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Lois Catherine Marshall, gifted with a lovely voice and a very wide range, was Canada's leading soprano, then, with Maureen Forrester, one of its two best mezzo-sopranos.

She was stricken by polio when she was two years old, and survived with permanent partial paralysis of her legs. Her recovery and rehabilitation primarily took place at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children. To pass time and keep up her spirits she sang. Soon she was lifting the spirits of other children, as the nurses and doctors brought them to listen to her. "Maybe that's where I get the idea that people liked to listen to me," she mused in an interview late in her life. "One way or another, I've been performing all of my life," she added. "As a patient in the hospital, it was still performing for people -- who were forcing me to do it at the time -- but still I think I liked doing it." She began studying with Weldon Kilburn (who would become her husband in 1968) and Emmy Hein, then entered the University of Toronto's Faculty of Music.

In 1947, she was asked by Sir Ernest MacMillan to sing in his Holy Week presentation of J.S. Bach's Passion According to St. Matthew, which earned her wide recognition. This spread after 1950 when she won the York Knitting Mills Singing Stars of Tomorrow competition (now called the CBC Singing Stars of Tomorrow). This made her famous throughout Canada. She went on to receive the prestigious Naumberg Award in 1952, winning a New York recital.

She was given an opportunity to perform with the CBC Opera Company in 1952, but during her career did little operatic work on account of her relative immobility. Her debut was as the Queen of the Night in Mozart's The Magic Flute, a role possessing some of the highest notes in any opera. She had an evenly produced three-octave range of unique personal coloration and special warmth. As an operatic lyric soprano she did appear in La bohème as Mimì, as Tosca (both in Boston), and as Ellen Orford in Britten's Peter Grimes in a CBC Television production.

However, she became internationally famous as an oratorio, concert, and recital singer. Canadian newspapers expressed a great deal of pride when Arturo Toscanini selected her to sing in his performance and recording of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis in 1953, a performance that launched her world-wide fame.

She attracted the attention of England's most illustrious conductor of the day, Sir Thomas Beecham, who engaged her to sing Mozart's Exsultate Jubilate in her London debut in 1956, with his Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. He also cast her in his concert productions of Handel's Solomon and Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio, and recorded both performances under his baton.

She embarked on numerous recital and concert tours that took her to the Netherlands, Germany, England, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and the U.S.S.R. (which she toured six times).

In 1965, she joined the early music organization the Bach Aria Group, and traveled extensively with them. In the early 1970s she formed a singing and touring partnership with mezzo-soprano Forrester. In the late 1970s, her voice lowered, making her an excellent mezzo. She continued to sing for several years and joined the Faculty of Music at Toronto. In 1968 she was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.

She died of cancer, and an anonymous challenge grant resulted in raising a $2-million endowment for the Lois Marshall Chair in Voice Studies at the University of Toronto.

Mezzo-soprano Nan (born Katherine-Ann) Merriman was one of America's leading opera singers for two decades following World War II.

She studied singing in Los Angeles with Alexis Bassian and Lotte Lehmann. Before she was 20 she was earning money as a singer for film soundtracks. In that capacity, she attracted the attention of Laurence Olivier. When the great British actor put together a touring company (including his wife, Vivian Leigh) to perform Romeo and Juliet around the United States he engaged Merriman to join. Her part was to sing arias by Palestrina and Purcell during scenery changes.

Her debut in opera was at the Cincinnati Zoo, where the Cincinnati Summer Opera had its regular season. The role was La Cieca in La Gioconda. Then she entered a singing competition sponsored by NBC Radio, winning the top prize, which included being given 15 minutes of national network airtime to sing a brief recital.

Looking for new talent, conductor Arturo Toscanini listened to that broadcast, liked Merriman's voice, and engaged her for several broadcast concerts and recordings which included the title role of Gluck's Orfeo, Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, and the Verdi roles of Emilia (in Otello), Maddalena (in Rigoletto) and Meg Page (in Falstaff).

