herself and produces tone after tone of focused beauty.” In a section on Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” in “The Metropolitan Opera Guide to Recorded Opera” (1993), Lord Harewood said that Ms. Arroyo’s Amelia, from 1975, was the best in the 14 classic recordings under review.
A frequent guest on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show,” Ms. Arroyo took an unusual path to stardom, briefly serving as a social worker and schoolteacher in New York City early in her career. She was down to earth and known for her sense of humor. Joking about the role she sang for her Met debut after winning the company’s Auditions of the Air in 1958, she recalled, laughing, that the offstage part of the Celestial Voice in “Don Carlo” was so tiny that her mother missed hearing her because of an ill-timed bathroom break.
In addition to the Met, Ms. Arroyo appeared at leading houses such as the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Royal Opera in London. While best known for Verdi, she was a versatile artist whose repertory ranged from Mozart to 20th-century composers like Stockhausen, Schoenberg and William Bolcom, and she gave the world premieres of works including Samuel Barber’s “Andromache’s Farewell.”
She sang with a powerful, luminous and expressive voice, and wanted listeners to know that she labored to achieve such lustrous results.
“If people think a kind of magic happens onstage, they ought to know that what they’re seeing is a lot of work,” she told The Times in 1972. “To me, ‘charisma’ is just a fancy word for rehearsals. And if I catch you using the word ‘effortless’ about me, I’ll laugh in your face.”
Ms. Arroyo was born on Feb. 2, 1937, in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, the daughter of Demetrio Arroyo, a mechanical engineer from Puerto Rico, and Lucille Washington, an amateur pianist from South Carolina.
The family, which also included an older son, placed a premium on culture. Ms. Arroyo sang in church choirs and took ballet classes, and with her parents frequently attended museums, concerts, plays, films and musicals.
Opera was not part of her upbringing, but while she was a student at Hunter College High School, she attended an opera workshop and was sent to audition for the vocal coach Marinka Gurewich, who later told the Times that she was as impressed by Ms. Arroyo’s character as she was by the teenager’s voice.
“To be a great singer means more than just a voice,” Ms. Gurewich said. “What struck me was this personality of straightforward determination without any of the unkindness that is so often included.”
Ms. Gurewich would be Ms. Arroyo’s teacher for the next four decades.
Ms. Arroyo’s parents initially worried about her passion for opera. “My father was so afraid I would have to wear a short dress and kick up my legs,” she recalled. “He finally found out more and saw an opera himself, and certainly my mother came to love opera and respect it almost more than I do. She became addicted to it.”
But the possibility of a career in the field still seemed far-fetched when Ms. Arroyo was getting started, in part because of a lack of models. It was only in 1955 that the contralto Marian Anderson became the first Black artist to sing a significant role at the Met.
Even after Ms. Arroyo’s parents began supporting her interest in music, they insisted that she also pursue a more reliable line of work as a backup. She received a bachelor’s degree in romance languages from Hunter College, followed by a teacher’s license and graduate studies in literature at New York University. She was a New York City welfare caseworker and a high-school teacher in the mid- to late 1950s.
Later, asked about the advice she liked to give young singers, she replied, “The only real answer that has remained with me has been the security of having had another profession.”
Ms. Arroyo won the Auditions of the Air by singing “O patria mia” from “Aida.” She then returned to her day job while also making her Met debut and singing around the country in opera and concerts. She then moved to Europe, giving well-reviewed lieder recitals and becoming part of the resident ensemble at the Zurich Opera.
In 1961, she married the Italian violist Emilio Poggioni, a relationship which ended in divorce, and later married Michel Maurel, a banker, who died in 2011. She has no immediate survivors.
She sang “Aida” for her final Met performances in 1986 and, after retiring from the stage in the early 1990s, devoted herself to teaching. She received the National Endowment for the Arts Opera Honor in 2010 and the Kennedy Center Honor in 2013.
As a professor at Indiana University, she taught a course in role preparation that laid the groundwork for the Martina Arroyo Foundation, which she established in 2003. Ten years later, she told The Washington Post that, while her singing career had been wonderful, “Life as I wanted it truly began for me with the foundation.”
The foundation long organized a six-week summer program, Prelude to Performance, that culminated in a fully staged opera at Hunter. Instead of focusing on technique, the program sought to help aspiring singers more convincingly inhabit roles. It was the kind of dramatic training that Ms. Arroyo felt had been missing from her own early studies, which had left her to her own instincts.
“I love Amelia in ‘Ballo in Maschera,’” she said. “I love Butterfly. She’s dramatic, she’s wonderful, she’s warm, she gives. The characters I don’t like, I don’t go near. Because if I don’t like her, if I don’t really love her, I can’t sing her.”
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