Margaret Tynes, Soprano Who Soared in Verdi and Strauss, Dies at 104

Margaret Tynes, an American soprano who was acclaimed in Europe but neglected in the United States at a time when Black singers were newly breaking into the operatic world, died on March 7 in Silver Spring, Md. She was 104.

Her nephew Richard Roberts confirmed the death, in a nursing home.

In the 1960s and ’70s Ms. Tynes’s incendiary, full-throated voice was heard in roles like Aida and Salomé at opera houses in Vienna, Prague and Budapest, earning high praise on the continent — “an exceptional voice, intense in every coloring, vibrant and dramatic,” the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera newspaper wrote — even while U.S. critics were cooler.

Reviewing her performance in Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem,” the Süddeutsche Zeitung of Munich wrote, “What Britten expects of a woman’s voice can only be achieved by a singer of Margaret Tynes’s caliber.”

But she did not make her Metropolitan Opera debut until 1974, when she was 55, in a run of three performances in the title role of Janacek’s “Jenufa.” That run both began and ended her career there.

Ms. Tynes grew up in the segregated South and gained a measure of American fame in the 1950s — recording “A Drum Is a Woman” with Duke Ellington, singing heartfelt renditions of “Negro spirituals” on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and appearing with Harry Belafonte in the musical “Sing, Man, Sing.” She also sang at the funeral of W.C. Handy, the musician known as “the father of the blues,” and toured the U.S.S.R. with Mr. Sullivan’s show in 1958.