In the decade after the War she established herself as a successful singer on international stages, including opera houses in Vienna, Paris, Milan, Brussels, and Amsterdam, and was a favorite at the Chicago Lyric Opera and the San Francisco Opera. She sang in the British premiere of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress at the Edinburgh Festival of 1953, as Baba the Turk. An even more unusual role was the part of Laura in The Stone Guest, by the nineteenth-century Russian composer Dargomizhsky, in its century-delayed world premiere at Milan's Piccola Scala in 1958.

But her favorite and most-repeated role, on which she built a strong reputation in Europe, was Dorabella in Mozart's Così fan tutte. She debuted in that part at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 1953, repeating it there in 1955 and 1959. She also sang it at the Piccola Scala and in the Glyndebourne Festival in 1956. She participated in two different complete recordings of Così.

These appearances established a strong demand for her in Europe as a concert and recital singer, particularly in the Netherlands. She had a rich, warm, and strong mezzo-soprano voice. In 1965, she retired voluntarily from singing, wishing to go out while still at the top of her vocal powers.

She continued to live in the Netherlands for eight years, but returned to the United States in 1973.

Eugene Conley was a tenor active on the U.S. vocal scene around the middle twentieth century. He was chosen by Arturo Toscanin to participate in his NBC Symphony Orchestra recording of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, and sang in Mahler's Eighth Symphony in a historic performance with Leopold Stokowski conducting the New York Philharmonic.

Jerome Hines was one of the best known and most durable of American bass-baritones, known for his rich, powerful, unforced voice and his psychologically penetrating acting performances.

Jerome Albert Link Heinz (as he was born) loved singing but was turned down by his junior high school glee club because his voice didn't blend.

He studied at the University of California Los Angeles, with a degree in science, having taken chemistry, physics, and mathematics. He taught chemistry at UCLA for a year, then worked as a chemist for an oil company.

However, while he had been at UCLA he took singing lessons from Gennaro Curci, and at the age of 20 debuted at the San Francisco Opera in 1941; during that season he sang as Monterone in Verdi's Rigoletto and in Tannhäuser. After that, he was invited to sing with several orchestras, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and with the New Orleans Opera, which convinced him to concentrate on singing as his career. He won the Caruso Award in 1946, resulting in his Metropolitan Opera audition and debut in 1947 as The Sergeant in Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov. Irving Kolodin's review made as much mention of his tall height as of his "able singing." In December, he was given the role of Méphistophélès in Gounod's Faust. The New York Times judged that the role was "still somewhat beyond him" but praised his singing ability and said that "much can be expected" of him.

He soon proved himself a reliable comprimario singer the next season, appearing 45 times in ten roles, including the Grand Inquisitor in Don Carlos, Don Basilio in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, the Commendatore in Don Giovanni, and Nick Swallow in Peter Grimes. He also appeared in these years in Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City. His reputation soared when he was selected by conductor Arturo Toscanini to sing some of his concerts and appear in his 1953 recording of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis.

Also in 1953 he made major European appearances at the Glyndebourne and Edinburgh Festivals.

Complications in his career development arose in 1951, when the Montreal-born American bass-baritone George London appeared at the Met. With the presence of London, Hines, and Ezio Pinza -- singers so great that in a later day they would surely have been marketed as the "Three Basses" -- it took Hines a few more years before he moved out of roles like the Grand Inquisitor and the Sergeant into the leading roles, like Philip II and Boris himself.

In the mid-1950s, he added the major Wagnerian bass-baritone parts to his repertoire, including Gurnemanz, King Marke, and Wotan, all of which he sang at Bayreuth. In 1962, he became the second American singer to portray Boris Godunov at the Bolshoi Opera in Moscow; George London had preceded him in 1960.

Hines went on to sing 45 roles in hundreds of performances at the Metropolitan. He holds the record for the most consecutive seasons there by any major artist at 41. His last appearance was on January 24, 1987 as Sparafucile in Rigoletto.

He was a highly religious man who is reputed to have walked out of a production at the Met due to his objections over the "lewd" qualities of the choreography. He wrote an opera, I Am the Way, on the life of Christ. His autobiography, This is my Story, this is my Song, was published in 1968, and he wrote two highly regarded books on the art of singing, Great Singers on Great Singing (1982) and The Four Voices of Man (1997).