Licia Albanese, a revered Metropolitan Opera soprano who achieved superstar status in the postwar era for her emotionally intense and technically accomplished portrayals, particularly of the doomed geisha in “Madama Butterfly” and other Puccini heroines, died of natural causes Friday in New York. She was 105.
She had been attending performances until late last year, but “at 105 she felt it was time for her to go,” her son, Joseph Gimma Jr., said this week.
The Italian-born singer made her debut at the Met in 1940 as Cio-Cio San, the geisha wife of an American naval officer in the beloved Puccini opera. It was one of 17 roles Albanese performed at the Met over the next 26 years, including her widely admired Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata” and the title role in Massenet’s “Manon.”
In her farewell performance on the closing night of the Met’s old house in 1966, she fittingly reprised her “Butterfly” role, stirring critics and the audience with a dramatic gesture at the end of the famous aria “Un bel di.”
Calling her “a Puccini heroine with few peers at the Metropolitan Opera of the 1940s and ’50s,” longtime music critic Martin Bernheimer once described Albanese as “a soprano who invariably knew how to caress the tenderest of phrases in an individual and poignant manner, and who also knew how to wring the last vibration of emotional fervor from every dramatic climax.”