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Lucine Amara, an American singer who continued a decades-long career at the Metropolitan Opera after she successfully brought the company up on age-discrimination charges in a widely publicized case, died on Sept. 6 at her home in Queens. She was 99.
Her daughter, Evelyn La Quaif, a soprano and stage director, who had shared an apartment with her mother in recent weeks, said that the cause was respiratory illness and heart failure and that Ms. Amara also had dementia. She had lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for decades.
A lyric soprano known for her clear, supple voice, Ms. Amara sang 748 performances with the Met between 1950 and 1991, an impressively long tenure.
Her dozens of roles there included Mimì in Puccini’s “La Bohème,” Nedda in Leoncavallo’s “I Pagliacci,” the title part in Richard Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos,” and Donna Elvira in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and Pamina in his “Magic Flute.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTAppearing in a 1964 Met production of Gounod’s “Faust,” Ms. Amara was described by Theodore Strongin in The New York Times as “a first-rank Marguerite in all respects.”
If Ms. Amara was not as well known to the general public as other singers in her cohort — among them Roberta Peters and Victoria de los Angeles — it was partly, her admirers say, because she was damned by her own competence and by her matter-of-fact approach to her craft.
“She did not have a blazing temperament,” Bruce Burroughs, a writer on opera and a longtime friend of Ms. Amara’s, said in an interview for this obituary in 2017. “She made singing seem a little too easy: There was no evidence of struggle. We always knew that she was going to hit the high note, and it would be in the center of the pitch.”
That reliability, together with her immense command of the operatic repertory and fine diction in a range of European languages, had carried Ms. Amara from an early career as a typist to entirely unplanned success as an opera singer.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTBut in many respects, those assets also turned out to be her professional undoing.
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Lucine Tockqui Armaganian was born on March 1, 1925, in Hartford, Conn., to Kevork and Adrine (Kazanjian) Armaganian. Her parents had emigrated to the United States from Ottoman Armenia after surviving the Armenian genocide of 1915. The family later moved from Hartford to San Francisco, where Lucine’s father ran a shoe-repair shop.
Lucine began violin lessons at 10 and played seriously for years. Though she also sang in her church choir, she never contemplated a career in vocal music.
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Learn more about our process.“The funny part is, I never wanted to sing, and I never thought I had a voice,” Ms. Amara told The Washington Post in 1965. “I wanted to teach violin.”
But when she was a teenager, a friend, hearing her sing, urged her to take voice lessons. At 18, she began instruction with Stella Eisner-Eyn, a Viennese soprano, supporting herself by working as a typist for the Southern Pacific railroad and the Navy.
After little more than a year of instruction, the young Ms. Amara joined the chorus of the San Francisco Opera — as a contralto. (Her voice would rise of its own accord over time, and she would credit the sight-reading skill and keen sense of pitch for which she was known as a singer to her years with the violin.)
In 1948, she won the Atwater Kent competition, a national music contest on the radio. She embarked on a career singing principal roles that would lead her to the Met.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTMs. Amara’s Met debut, on Nov. 6, 1950, held two portents for her future there. The performance, Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” was the Met’s first under its new, imperious steward, Rudolf Bing. Mr. Bing, the company’s general manager from 1950 to 1972, would both help and hinder her career.
Perhaps even more prophetically, Ms. Amara’s role that night, the Celestial Voice, was an offstage part. With hindsight, that role — heard but not seen — seemed to augur the marginalization that she said she later experienced at the company’s hands.
Her other Met roles of the 1950s and ’60s included Micaela in Bizet’s “Carmen,” Tatiana in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” Euridice in Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice” and Ellen Orford in Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes.” She also appeared in some of the country’s foremost recital halls.
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“Her artistry was impeccable, her musicianship wise and her voice crystalline and variegated in color,” Mr. Strongin wrote in The Times in 1969, reviewing a recital by Ms. Amara at Carnegie Hall.
Besides singing her scheduled roles at the Met, Ms. Amara became the company’s cover artist of choice — on more or less perpetual standby to fill in for indisposed sopranos, often at a moment’s notice.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT“She became the house’s leading specialist in the last-minute rescue,” the music critic Richard Dyer wrote in The Boston Globe in 1979. “Fifty-four times Amara’s name was announced from the stage as replacement for another artist.”
