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One of the best-known conductors of the last quarter of the 20th century, Zubin Mehta is known for his flamboyant, passionate style on the podium. A conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestras for many years, he has appeared with orchestras all over the world and has sought to use classical music as a force for peace in troubled regions.

Mehta was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), in British-controlled India, on April 29, 1936. His first language was Gujarati, and the family adhered to the Parsi religion. His father, Mehli Mehta, was a violinist and conductor who co-founded the Bombay Symphony Orchestra. Part of the key to Zubin's later confidence and success as a conductor is that he began very early; his father taught him to play violin and piano and to conduct, and from his early teens, he was leading sectional rehearsals with the Bombay Symphony; he took rehearsals with the entire ensemble at 16. Mehta's mother wanted him to study medicine, and he enrolled at St. Xavier's College, Bombay, with that aim, but after two years, he dropped out and moved to Vienna, Austria. Living on a shoestring, he took conducting lessons from Hans Swarowsky at the Vienna Academy of Music and learned the double bass so he could find orchestral work. After winning a contest, he received a one-year appointment as the assistant conductor with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. This led to prestigious guest conducting posts with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra and then, in 1960 and 1962, respectively, to music director posts with the Montreal Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. For the former post, he had help from Charles Munch, whom he had impressed at a contest at the Tanglewood Music Festival. The jet-setting conductor who holds posts in far-flung cities has become commonplace, but Mehta was one of the first whose career followed the pattern. He built the Los Angeles Philharmonic into one of the major U.S. orchestras.

Mehta resigned his Montreal post in 1967, beginning a long association with the Israel Philharmonic that came to an end only in 2017. An early recording was one of Puccini's Tosca, starring soprano Leontyne Price, for the RCA label in 1973. Mehta left the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1978, succeeding Pierre Boulez as the music director of the New York Philharmonic. He remained in New York until 1991. Mehta also became the music director of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, entering into the musical life of Florence and later becoming an honorary citizen of that city. The tendency to engage with an orchestra's surroundings rather than simply flying in to conduct could be seen especially clearly in his work with the Israel Philharmonic, which he conducted during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the 1982 Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon (where he conducted for both Israeli and Arab audiences, with the latter receiving him enthusiastically), and the 1991 Gulf War.

Conducting the internationally televised Three Tenors concerts featuring Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, and José Carreras, Mehta gained wide public exposure for his outsized style, perfectly suited to these concerts. After leaving his New York Philharmonic post, Mehta assumed the music directorship of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 1998, remaining in that post until 2006. He also became the music director of the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia in Valencia, Spain, in 2005. During the 1990s and 2000s, Mehta took the opportunity to conduct orchestras and operas in large, one-of-a-kind events. In 1992, he conducted a performance of Puccini's opera Tosca, starring Domingo as Cavaradossi, at the actual places specified in the score in real time. Mehta conducted a similar production of Puccini's Turandot in China in 1998, directed by filmmaker Zhang Yimou, with 300 soldiers and 300 extras.

Mehta's recording catalog is one of the most extensive of any contemporary conductor, comprising well over 200 albums. His output focuses on Romantic orchestral repertory, most often from the second half of the 19th century, but encompasses a startling variety of music, from early American composer John Knowles Paine to Schoenberg to opera and film soundtracks (he led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Frank Zappa's film 200 Motels in 1971), to Vienna's Summer Night and New Year's concerts. He has rarely recorded contemporary music. Mehta remained active into old age, releasing a new recording of Haydn's oratorio Die Schöpfung, Hob. 21/2, with the Munich Philharmonic in 2021, when he was 85. He conducted the Australian World Orchestra at concerts in Melbourne and Sydney in 2022 and released several new recordings, including one of works by Bruckner and Schumann, featuring pianist Martha Argerich in Schumann's Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54, with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 2024. By that time, his catalog comprised some 300 recordings. ~ James Manheim

