Biracial American opera singer Maria Ewing dies aged 71 

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The opera singer Maria Ewing, the ex-wife of theater director Sir Peter Hall and the mother of actress-director Rebecca Hall, has died at the age of 71.

Born in Detroit to a Dutch mother and an African American father, Maria went to school in Detroit before making her debut in a Metropolitan Opera production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.  

A soprano and mezzo-soprano known for her intense performances, Ewing met Sir Peter, a founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company and then director of the National Theatre, while performing at Glyndebourne in 1979 and the pair fell ‘madly in love’, despite Hall being married to his second wife at the time. 

They had daughter Rebecca, who recently revealed her maternal grandfather’s experience as a biracial man who ‘passed’ as white and raised his children, including Maria, as white, informed her directorial debut, Passing, which tells the story about two light-skinned Black women who also ‘pass’.

Rebecca, 39, recently spoke of how her mother’s racial heritage had remained an unspoken mystery in her family for many years. 

Maria died Sunday at her home in Detroit, spokeswoman Bryna Rifkin said Monday.

‘She was an extraordinarily gifted artist who by the sheer force of her talent and will catapulted herself to the most rarefied heights of the international opera world,’ her family said in a statement.

Born in March 1950, Maria was the daughter of Norman Isaac Ewing and Dutch-born Hermina Maria Veraar. 

Norman’s parents, John William Ewing and Hattie Norman, were described in U.S. Census records as ‘mulatto’, an outdated term used to describe a child born to a Black person and a white person.

On the 1910 U.S. Census, Norman’s race is listed as ‘mulatto’. In 1920 he describes himself as ‘Native American Indian’.  

Norman married Hermina, who was born in Amsterdam, in Ontario, Canada, in 1938. The couple settled in the US and welcomed four daughters, Norma Koleta, Carol Pankratz, Frances Ewing and Maria Ewing.

Norman died in 1968, when Maria was a teenager, and Hermina died in 2004, aged 88.

Maria graduated from Finney High School, Detroit, in 1968 and made her professional debut just eight years later in a Metropolitan Opera production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. 

She also starred as Blanche de la Force in a new John Dexter production of Poulen’s Dialogues des Carmélites in 1977.

She sang 96 Met performances until her finale as Marie in Berg’s Wozzeck in 1997, a span that included a six-year interruption triggered by a spat with Met artistic director James Levine.

She met Sir Peter at Glyndebourne in 1979 when she sang Dorabella in a staging of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte at Glyndebourne Festival, directed by Sir Peter and led by conductor Bernard Haitink.  

Sir Peter fell ‘madly in love’, despite being married to his second wife Jacky at the time. 

Jacky and he were divorced in 1981, and in 1982 he married Maria, who that same year gave birth to their daughter, Rebecca.

Four years later, her husband directed her at the Met where she sang the title role in a new staging of Bizer’s ‘Carmen.’

‘Far from the usual attempt at a fiery sexpot, her Carmen was easily bored, even sullen, her come-hither being a challenge to men to awaken her interest,’ critic Mary Campbell wrote of the performance. 

But Ewing severed ties with the Met after the company scrapped a contemplated telecast of ‘Carmen’ with her, then broadcast a 1987 performance of the production starring Agnes Baltsa. Ewing responded by withdrawing from appearances at the Ravinia Festival outside Chicago, where Levine was music director.

‘The Met has no manners,’ Ewing and Hall told the Chicago Tribune.

Hall directed Ewing in 1986 in the title role of Strauss’ Salome at the LA Opera, in which she stripped to fully nude at the end of the Dance of the Seven Veils.

The staging traveled in 1988 to London’s Royal Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and a telecast of the production was released commercially on DVD.

‘Maria Ewing, who ventured the title role in Richard Strauss’ Salome for the new Music Center Opera on Thursday night, is a Theaterviech,’ Martin Bernheimer wrote in the Los Angeles Times, using a German word for ‘theater beast.’ 

‘She is, in fact, a prime and wondrous example of the rare breed. She is a lovely, frail, seemingly nervous young woman blessed with a devastating pout, hypnotic eyes and a searing mind. She also happens to command a rather soft, slender and reedy mezzo-soprano that thins out a bit at the extended top.’

Hall was to write of his third marriage to Maria: ‘We were together for ten years of passion, highs and lows, excitement and despair. It was a turbulent life, gloriously happy and acutely miserable.’

But by 1988, he had fallen in love yet again with the theatre’s press officer, Nicki Frei. She became his fourth and final wife when he was 60 and she 30. Sir Peter Hall died in 2017, aged 87.  

Since the 1990s, Maria has stayed largely out of the spotlight, although she remained supportive of her daughter Rebecca, turning out to support her cinematic endeavours.  

Rebecca has starred in films that include Woody Allen´s ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona,’ Ron Howard´s ‘Frost/Nixon’ and ‘The Awakening.’ Her directing debut ‘Passing’ was released last year.

Speaking last year, Rebecca revealed how her family’s own complex biracial history inspired her to direct the film. 

She said of her maternal grandfather, Norman: ‘He was almost definitely African American. I say he passed for white; there was no language for that within even my family… it was it was mysterious even for [my mother] and complicated for her.’

‘I then dug a little deeper, and it became very clear that he was white passing. And more than that, it was likely that his parents were also both white passing. And I started thinking more and more about the legacy of passing in a family.’

Rebecca first starting her family’s heritage when she was in her mid-20s.

‘I went through a stage of really bringing it into a room and being surprised by the reaction that I got and also confused by the reaction, which varied,’ she told Screen Daily.

‘Some people would be accepting, and a lot of people just would laugh and find it hilarious. And I’d always be like, ‘What does that say about you that you find that so funny? What’s funny about it? Because I look like an English rose and that’s funny to you because you have an absolute idea about what blackness is?’ 

‘All these things start to percolate and you’re like this walking paradox.’

In a separate interview, Rebecca described her grandfather’s ‘passing’ as something that was ‘known and not known’. Adapting Passing for the screen was a way of processing her own complicated family history.

‘I don’t think that I really had language for passing. It was such a difficult area of conversation in my family,’ explained Rebecca in an interview with Variety. 

‘It was a question of, maybe my grandfather and maybe his parents [were Black], maybe this, maybe that, maybe it was something else, we don’t really know. It wasn’t framed as this choice.

‘I don’t think I understood the truth of [passing] until I read the book. And then I had a context for it that made sense and slotted everything together in relation to all of the snippets of information I had about my family.’ 

Hall said her mother was ‘incredibly moved’ when she saw the film for the first time.

‘There were a lot of tears,’ she said. ‘She said that she felt her father would have been released by it on some level because he was never able to talk about it. This has given our family an ability to not feel like there’s something that’s hidden.’

Ewing also is survived by sisters Norma Koleta, Carol Pancratz and Francis Ewing.