Once, in 1975, Martina Arroyo, singing Leonora, was seized by a coughing fit in the middle of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino.” Ms. Amara, relaxing backstage, was hustled into a costume and propelled on in her place. She had no time to change out of the anachronistic, patent-leather boots she had on.
So esteemed was Ms. Amara as a pinch-hitter that it seemed not to have occurred to the Met that a pinch-hitter might sometimes require a pinch-hitter herself. As a result, she once took the stage to sing an 11th-hour Antonia in Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann” with a fever of 102.
During Mr. Bing’s reign, Ms. Amara’s prowess as a replacement became something of a golden straitjacket.
“I always had to live in Manhattan,” she told the northern New Jersey newspaper The Record in 2015, “because I had to be no further than 10 minutes from the opera house.”
Her movements were restricted in far more serious ways.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT“Mr. Bing didn’t like the idea of her accepting contracts elsewhere, particularly going off to Europe, because he knew that the more she was heard in other places, the more in demand she would be,” Mr. Burroughs said in 2017. “She was too valuable.”
Ms. Amara did manage to sing at the Vienna State Opera, the Glyndebourne Festival in England and on other foreign stages. But the Met almost invariably summoned her home and kept here there, once keeping her from an engagement at La Scala, the Milan house considered the Olympus of operatic careers.
“When I was in Vienna, I received a telegram from La Scala to come do Aida,” Ms. Amara told Opera News in 2005. “But Mr. Bing wouldn’t release me. I almost said, ‘Well, I’ll go anyway,’ and he said, ‘If you go, don’t bother coming back.’”
Yet as much as the Met seemed to need Ms. Amara, her vaunted status as a replacement began to wane once Mr. Bing’s tenure ended. In late 1976, she filed an age-discrimination complaint against the company with the New York State Division of Human Rights.
In it, she charged that although the Met was paying her some $50,000 a year to remain on call as a substitute (about $277,000 in today’s currency), it was increasingly bringing in other sopranos — often with more blazing marquee names — when last-minute replacements were needed.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe Met’s actions, as she later told The Times, left her feeling “like a football player on the bench.”
At the time of her complaint, Ms. Amara was 51, an age at which opera singers can be considered past their vocal prime. She argued, however, that she was still in good voice.
“If the Met had ever said that I was artistically inadequate I would have bowed out,” she told The Globe. “They told me I was ‘too familiar’ to the public — as if people didn’t spend thousands of dollars on publicity in order to become familiar to the public.”
In 1978, the Human Rights division upheld Ms. Amara’s complaint, ordering the Met to conciliate the dispute.
While some music writers, among them Donal Henahan of The Times, criticized the Met for letting a singer dictate its casting decisions, others applauded Ms. Amara for her tenacity.
The company eventually offered her a four-year contract, starting with the 1980-81 season, that included the title roles in Puccini’s “Turandot” and Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda” and the leading role of Amelia in Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTAlas for Ms. Amara, that season was significantly shortened by a labor dispute at the Met. Retaking its stage in February 1981 after an absence of nearly four years, she sang just a single “Ballo,” her only performance there that year.
Over the next decade, Ms. Amara made 16 more appearances with the Met. Her last performance there, on Jan. 7, 1991, was as Madelon in Giordano’s “Andrea Chénier.”
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In later years, she gave master classes and served as the artistic director of the New Jersey Association of Verismo Opera.
Ms. Amara’s marriage, to Gil Rudy, an advertising and public relations executive, ended in divorce. Ms. La Quaif is her only immediate survivor. Until she moved to Queens in August, Ms. Amara had lived on the Upper West Side since the late 1950s.
Among her recordings is an esteemed “Bohème” (she sings Musetta), with Ms. de los Angeles, Jussi Björling, Giorgio Tozzi and Robert Merrill, conducted by Thomas Beecham.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTIn 2007 at the age of 81, Ms. Amara sang the role of the retired diva Heidi Schiller in a concert performance of the Stephen Sondheim musical “Follies” at City Center in Manhattan.
“Never look back,” she sang, as Heidi. “One more kiss and goodbye.”
Bernard Mokam contributed reportingslotv casino
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