Licia Albanese, 105, longtime opera star

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 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, 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."

She was born in Bari, Italy, on July 23, 1909. One of seven children in a musical family, she "wanted first to be a ballerina, then actress," she said in a 1994 Associated Press interview. "After I find out I had a voice, I combine everything."

She was 12 when her piano teacher discovered that she could sing and coached her to perform an aria from "Tosca" as a surprise for her father's birthday.