La Scala expressed "immense sorrow'' over Gencer's death and said the singer had "one of the most emotional voices of any time.''
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Leyla Gencer in “Aida” 1966 Photo: La Scala Archive © ERIO PICCAGLIANI, Milano |
Leyla Gencer, who has died aged 79, was one of the most remarkable bel canto sopranos of the 20th century; known as La Diva Turca (the Turkish Diva), she brought an exotic background and formidable temperament to the already rarified stage of La Scala, Milan – only to find herself overshadowed by the towering figures of Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi.
Musically, Gencer was more than able to hold her own in Italian opera, making Donizetti's Tudor queens – Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda and Elisabeth in Roberto Devereux – her calling card. To the Daily Telegraph's Michael Kennedy, she was "often an erratic performer", but others found her performances to be magnetic and inspiring. Her voice was distinctive, smokily Middle Eastern and often sublime. When she was on top form she could mesmerise an audience; and even when she was not she could offer some interesting moments.
Off stage, Gencer could rival any of her contemporaries as an opera diva. On one occasion, refusing to accept a director's rejection, she demanded that her audition be reheard by the entire staff of La Scala. She was reinstated.
On another occasion she commandeered Jerome Hines's dressing room at Newark, New Jersey, claiming that her own was as humid as a Turkish bath; his objection to her invasion marked him as a "barbarian". As Hines – who was, appropriately, playing the title role in Verdi's Attila - said: "She did as she darn pleased." "Yes, I am imperious," Gencer would say. "That is, I say what I think. Con forza. But I'm not nasty or malicious." Of Callas she once remarked: "She had the most imperfect voice in the worlde_SLps She was full of flaws, but she had the sacred fire. She was wonderful. Where can you find her equal today?"
Rivalry lingered long after Leyla Gencer retired. As recently as 1998, the pandemonium that followed when Renée Fleming caused offence at La Scala with her ornamentations in Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia was widely attributed to "partisans of the old Turkish belle". On that occasion the conductor, Gianluigi Gelmetti, had to be taken away by ambulance after collapsing on the podium.
Rumours abounded about the Turkish officials and parliamentarians who were wrapped around Leyla Gencer's little finger, miraculously arranging for her to be released from her official commitments as a state artist to undertake overseas engagements. Meanwhile, she enjoyed a passionate and well-publicised affair with George McGhee, the American ambassador to Ankara from 1951 to 1953.
The truth was that everything Leyla Gencer did involve passion. She could not understand the concept of a more sanitised diva. "I actually cried on stage; once in a while a note would issue forth that was not orthodox – that's why the American critics don't like me. But I don't care. They want music with water and soap," she told one interviewer.
She was born Ayshe Leyla Ceyrekgil in the Çubuklu district of Istanbul, on the Anatolian side of the Bosphorous, on October 10, 1928 (although some books suggest, not implausibly, 1922 or 1924). Her mother was a Polish Catholic descended from Lithuanian nobility, her father a Turkish Sunni Muslim. She was brought up as a model young sultana in a grand wooden palace with chandeliers, silverware, servants and a French governess. Tragedy struck in her early teens when her father was killed by a flash flood that roared through the house.
Aged 16 Leyla fell for a 34-year-old Polish architect with whom she read Plato, prompting her mother to withdraw her from school. She was sent to the conservatory in Istanbul – where famously she could hit the F above a high C – and later took lessons in Ankara with Giannina Arangi Lombardi, the Italian soprano, and the ageing tenor Apollo Granforte. On one occasion she was accompanied in recital by Alfred Cortot.
Her first taste of rejection came in 1946, when she failed to impress in a Dutch singing competition. She immediately vowed that in the future failure would not be an option. "When I had begun my career, I had said to myself, 'Either I will sing at La Scala or I won't sing at all. Either I'll have a great career or none'," she later recalled.
She sang for Eisenhower, Tito and Adenauer, and made her debut in the Turkish capital in 1950 as Santuzza in Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana. She would reprise the role around the world, including for her Italian debut three years later in Naples before an audience of 10,000.
Staples such as Madam Butterfly and Eugene Onegin followed under the batons of Victor de Sabata, Gianandrea Gavazzeni and Vittorio Gui. Tullio Serafin was her favourite conductor because "he was the first to put me on the path towards bel canto". But she did not shy away from the heavier roles. Her performance of Lady Macbeth (Verdi) in a live recording from Palermo in 1960 has been described as "without peer, both as a singer and as an actress".
