Shade, Hllen
Shade, Hllen
Shade, Ellen, American soprano; b. N.Y., Feb. 17, 1944. She studied with Talma at Hunter Coll. of the City Univ. of N.Y., and with Tito Capobianco and Cornelius Reid. Following an apprenticeship at the Santa Fe Opera (1968–69), she made her operatic debut as Liù in Frankfurt am Main in 1972. That same year, she made her U.S. operatic debut as Micaëla in Pittsburgh. She then sang in Houston, Dallas, Santa Fe, New Orleans, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati. On April 21, 1976, she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in N.Y. as Wagner’s Eva. That same year, she sang for the first time at London’s Covent Garden as Emma in Khovanshchina, and returned there in 1978 to create the role of Eve in Penderecki’s Paradise Lost. In 1981 she made her debut at the N.Y.C. Opera as Donna Elvira. She first appeared at the Salzburg Festival in Einem’s Der Prozess in 1988, and also sang Ká;t’a Kabanová; in Geneva that year. In 1992 she portrayed Strauss’s Empress in Amsterdam and Salzburg. She was engaged as Arabella at Covent Garden in 1996. As a soloist, she appeared with many orchs. in North America and Europe.
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire