Tatiana Troyanos - Final Season

Final Season

Troyanos died on August 21, 1993, at the age of 54 in New York City from breast cancer (first diagnosed in the mid-1980s), which was found in July to have metastasized to her liver. She is buried in Pinelawn Memorial Park on Long Island. In 1994, the Metropolitan Opera performed a concert in memory of Troyanos; in his printed eulogy, Music Director James Levine wrote, "The idea that we are gathered here ... to pay memorial tribute to Tatiana Troyanos is incomprehensible. What it means, of course, is that our Metropolitan Opera family has lost one of the most important, beloved artists and friends in its entire history."

Troyanos had successfully concealed her illness from the vast majority of her colleagues, having sung her last Met performance—the last of three performances as Waltraute (a role debut) to Gwyneth Jones' Brünnhilde in Wagner's Götterdämmerung—on May 1, 1993. That April and May, she also sang in Mahler's Third Symphony with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in both Boston and New York. "Troyanos is still a profoundly immediate and expressive artist," wrote Richard Dyer in the Boston Globe, citing her "pliant and meaningful delivery and coloration of the text" and her "beautiful, sophisticated and natural shaping of the musical line." James Oestreich in The New York Times reported that "Troyanos offered a searching, almost harrowing reading." Troyanos' last opera performances were as Clairon in Richard Strauss' Capriccio at San Francisco Opera between June 12 and July 1, 1993. The cast, Joseph McLellan of the Washington Post recalled, was "highlighted not only by the radiant presence of Kiri Te Kanawa but by the deceptively robust performance of Tatiana Troyanos." Daniel Kessler added that "beneath the veneer of the casualness of her Clairon for San Francisco on those late 1993 Spring evenings, with each performance she gave, there was a conscious endeavor to build or perfect over what had gone before." Troyanos last sang on the last day of her life, in Lenox Hill Hospital for other patients, one of whom "told her that this was the first time in three years that she had completely forgotten her pain."

Troyanos, who died twenty-two days before her 55th birthday, was one of three female opera stars of international stature who succumbed to cancer in 1993 in or near their 55th year; the others were sopranos Lucia Popp and Arleen Auger.