Her La Scala debut was as Mme Lidoine in the premiere of Poulenc's Les Dialogues des Carmelites. The composer was so entranced by the powerful coloratura of her voice that, learning of her exotic ancestry, he wrote a set of eight songs in Polish for her. She did sing in Poland on one occasion – La traviata, in Warsaw, in 1956.
Despite the presence of Callas and Tebaldi, Leyla Gencer successfully made La Scala her home, building up a remarkable repertoire of some 70 roles, including the First Woman of Canterbury, which she sang there in the premiere of Ildebando Pizzetti's L'Assassinio nella Cattedrale (Murder in the Cathedral) in 1958.
Her debut at the Royal Opera House, London, came in 1962, when she substituted for Gré Brouwenstijn as Elisabeth in Verdi's Don Carlos. She also sang Donna Anna at the Garden with Mirella Freni and Geraint Evans in Franco Zeffirelli's production of Don Giovanni under Georg Solti, a stunning performance that was reissued on CD last summer. She appeared in two seasons at Glyndebourne, in 1962 and 1963, and visited Edinburgh in 1972.
When Callas declined to sing the title role in Lucia de Lammermoor in San Francisco in 1957, Kurt Alder, the director, noticed that the part was on a list of Leyla Gencer's repertoire. The only problem was that she had simply "written down all these roles that I didn't really know. I knew it was a lie." She spent the next five days and nights locked in her hotel room before delivering a spellbinding account of Donizetti's tragic heroine.
There were talks about a Tosca at the Met in 1956, but in the end her career never reached New York.
Leyla Gencer retired in 1985 with a production of Gnecco's La Prova di un'Opera Seria at La Fenice in Venice. She was still at the height of her vocal powers and continued to give recitals for some years, in particular one in Paris in 1991 that was widely acclaimed. Latterly she worked at La Scala helping to develop the voices of younger singers.
In her native country Leyla Gencer was hailed as a role model for women in the arts. The Turkish government issued a commemorative coin bearing her image, worth about £5; it also arranges an annual singing competition in her honour and has named an opera house after her. A biography, Leyla Gencer: A Story of Passion, by the distinguished Turkish writer Zeynep Oral, appeared in 1997; and another, Leyla Gencer and the World of Opera, was published two years ago.
In the early part of her career the major record companies showed little interest in Leyla Gencer's work, but among aficionados she became known as "queen of pirates" because of the number of underground recordings that circulated.
Leyla Gencer, who died in Milan on May 9, married Ibrahim Gencer, a banker, in 1946. Her ashes will be scattered in the Bosphorous.
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Leyla Gencer in “Aida” 1966 Photo: La Scala Archive © ERIO PICCAGLIANI, Milano |
Gencer was a very beautiful woman, with large dark eyes, a wide, generous mouth and a natural command of the stage. Born Leyla Ceyrekgil in Istanbul, the daughter of a Turkish Muslim father and a Polish Catholic mother, she married Ibrahim Gencer, a wealthy banker, in 1946; he eventually predeceased her. She made her debut as Santuzza in Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana at the open-air summer festival in Naples in 1953, and remained a particular favourite with the Neapolitans.
Her early successes were in verismo roles - Madama Butterfly, Tosca, Francesca da Rimini (by Zandonai). By 1957 she had been engaged by La Scala, Milan, where she created the role of the New Prioress in the world premiere of Poulenc's Les Dialogues des Carmélites, and shortly after sang the title role in La Traviata at the Vienna Staatsoper, under Herbert von Karajan.
Throughout her career, Gencer had a very wide repertoire, ranging from Monteverdi, Gluck and Mozart to Verdi, Ponchielli and Puccini. During her career she sang virtually every soprano role in Verdi's operas, but it was especially in the revival of bel-canto works by Bellini, Donizetti and Pacini that she made her mark. To some extent, Gencer shot to fame in the immediate aftermath of the end of Maria Callas's Italian career - Gencer followed Callas as Anna Bolena at La Scala, and in the role of Paolina in Donizetti's Poliuto - the last new part Callas undertook. As Queen Elizabeth I of England, first in Donizetti's Roberto Devereux, and then in Rossini's Elisabetta, Regina d'Inghilterra, Gencer preceded Montserrat Caballé and Beverly Sills, who later recorded the roles.
