Eleanor Steber

Eleanor Steber was an American soprano and voice teacher. She was particularly celebrated for her performances in the operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Strauss. A native of West Virginia, she was educated at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston where she began her performance career in the 1930s. She made her opera debut in 1936 at the Boston Opera House as Senta in Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman. In 1940 Steber won the Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air competition which garnered her a contract with the Metropolitan Opera. She was a leading soprano at the Met for 22 continuous years during which time she gave more than 400 performances in more than 30 roles. Disagreements between Steber and the Met's director Rudolph Bing led up to his decision not to renew Steber's contract after a December 1962 performance as Donna Anna in Don Giovanni. She later returned to the Met in 1966 for a final opera appearance as Minnie in Puccini's La Fanciulla del West. Steber's career was mainly based in the United States, and she only made a relatively small number of appearances abroad. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor...) under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...)