The vocal talents of Birgit Nilsson were first recognized when she began to sing in her church choir. She studied voice with Ragnar Blennow in Bastad and later at the Royal Music Academy Stockholm with Joseph Hislop and Arne Sunnegärdh. She made her opera debut at Stockholm where her first important role was Agatha in Der Freischütz, and in 1947 she sang Lady Macbeth in Verdi's Macbeth there. Her first important international appearance came in 1951 as Elettra in Mozart's Idomeneo at the Glyndebourne Festival. In 1952, she sang Donna Anna in Don Giovanni at Florence. Her first important appearances in Wagner operas came in 1953 at Stockholm where she sang Elisabeth in Tannhäuser and Isolde for the first time. This marked the start of the most important Wagnerian career of the second half of the 20th century. The following year she made her Bayrueth debut as Elsa in Lohengrin and in the same season sang Ortlinde in Die Walküre. She later appeared there as Isolde and as Brunnhilde. It was in Munich during the 1954-1955 season that she first sang Brunnhilde in Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen and during the same season she sang her first Salome. In 1957, she sang the complete Ring cycle in London. At the Vienna State Opera she was heard as Elsa, Sieglinde, Elisabeth, Aida, and Sent. In 1957 she sang Leonore in Beethoven's Fidelio and the following season sang her first Turandot. She was also highly regarded for her interpretations of Elektra and the Barak's Wife in Die Frau ohne Schatten. Her other important Italian roles were Tosca, Amelia in Un ballo in maschera and Aida. She sang at all of the major opera centers of the world including Tokyo, Paris, Buenos Aires, Chicago, San Francisco, and Hamburg. Also she sang Turandot in Moscow with the Teatro alla Scala. At the age of 62, a performance of Strauss' Elektra was videotaped at the Metropolitan Opera House and broadcast around the world.

Because of her full schedule of opera performances, Nilsson did not sing in many concerts or recitals although early in her career she did sing the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven on several occasions, including one at Bayreuth. She did give some recitals including tours of Australia and Japan as well the major music centers of Europe and North America. Her recital programs concentrated on the German and Scandinavian songs, including some rarely heard pieces by Stenhammar. She often sang "I Could Have Danced All Night" as an encore.

The voice of Birgit Nilsson was like a laser beam that cut through the orchestra, unlike the voice of Kirsten Flagstad or Jessye Norman which are like a wall of sound. It was a large voice with such brilliance that at times it gave the sensation of being sharp of the intended pitch. She was a congenial colleague except for her long-standing difficulties with Franco Corelli regarding the length of the high Cs in Puccini's Turandot and with Herbert von Karjan. Happily all of her important roles have been preserved on recordings. As long as the operas of Wagner are performed, the voice of Birgit Nilsson will be remembered, and no one has sung Puccini's Turandot with more brilliance or security. Her autobiography, Mina minnesbilder, was published in 1977 at Stockholm.

"Thrilling" is the word that inevitably seems to come up in discussion of Franco Corelli, whether in reference to his powerful, immediately identifiable voice or his matinee idol good looks. (He was one of the few tenors whose appearance was actually enhanced by Renaissance style tights, and after one such appearance was nicknamed "The Golden Calves.") While he was no stylist, or rather, sang everything "Corelli style," altering rhythms to suit his voice, inserting or prolonging high notes whenever he felt like it, and almost never displaying a high level of finesse, nuance, or sensivitiy to phrasing, for his admirers, he was the quintessence of operatic excitement.

Rather unusually, he did not come from a musical family, discovered his own talent relatively late in life, and was almost completely self taught. He had studied for an engineering career, but friends encouraged him to think about music, and he briefly studied at the Pesaro Conservatory when he was in his early twenties. In 1951, he won the Maggio Musicale competition, but decided to discontinue formal musical studies shortly afterwards. Instead, he spent his time listening to recordings of great tenors of the past, particularly Caruso, Gigli, and Lauri-Volpi, in the repertoire which he himself hoped to sing. He made his operatic debut as Don Jose in a production of Carmen in Spoleto, also during 1951.

Despite not having the network of teachers that many students have, he quickly grew in reputation, appeared in a television production of Leoncavallo's Pagliacci, and made his La Scala debut in Spontini's La Vestale as Licinio, in 1954. His Covent Garden debut in 1957 was as Cavaradossi in Puccini's Tosca, and his Metropolitan Opera debut as Manrico in 1961. While he had a definite "bleat" in his voice during his early years that led to some critics dubbing him "PeCorelli" (Italian for "goat"), he did learn to overcome that, and also to add a ravishing pianissimo to his singing, though his phrasing remained more or less crude. Over the coming years, La Scala and the Met were the houses where he appeared most frequently. He constantly suffered from stage fright, and many of his divo antics, offstage and on, might have stemmed from that, but on stage, he cut a dashing figure, though somewhat more inclined to pose than to act. In one memorable staging of Don Carlo, feeling that Boris Christoff, the bass singing King Philip was getting too much audience attention, he provoked a genuine sword fight with the no less feisty Christoff during the auto-da-fe scene, until a brave supernumerary (spear carrier) physically separated the two. In yet another staging of the same scene and opera, he didn't come out onto the stage until long after his cue; he had been in the middle of a dispute backstage, and wanted to win that before he came out to sing.

He sang a wide variety of roles from the Italian and French repertoire, including several works that had been relative obscurities, such as Meyerbeer's Les Hugenots and Donizetti's Poliuto. Appropriately, considering how he learned to sing, he made several recordings, mostly for EMI/Angel. Among the recordings that capture him at his best are an Andrea Chenier, conducted by Santini (EMI CDS5 65287-2) and a selection of arias and songs (EMI Double Forte CZS 569530 2.) ~ Ann Feeney

A trailblazer in the operatic world, mezzo-soprano Grace Bumbry was the first singer of color to appear at the Bayreuth Festival and was the first African American opera singer to perform in the White House. Inspired as a child by attending Marian Anderson concerts, Bumbry would continue the legacy of that famed singer.

Bumbry was born in St. Louis, Missouri on January 4, 1937. As a youth, she sang in church choirs. In 1955, she entered Northwestern University, where she studied voice with the great Lotte Lehman, and transferred with her to the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California. In 1958, Bumbry was a joint winner of the Metropolitan Opera auditions, sharing first place with Martina Arroyo. She won several other prizes and made her professional debut in a recital in London in 1959. Her first operatic appearance was at the Paris Opéra as Amneris in Verdi's Aida. It was one of the most spectacular operatic debuts in history; Bumbry became an instant star and was invited to join the roster of the Basle Opera. She made operatic history in 1961 when she was engaged by Wieland Wagner to sing at the Bayreuth Festival and became the first Black singer to perform in the shrine of Wagnerian opera. Furthermore, musical historian Nicolas Slonimsky pointed out that she was the first Black woman to make a professional operatic appearance as a goddess with her debut at Bayreuth as Venus in Tannhäuser on July 23, 1961. Bumbry embarked on a concert tour of the U.S. and was invited by Jacqueline Kennedy to sing at the White House on February 20, 1962. She also followed up her smash success at Bayreuth with appearances as Venus at the Chicago Lyric Opera and at Lyons, France.

Bumbry's 1963 London debut came in the role of Princess Eboli in Verdi's Don Carlos, and she gave her first Metropolitan Opera performance in the same role in 1965. Among the other roles she undertook were those of Lady Macbeth in Verdi's Macbeth and Carmen in Bizet's opera. She had unequivocally established what should have been obvious 30 years earlier in connection with her great predecessor Marian Anderson: namely, that vocal artistry, not race, matters in the casting of operatic roles. During the 1960s, Bumbry worked on extending her range. In 1970, at the Vienna Staatsoper, she sang the part of Santuzza, making her debut as a soprano. She sang Richard Strauss' Salome at Covent Garden the same year, and her first appearance in Puccini's Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera came in 1971. She maintained her mezzo voice while triumphing in soprano parts, such as Jenufa in Janacek's opera and as Ariane in Dukas' Bluebeard.

Between operatic performances, she established a fine recital career, stressing the core repertory of German lieder. Her attractions as a performer included a commanding stage presence with an effective and understated acting technique. She had a very warm voice with rich tone quality throughout the mezzo range, although it lost some of its distinctiveness in the very upper part of her soprano register. She was among the few sopranos who sang both the roles of Aida and Amneris in Aida and both Venus and Elisabeth in Wagner's Tannhäuser. After appearing in a 1997 production of Richard Strauss' Elektra in Lyon, Bumbry retired from operatic roles and became a voice teacher and performed occasional recitals. In 2010, she made a comeback in a Parisian production of Scott Joplin's Treemonisha, and three years later, she was cast in a Vienna Staatsoper staging of Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades, appearing as the Countess. In October 2022, Bumbry, who was living in Vienna, was traveling to New York City to be inducted into Opera America's Opera Hall of Fame when she suffered a stroke during her flight. She never fully recovered, and after months in various care facilities, she died in Vienna on May 7, 2023; she was 86 years old. ~ Joseph Stevenson & Keith Finke