Edith Mathis, a light-voiced Swiss soprano who sparkled in Bach, Mozart and Weber and was the agile-voiced favorite of several of the conducting giants who dominated mid-20th-century concert halls, died on Sunday at her home in Salzburg, Austria. She was 86.
Her death was announced by the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, where she sang throughout the 1970s and ’80s.
But she was also a star in all the world’s other major opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, illuminating roles like Cherubino and Susanna in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro,” Ännchen in Weber’s “Der Freischütz” and Marzelline in Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” which she sang five times at the Met in 1971 under Karl Böhm. She was a favorite of his, as she was of his rival for conducting pre-eminence in the last century, Herbert von Karajan.
The dozens of opera, oratorio, cantata and song recordings Ms. Mathis left behind illustrate why: a clear, bright voice, perfect intonation even on the highest notes, an unaffected manner and absolute service to the text — “the voice so reliably radiant and clear, the musicianship so reliably impeccable,” the British critic Hugo Shirley wrote in Gramophone magazine in 2018, reviewing a CD collection released by Deutsche Grammophon in observance of her 80th birthday. She was, the dramaturg Malte Krasting wrote in a tribute for the Bavarian State Opera, “the epitome of an ideal Mozart singer.”
She was also ideal in the German lieder repertoire — Schubert, Schumann and Hugo Wolf — many of whose songs she recorded with all-star partners like Christoph Eschenbach and Graham Johnson.
When, for instance, she sang the Schubert song “Schlaflied” in a 1994 recording with Mr. Johnson, she gave a slight, barely perceptible push to the German word “jedem” (“all” or “every”), in the line “And is healed of all pain.” The extra measure of reassurance for the poem’s subject, a young boy, adds a dramatic point to the whole song.
And it illustrates what critics found most admirable about her singing, which they sometimes contrasted with the more exaggerated manner of, say, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, with whom she sometimes sang — they recorded Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” and Haydn’s “The Creation” together, among other works.
She was faithful to her material, yet she didn’t shy away from giving it an interpretive nudge. Mr. Fischer-Dieskau’s more emphatic style, by contrast, ensures that a listener never misses the point.
“Her manner is unfailingly direct, and she exudes a yearning, almost girlish, enthusiasm,” Tim Page of The New York Times wrote of a song recital in 1985. “This was an afternoon sullied by neither pretension nor profundity. Miss Mathis came, she sang and — too gracious to conquer — she captured our affection instead.” In her numerous Schumann song recordings, Mr. Shirley wrote in Gramophone, “words sit clearly on a steady vocal line without ever disturbing it.”
She made her debut at the Met as Pamina in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” under the conductor Stanislaw Skrowaczewski in January 1970 and went on to sing there 25 times between 1970 and 1974. The critics never seemed to find anything to reproach her for.
As Marzelline in Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” the New York Times critic Donal Henahan wrote in 1971, “Edith Mathis acted sensibly, and her pinpoint intonation made her silvery tone seem surprisingly robust.” Three years later, Harold Schonberg praised her performance in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier”: “A big controlled voice comes from that little body. She is one of the distinguished Sophies in Metropolitan Opera history.”
Ms. Mathis entered popular culture, briefly, when a duet from Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” that she sang with the soprano Gundula Janowitz figured in the soundtrack to the hit 1994 film “The Shawshank Redemption.” The music “soars over a prison yard, signifying joy and hope in a world of despair,” Zachary Woolfe of The Times wrote in 2014.
She gave few interviews over her career and was described by those who knew her as modest to the point of shyness. In a rare 1992 interview with the music journalist Bruce Duffie, she reflected on what some critics deemed a cautious, protective attitude toward her own voice — for instance, she would never accept a full-throated Wagnerian role like Brünnhilde.
“When I try a role, if I feel it’s too heavy for me then I will never do it,” she told Mr. Duffie. “I might just wait perhaps until later, but I wouldn’t do something which hurts the voice, and where I have to force against the orchestra. That’s impossible.”
Edith Mathis was born in Lucerne, Switzerland, on Feb. 11, 1938. She once recalled in an interview with the Neue Zurcher Zeitung, Switzerland’s leading newspaper, that her parents, and particularly her mother, cultivated her ambition to sing. In her teenage years, she said, she typed invoices in an office in the morning, to placate parents worried about the uncertainties of a career in music, and in the afternoons went to the local conservatory. She also studied at the conservatory in Zurich.
She made her operatic debut in 1957 at the City Theater in Lucerne as the Second Boy in “The Magic Flute.” From 1959 to 1963 she was part of the ensemble at the Cologne Opera House, and in 1963 she joined the Deutsche Oper in Berlin.
She first sang at the Salzburg Festival in 1960, in a concert, and at the Glyndebourne Festival in England, as Cherubino, in 1962.
She won a number of awards for her recordings, including the Prix Mondial du Disque de Montreux, in Switzerland, and taught song and oratorio at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna from 1992 to 2006. She made her last appearance as a singer in 2001.
Ms. Mathis is survived by her husband, Heinz Slunecko, an art collector, and two children, Bettina Mathis and Tom Mathis. An earlier marriage, to the conductor Bernhard Klee, ended in divorce.
In her interview with Mr. Duffie, Ms. Mathis spoke of the singer’s isolation:
“We have no excuse,” she said. “A conductor can say, ‘They didn’t play well for me,’ and a pianist can say, ‘The piano was very bad, and was not in tune, or was a very old instrument,’ but we singers are our instruments, and we have to do the whole business ourselves.”
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