Risë Stevens; defined the opera role of Carmen

Risë Stevens, 99, who defined the role of Carmen for a generation and brought opera to millions through her radio, TV, and film work, died Wednesday at her home in New York City.

Ms. Stevens had one goal in life: to bring opera to anybody, anytime, anywhere. As the Washington Post once noted, more people heard her sing Carmen's "Habañera" in Going My Way, which costarred Bing Crosby and swept the Academy Awards for 1944, than heard all her live performances combined.

"The entire country . . . was her audience," said opera scholar Roger Pines, "not just people who went to the Metropolitan."

Among her most celebrated roles were Delilah in Saint-Saëns' Samson et Dalila and Octavian in Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier. Her 1951 RCA recording of Carmen remains a standard-setter.

Ms. Stevens won mass appeal by bringing her classical training to familiar songs. Her rendition of Schubert's "Ave Maria" is one of the most memorable moments in Going My Way. She was Anna in the production of The King and I that inaugurated the Music Theater of Lincoln Center in 1964. And, said a Boston Globe critic, she sang Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine" "so insinuatingly, she could have gotten herself arrested."

Ms. Stevens never set out to become a pop star. Her Hollywood career came about, she recalled in a 1990 interview with the Washington Times, when she caught the attention of MGM mogul Louis Mayer. It didn't hurt that the sultry mezzo was about as far from the fat-lady stereotype as an opera singer could be.

After he heard her sing, she said, Mayer auditioned her and booked her for The Chocolate Soldier, a 1941 film costarring Nelson Eddy. She enjoyed the project enough to make Going My Way, but her life was not in the movies.

"Mayer told me, 'What do you mean? I'm offering you this incredible chance at MGM.' I told him that was my life."

Risë Gus Steenberg was born in New York; her father was Norwegian, her mother American. By age 10, she was singing on a children's radio program. After high school, she sang with the New York Opera Comique and entered New York's prestigious Juilliard music school on a scholarship.

Given her early success, she could have immediately pursued a career at the Metropolitan. Instead, she went abroad, triumphing in Salzburg, Prague, and Vienna. New York Times critic Herbert Peyser described seeing her in Der Rosenkavalier.

"I heard . . . a lovely, blooming voice . . . beautifully cultivated throughout its scale. When Risë Stevens comes to America it will be a ripe and considerable artist who steps upon the scene" - which she did in November 1938, debuting with the Met in a performance in Philadelphia and, a few weeks later in New York.

After retiring, she became co-general manager of the short-lived Metropolitan Opera National Company, which took young artists to communities where live opera was rare. In the 1980s, she directed the Met's National Council Auditions, and in 1990 she received the Kennedy Center Honors.