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Among the major opera stars of the 20th century, soprano Joan Sutherland excelled in bel canto roles and later in dramatic coloratura singing. Her voice was legendary for its agility, accuracy, and brilliant upper register.

Sutherland was born on November 7, 1926, in Sydney. Her parents were from Scotland. Sutherland's mother was a mezzo-soprano and gave her singing lessons all through her childhood and adolescence. At 18, she began voice lessons in Sydney with John and Aida Dickens, who directed her into the soprano range (she began as a mezzo like her mother). Sutherland made her debut in 1947 in a production of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. In 1949, she won Australia's Sun Aria competition, and after several more performances and competition wins in Australia, she moved to London, enrolling at the Opera School of the Royal College of Music for studies with Clive Carey. She became a utility soprano at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and made her debut there in 1952 in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, K. 620. After several other small roles, she sang her first leading role there later in the year, that of Amelia in Verdi's Un ballo in maschera. At this point, Sutherland aspired to a career as a Wagnerian dramatic soprano. It was conductor Richard Bonynge, whom she married in 1954, who persuaded her to focus on Italian bel canto repertory instead. Bonynge would go on to conduct many of her performances and recordings from the 1960s through the '80s.

When Sutherland switched to bel canto opera, success came quickly. One breakthrough occurred at Covent Garden on February 17, 1959, when Sutherland sang the lead role in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. At the time, bel canto operas -- by the likes of Donizetti, Rossini, and Bellini -- were less often heard on British stages than they are today, but Sutherland's voice, seeming to bloom into an effortless upper register, quickly made converts of British operagoers. It wasn't long before her prominence became international. She made her debut at Italy's La Scala in 1961, again as Lucia di Lammermoor, and she took the same role in November of that year at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. By that time, word of her talents had spread, and fans began lining up at 7:30 a.m. to buy tickets. They rewarded her with a 12-minute ovation. That year, she was signed to the Decca label and released a recording of Lucia di Lammermoor; the recording remains in print in Decca's Legendary Performances series. Her album The Art of the Prima Donna won a Grammy award in 1962 for Best Classical Vocal Performance; she was the first Australian so honored.

Sutherland soon made appearances at most of the world's major opera houses, and between then and her retirement in 1990, she was one of the world's top opera stars. She did not neglect her native Australia, for she and Bonynge formed their own company and toured Australia with it during the 1965-1966 season. Bonynge was named music director of the Australian Opera in Sydney in 1976, and Sutherland frequently appeared there. Sutherland's recording career on Decca got underway in earnest in the mid-'60s as she made numerous recordings of operas by Handel, Bellini, Donizetti, Meyerbeer, and others. As of 2022, her recording catalog comprised more than 150 items, the vast majority of them full-length operas. Sutherland was named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1979. After her retirement in 1990, she lived quietly in Switzerland. Sutherland died in the Swiss town of Les Avants on October 10, 2010, at the age of 83. ~ James Manheim

Richard Tucker is today primarily associated with the history of opera in America -- a highly gifted tenor, he is compared to Franco Corelli in influence and appeal, and classed with people like Alfredo Kraus and Nicolai Gedda. But Tucker, as a Jewish American who came to music from a religious background, had an output different from all of those others, and, ironically, was just as well known in the United States -- and perhaps even more beloved -- for that other side of his work. When he sang the part of Radames in Verdi's Aida as conducted by Toscanini on the NBC television network, it was because he was arguably the supreme Verdi tenor of his generation, and this broadcast was a piece of operatic, musical, and television history in the making; but Jewish audiences took a special pride in his selection for the role in the concert performance (for which he would have been utterly unsuited physically, in an actual production of the opera) because of whence he came.