Gencer's voice was not a natural dramatic soprano - she sang all the coloratura roles, such as Lucia, Elvira (Puritani), Amina, Gilda. The sound had a strange, smokey quality which could - and quite often did - turn sour and detracted from the pleasure of her singing. "We're in great luck tonight," said the impresario Denny Dayviss, when I met her at the San Carlo in Naples in 1972, "Leyla-gal's in great voice." The opera was Donizetti's Caterina Cornaro, in which Gencer was partnered, as often before, by Giacomo Aragall. Gencer tore into the role of the daughter of St Mark, the Venetian girl who becomes Queen of Cyprus, her voice ranging from fiercely declaimed dramatic recitative right up to a ringing high E with which she capped the first-act finale.
Although Gencer's career was mostly in Italy, she appeared in the United States, where she made her debut in San Francisco as Lucia in 1957, returning there, as well as to Chicago and Dallas. John Ardoin described her voice in a memorable Lucrezia Borgia in 1974, as "poignant, compelling" and mentioned the "strange colours and deep pathos of her art". In England she was heard at Glyndebourne as the Countess in Figaro, and as Anna Bolena. At Covent Garden she was Donna Anna in Zeffirelli's 1962 production of Don Giovanni, then Elisabeth de Valois in Don Carlos. Gencer's most memorable UK appearances were undoubtedly in the title role of Donizetti's Maria Stuarda, at the Edinburgh Festival in 1969. The sparks that flew on stage in the confrontation - historically absurd but dramatically thrilling - when Gencer as Mary Stuart ripped off her glove and flung it in the face of Shirley Verrett as Elizabeth I at the words, "Vil bastarda" will surely live in the memory of all who witnessed it.
As a recitalist Gencer also had a wide repertoire of 19th and early 20th-century songs. Some of her later appearances were in recital in Paris at the Athenée in the 1980s, when a young French public, who had never had the opportunity to see her on stage, proved receptive to her high-flown style and hailed her as the greatest living prima donna. Gencer had no career whatsoever as a recording artist, but many of her broadcasts from Italian radio have now been issued on disc and are a fine memorial to her voice and dramatic ability. Especially noteworthy are performances of Verdi's I due Foscari (under Serafin), Donizetti's Belisario (from Venice in 1970) and Simon Boccanegra, from the 1959 Salzburg Festival, in which she is partnered by Tito Gobbi.
Gencer said of herself: "I am a fatalist and am instantly resigned to adversity, my temperament is gentle and I am incapable of putting up a fight for anything." None of this was evident on stage, where she projected a suberb sense of dramatic power. In 1987 she was the first recipient of the Donizetti Prize awarded by the city of Bergamo, and in 1995 the Leyla Gencer Voice Competition was established in Istanbul. In recent years she was artistic director of La Scala's academy for advanced courses for opera singers.
Leyla Gencer, soprano, born October 10, 1928; died May 9, 2008
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Leyla Gencer in “Aida” 1966 Photo: La Scala Archive © ERIO PICCAGLIANI, Milano |
Popularly known as La Diva Turca, Ms. Gencer performed in opera houses throughout Europe and the United States from the 1950s to the 1980s. Although her major career was in Europe — she sang at La Scala in Milan for many years — she was also admired by fans, and at least some critics, on this side of the Atlantic.
Ms. Gencer (pronounced GHEN-djer) sang more than 70 roles but was most closely associated with the bel canto style of Donizetti. Her singing was characterized by a burning intensity but was also widely praised for its exquisite pianissimo — the attainment of maximum audibility at minimum volume that eludes even many fine singers.
Though Ms. Gencer appeared on many of the world’s major stages, among them Covent Garden in London, she never sang at the Metropolitan Opera. She did not make her New York debut until 1973, when she sang the title role in Donizetti’s little-known opera “Caterina Cornaro” in a semi-staged production at Carnegie Hall by the Opera Theater of New Jersey.
By this time, Ms. Gencer was 50, give or take. Reviewing her performance in The New York Times, Harold C. Schonbergwrote: “Her voice shows signs of the abuse that comes from overwork and an insufficient technique. She clearly was an experienced singer of the old arm-waving school, and the middle range of her voice had moments of appealing beauty. But the top is virtually gone, and fortissimo high notes emerged in ear-splitting yells.”
