Who is Teresa Stratas | Canadian Opera Star

Born Anastasia Stratakis on May 26, 1938 in Toronto, Canada, the daughter of Greek immigrant restaurateurs, Teresa Stratas began voice lessons at 12 and made her radio debut singing Greek pop songs a year later.

She sang the role of Nora in a 1958 production of Vaughan Williams' Riders to the Sea at Hart House and made her debut in professional opera October 13, 1958 as Mimi in La Bohème with the Toronto Opera Festival. Co-winner of the 1959 Metropolitan Opera Auditions, she made her debut with the Metropolitan in October 1959 as Poussette in Manon.

During rehearsals for Mahagonny in 1979, Stratas met Lotte Lenya, widow of the composer Kurt Weill and creator of the role of Jenny. Lenya gave Stratas the scores of previously unpublished Weill songs, some of which Stratas later recorded on two albums, The Unknown Kurt Weill and Stratas Sings Weill. Later, she sang on the recording September Songs: The Music of Kurt Weill (Sony Classical 1997), and appeared in the CBC documentary film co-production of the same name (directed by Larry Weinstein), which won an International Emmy in 1996 and a Gemini in 1997.

Stratas temporarily abandoned the opera stage in 1981 to travel in India and then worked in Calcutta with Mother Teresa, helping the terminally ill. Later she nursed Lotte Lenya through her final illness, then nursed her father, subsequently becoming ill herself.

She began to perform and record again in the early 1990s, including the role of Anna with the Lyon Opera in the 1993 video of Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins, and was cast by the Met in Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites and Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos in 1994. She sang both soprano leading roles in the Met's double-bill of Pagliacci and Il Tabarro. Scheduled to appear in The Bartered Bride there in 1996, she withdrew. She again absented herself in order to work with Romanian orphans. In 1997 she won a Gemini (best supporting actress) for the role of the mother in the television motion picture Under the Piano, opposite Megan Follows. From 1998, Stratas adjudicated the Lotte Lenya Competition for Singers at the Eastman School of Music.

Stratas became an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1972, and the Canadian Music Council named her artist of the year in 1980. She received the Governor General's Performing Arts Award in 2000, and the American Immigration Law Foundation and the National Association of Teachers of Singing also honored her; Canada's Walk of Fame added her star in 2001.