He was born in New York, and at age six joined the choir of an Orthodox Jewish synagogue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan as a boy alto. Over the next eight years, he sang at weddings and other events and became steeped in Jewish liturgy and the musical traditions of the synagogue -- only the inevitable change to his voice interrupted his vocalizing, and from ages 14 through 18 he abandoned singing. By the time he reached 18, however, his adult voice had settled into a rich tenor, and it was in that capacity that he returned to his old synagogue. He also studied cantorial music with Cantor Weisser, Zavel Zilberts, and Cantor J. Mirsky, all eminent teachers, and at age 22 he was a cantor at a synagogue in New York. He subsequently sang at Temple Emanuel in Passaic, NJ, Temple Adath Israel in the Bronx, and the Brooklyn Jewish Center in Brooklyn, NY. But he overlapped his cantorial work with the study of operatic singing and repertory, principally with Paul Althouse, himself a former tenor with the Metropolitan Opera. It was Althouse who, in 1944, when Tucker was 29 years old, arranged for Edward Johnson, the general director of the Met, to hear Tucker sing at a service at the Brooklyn synagogue, and what he heard impressed him sufficiently to offer Tucker a contract. He relinquished his position with the synagogue in order to accept, although he vowed never to give up that side of his art, regardless of his professional engagements -- and ironically enough, with the Metropolitan Opera as his platform, he became the guest cantor to the world, officiating on the High Holy Days at services across the United States, and recording a then-unique body of cantorial repertory for Columbia Records; many of the early recordings were done in collaboration with conductor Sholom Secunda. His later recordings also included lighter fare, including stage work by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick (obviously with Fiddler on the Roof looming large in the selection). His more than 600 performances at the Met were, to at least some of his admirers, only icing on the cake next to his religious and other Jewish repertory, which also came to encompass such little-known works as Abraham Goldfaden's operetta-like work for the Yiddish theater. Meanwhile, Tucker sang around the world, his debut in Italy coming in the same production in which Maria Callas made her debut; he sang at Covent Garden in 1957, and in Vienna in 1958, and at La Scala in Milan in 1969. Tucker remained uniquely popular in America, however, and even more so in New York. Alas, because operatic recording was limited in the United States during his prime years, there are relatively few examples of his work in this area in complete operas during his first 15 years, before he reached his fifties -- the Aida with Toscanini and some other live performances with the Maestro, and an English-language version of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte from the start of the 1950s capture his youthful sound, and otherwise there are some later operatic recordings, and some Mahler with Leonard Bernstein on Columbia, all from the 1960s; mostly, however, he was represented by recitals, and his cantorial and other Jewish-themed recordings, relatively few of which have surfaced on CD. He passed away in 1975 at age 61. His funeral service was held on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, and in his memory the Richard Tucker Foundation awards a prize each year to a promising potential opera star. ~ Bruce Eder

Italian conductor Antonino Votto was a highly successful protégée of Arturo Toscanini. Votto rose to worldwide prominence in the 1950s largely on the strength of his numerous successful operatic recordings for EMI with popular soprano Maria Callas. But he also developed a reputation as one of the leading operatic conductors of his time owing to his many acclaimed performances at La Scala, in Milan, where he worked regularly for nearly two decades.

Votto was born in Piacenza, Italy, on October 30, 1896. He enrolled at the Naples Conservatory for music studies and after graduation served as répétiteur at La Scala. He was also an assistant conductor there to Arturo Toscanini. In 1923 Votto made his official debut, leading a performance of Puccini's Manon Lescaut.

With occasional appearances at La Scala and other major operatic venues in Italy and abroad, Votto gradually built a reputation as the one of the most outstanding conductors of Italian opera of his time. In 1941 he began teaching at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan, the war limiting operatic activity in Italy and most parts of Europe. Over the years, his students included Claudio Abbado and Riccardo Muti.

Votto began conducting regularly at La Scala in 1948, though Victor de Sabata was the music director. In the recording studio and arguably in the live performances he led over the next two decades at La Scala, Votto would rival de Sabata, as well as his young successors there, Carlo Maria Giulini and Guido Cantelli.

Votto made a series of highly successful recordings in the 1950s with Callas, based on extravagant productions staged at La Scala with the iconic soprano. Their collaborations on Puccini's La bohème (1956), Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera (1956), and Bellini's La Sonnambula (1957), for EMI, were enthusiastically received by both critics and public. Surpassing this imposing trio, many believe, were their two live recordings of Bellini's Norma and Giordano's Andrea Chenier, both from 1955.

Though Votto had debuted at Covent Garden in 1924 in performances of Puccini's Madama Butterfly and Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci, his American debut did not come until 1960, when he appeared at the Chicago Lyric Opera to conduct two Verdi staples, Aida and Don Carlo. Votto remained active at La Scala until 1967. In his remaining years he limited conducting appearances. Votto died in Milan on September 9, 1985.