Leyla Ceyrekgil was born in Istanbul on Oct. 10. Ms. Gencer was publicly coy about the year; sources give it variously as 1924 or 1928. The daughter of a Polish mother and a Turkish father, she grew up on the city’s Asian side.
From an early age, according to published accounts, she showed signs of the intensity that would serve her well. As Stefan Zucker wrote in a biographical article on the Web site of the Bel Canto Society (www.belcantosociety.org), “Her mother pulled her out of a lyceum at 16 because she had fallen in love with a 34-year-old Polish architect with whom she read Plato.”
Leyla enrolled briefly at the Istanbul Conservatory before leaving to study privately in Turkey with the noted Italian soprano Giannina Arangi-Lombardi. She later studied with the Italian baritone Apollo Granforte.
In 1946, she married Ibrahim Gencer, a banker. “She was temperamental and difficult,” Mr. Zucker wrote, “but he loved her.”
In 1950, Ms. Gencer made her operatic debut in Ankara, as Santuzza in Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana.” She made her La Scala debut in 1957, as Madame Lidoine in the world premiere of Francis Poulenc’s “Dialogues of the Carmelites.” Her United States debut was with the San Francisco Opera in 1956, in the title role in Ricardo Zandonai’s “Francesca da Rimini.”
Ms. Gencer’s other roles included Verdi (Amelia in “Un Ballo in Maschera,” Violetta in “La Traviata,” Leonora in “Il Trovatore” and Aida), Mozart (the Countess in “The Marriage of Figaro” and Donna Elvira in “Don Giovanni”) and title roles in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” Bellini’s “Norma” and Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.”
In 1995, an international voice competition named for Ms. Gencer was inaugurated in Turkey.
Pre-empted by better-known contemporaries like Callas and Renata Tebaldi, Ms. Gencer did not have a contract with a major commercial record label. But her voice traveled the globe many times over in bootleg recordings, earning her the nickname the Pirate Queen.
If she “never made a lira” from these recordings, as Ms. Gencer told Opera News in 2003, they had other compensations.
“All the young people know me,” she said at the time. “They write me long letters. They tell me: ‘It’s as if we were in the theater. We see you. We hear you through your discs as if we were there.’ This is a great miracle!”
La Scala expressed "immense sorrow" over Miss Gencer's death and said the singer had "one of the most emotional voices of any time."
Miss Gencer was born in
Istanbul in 1928 to a Polish mother and a Turkish father.
She studied privately in Ankara, the Turkish capital, with Italian opera singer Giannina Arangi Lombardi and made her operatic debut there in 1950, cast as Santuzza in Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana (Rustic Chivalry) - a role she would later reprise on world stages.
Miss Gencer, a contemporary of opera legends Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi, made her La Scala debut in 1957, playing Madame Lidoine in the premiere of Francis Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmelites. She moved to the Milanese opera house after successful performances in Madame Butterfly and Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin in Naples.
At La Scala, she was cast as the first woman of Canterbury in the world premiere of Pizzeti's L'Assassinio nella Cattedralle (Murder in the Cathedral). A debut at London's Royal Opera House came in 1962, when she performed Donna Anna in Don Giovanni. AP
THE REPORTER-TIMES
The singer known as La Diva Turca – the Turkish Diva – died Friday of respiratory problems and heart failure at home in Milan, La Scala and the Turkish State Opera and Ballet said.
La Scala expressed “immense sorrow” over Gencer's death and said the singer had “one of the most emotional voices of any time.”
It said in a statement that her performances at La Scala had provided “years of unrepeatable splendour.”
Gencer was born in Istanbul in 1928 to a Polish mother and a Turkish father.
She studied privately in Ankara, the Turkish capital, with Italian opera singer Giannina Arangi Lombardi and made her operatic debut there in 1950, cast as Santuzza in Pietro Mascagni's “Cavalleria Rusticana” (“Rustic Chivalry”), a role she would later reprise on world stages.
Miss Gencer, a contemporary of opera legends Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi, made her La Scala debut in 1957, playing Madame Lidoine in the premiere of Francis Poulenc's “Dialogues des Carmelites.” She moved to the Milanese opera house after successful performances in “Madama Butterfly” and Tchaikovsky's “Eugene Onegin” in Naples.
Her repertoire during a career spanning some 30 years included more than 70 roles. At La Scala, she was cast as the first woman of Canterbury in the world premiere of Pizzeti's “L'Assasinio nella Cattedralle” (“Murder in the Cathedral”). A debut at the Royal Opera House, in London, came in 1962 when she performed Elisabetta in Mozart's “Don Giovanni.”
“Leyla Gencer, a world artist, had become our honor in the international scene and has inscribed her name on the history of opera,” Turkish Culture Minister Ertugrul Gunay said.
“The Turkish opera, the international art world, have lost a great personality. She was one of the most important opera singers of the 20th century,” said Rengim Gokmen, director of the Turkish State Opera and Ballet.
After retiring from opera in 1985, the singer de voted herself to discovering and training young talent. An annual Turkish-sponsored voice competition is named after her.
“Even if in her finals years she was not able to go on stage, she became a leader for Turkish opera stars and trained them,” Gökmen said. “We owe her a lot.”
Gencer’s vocalism was not flawless: her middle range could be peculiarly veiled and lacking in colour, her upper register could turn flat under pressure, her ravishing pianissimo notes were often approached from below the pitch. It was a unique nobility of expression that made her singing memorable. To hear her sculpt the phrases of an elegiac Donizetti aria was to feel transported back to the mid-19th century, so completely did she seem to connect with the composer’s intention. If her contemporary, Maria Callas (with whom she was often compared), was Bellini’s emissary on Earth, Gencer was Donizetti’s; she sang nine of his operas, most of which were unfamiliar at the time. Gencer’s Verdi roles numbered 16, emphasising operas of the composer’s early and middle period. Listen to Gencer in a Verdi cabaletta to hear the ideal rhythmic drive and vaulting flexibility that can make such numbers so exhilarating.
Gencer’s voice adapted not simply to the gamut of stylistic requirements, but also to music written for different vocal types. Like Callas, she confused many listeners by easily encompassing roles as light as Bellini’s Amina (La Sonnambula) and as heavy as Verdi’s Lady Macbeth. By nature, a middleweight lyric soprano, she pushed her voice to a degree in order to perform dramatic coloratura parts to which her style, temperament, regal stage presence and patrician appearance were so eminently suited.
A Muslim by birth, Leyla Ceyrekgil was born in Istanbul to a Polish mother and a prosperous Turkish father. As early as 16 she was undertaking vocal training at the Istanbul Conservatory. More central to her development was her work in Ankara with two legends of Italian singing: the soprano Giannina Arangi-Lombardi and, after her death, the baritone Apollo Granforte. She was married to Ibrahim Gencer, a banker, in 1946.
Having made her debut at Ankara’s State Theatre in Cavalleria rusticana (1950), Gencer subsequently appeared there in Tosca and Così fan tutte. Well aware that only in Italy would she be able to fulfil her gifts, she moved there in 1953, making her debut that summer with a recital for the public service broadcaster RAI and in Cavalleria at the Arena Flegrea in Naples.
The next few years found Gencer consolidating her reputation in Italian houses. Her ascent to prominence received a significant lift with her exquisite performance as Mme Lidoine in the world premiere of Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites (1957), which introduced her to La Scala. The following year she returned in another world premiere, Pizzetti’s Assassinio nella cattedrale. Gencer was to sing no fewer than 17 roles at La Scala in 1973.
She made her debut in America as early as 1956, singing Francesca da Rimini at San Francisco Opera. Her association with SFO continued through the next two seasons (as Violetta, Lucia, Liù, Elisabetta di Valois, Manon Lescaut and Gilda). She did not return until 1967, when she sang Gioconda, her heaviest Italian role. Gencer’s other American performances were limited to Madame Butterfly (Dallas), Don Carlo (Chicago), and three strenuous roles during the 1970s, in which artistry and charisma nearly compensated for a worn voice: Verdi’s Odabella (Newark) and two Donizetti heroines, Caterina Cornaro (Carnegie Hall) and Lucrezia Borgia (Dallas).
Gencer’s international career also included the main houses of Monaco, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain and Sweden. As for Britain, she sang at Covent Garden only in 1962, appearing in Don Carlo (debut) and Don Giovanni (her sublime Donna Anna is currently available in the ROH Heritage CD series).
Another Mozart role, Countess Almaviva, brought her to Glyndebourne, where she also portrayed Donizetti’s Anna Bolena. This was a signature role, as were the same composer’s Maria Stuarda and Rossini’s Elisabetta, both of which Gencer sang at the Edinburgh Festival.
The soprano found favour with many celebrated conductors, including von Karajan, Solti and two generations of Italians, from Serafin to Muti. She was an intense and probing collaborator, as the renowned American musicologist Philip Gossett discovered when they worked together on Anna Bolena in Rome (1977). Gossett, who considers Gencer “a mighty link to the beginning of the bel canto revival”, recalls her as “formidable, master of the role, savvy commentator on its characteristics, and knowledgeable bel canto protagonist. There was nothing of the ‘diva’ about the way she worked, although she had earned that title a hundred times over. Rather than being cast as the ‘heir’ to Callas, as several notices have declared, many at the time preferred her interpretations to those of Callas.”
Gencer gave her final opera performance in 1985, singing Francesco Gnecco’s La prova d’un opera seria at Venice’s Teatro la Fenice, where she was a great favourite. Already in the mid-1970s she was scaling down her operatic activity in favour of recitals. She continued to perform in public until 1992. In later years she coached young artists, in association with the Associazione Lirica e Concertistica Italiana and as director of La Scala’s opera academy. A prestigious vocal competition named for her has been held in Istanbul four times since 1995.
Lacking any association with a commercial recording company, Gencer in her heyday was widely known as “the pirate queen”; innumerable privately recorded (“pirated”) tapes of her performances made available first on LP, now on CD — 62 roles in all — have created a remarkable legacy. Gencer’s videography includes studio-made operatic films (Werther, Don Giovanni, Il trovatore) and a live Aida from the Verona Arena. Her husband predeceased her.
Leyla Gencer, operatic soprano, was born on October 10, 1924. She died on May 10, 2008, aged 83
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Leyla Gencer in “Aida” 1966 Photo: La Scala Archive © ERIO PICCAGLIANI, Milano |
Ankara Turkey (AP)—Soprano Leyla Gencer, who made her career at Italy's famed La Scala opera house, has died in Milan, officials said Saturday. She was 80.
The singer known as La Diva Turca—the Turkish Diva—died Friday of respiratory problems and heart failure at home in Milan, La Scala and the Turkish State Opera and Ballet said.
La Scala expressed "immense sorrow" over Gencer's death and said the singer had "one of the most emotional voices of any time."
It said in a statement that her performances at La Scala had provided "years of unrepeatable splendor."
Gencer was born in Istanbul in 1928 to a Polish mother and a Turkish father.
She studied privately in Ankara, the Turkish capital, with Italian opera singer Giannina Arangi Lombardi and made her operatic debut there in 1950, cast as Santuzza in Pietro Mascagni's "Cavalleria Rusticana" ("Rustic Chivalry")—a role she would later reprise on world stages.
Gencer, a contemporary of opera legends Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi, made her La Scala debut in 1957, playing Madame Lidoine in the world premiere of Francis Poulenc's "Dialogues des Carmelites." She moved to the Milanese opera house after successful performances in Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" and Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin" in Naples.
Her repertoire during a career spanning some 30 years included more than 70 roles. At La Scala, she was cast as the first woman of Canterbury in the world premiere of Pizzeti's "L'Assasinio nella Cattedralle" ("Murder in the Cathedral"). A debut at the Royal Opera House, in London, came in 1962 when she performed Elisabetta in Verdi's "Don Carlo."
"Leyla Gencer, a world artist, had become our honor in the international scene and has inscribed her name on the history of opera," Culture Minister Ertugrul Gunay said.
"The Turkish opera, the international art world, have lost a great personality. She was one of the most important opera singers of the 20th century," said Rengim Gokmen, director of the Turkish State Opera and Ballet.
After retiring from opera in 1985, the singer devoted herself to discovering and training young talent. An annual Turkish-sponsored voice competition is named after her.
"Even if in her finals years she was not able to go on stage, she became a leader for Turkish opera stars and trained them," Gokmen said. "We owe her a lot."
La Scala said a funeral will be held Monday in San Babila Church in Milan.
The private Dogan news agency reported that her ashes will be taken to Istanbul to be scattered over the Bosporus, in line with her wishes. The strait forms the boundary between the European and Asian parts of Turkey.
