The Romanian soprano Ileana Cotrubas, who has died aged 87, was admired internationally, not least in Great Britain, where she lived at the start of her career, and Vienna, where she and her husband later made their home. What lent her lyric soprano voice, which may have lacked the voluptuousness and amplitude of other celebrated singers, its distinctive nature was its tightly focused tonal quality (occasionally criticised as plangent), combining inner strength with a touching vulnerability. She was also an excellent actor (her exemplar was Maria Callas), her stage portrayals tellingly incarnating the often wounded women she played.
Outstanding among these was her Violetta in La Traviata, which encompassed the character’s frailty, her zest for life, her exuberance and her inescapably tragic situation, in performances that were throbbing with passion and almost unbearably intense. The cumulative sweep of the phrases in her dazzling rendition of Sempre Libera, as captured in a celebrated Deutsche Grammophon recording with Carlos Kleiber, and the profoundly poignant Dite alla Giovine, in which she bids farewell to the past and to life, demonstrate perfectly the qualities for which Cotrubas is remembered.
