[2]) According to Ewing's former husband, her father's African roots caused her family so much anxiety that a particularly dark-skinned relative of theirs was forbidden from visiting their home during the hours of daylight.

[5] Ewing's parents were both musical enthusiasts: her mother was a keen collector of classical recordings, and her father played the piano well enough to attract an audience of admiring neighbors.

[6] After only a year of teaching Ewing, Gordon suggested that she should apply to take part in Oakland University's Meadow Brook Music Festival.

[6] In order to study with Levine, she sought and won a scholarship at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where her other instructors included soprano Eleanor Steber.

Her debut was as Rosina in an English-language production of Il barbiere di Siviglia in Detroit in 1970, staged by a company now known as the Michigan Opera Theatre.

[10]) After three years of gradually building a career as a recitalist, concert artist and opera performer, she made her first appearance at a high-profile venue on June 29, 1973, when she starred at the Ravinia Festival singing a program of songs by Alban Berg accompanied by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Levine.

[15] It was as Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro that Ewing first appeared in Europe, playing the farfallone amoroso at Salzburg in 1976; she repeated the role there in 1979 and 1980.

[10] In his autobiography, the director Lotfi Mansouri remembered Ewing at this stage in her career as "an alluring mezzo who could convince audiences possibly better than anyone else that her enchantingly sung Cherubino was really a boy".

It was for her performance in Salome that she attracted the warmest plaudits, not least for the succès de scandale that she achieved in the opera's notorious Dance of the Seven Veils.

At Los Angeles in 1986, she ended Salome's strip-tease with her modesty protected by a gold lamé G-string, but at Covent Garden two years later, she dispensed with even that minimal concession to prudery and became one of the few opera singers to dare full-frontal nudity.

"[3] The non-operatic music that Ewing performed was as diverse as her theatrical repertoire: it included Berg's Sieben Frühe Lieder,[16] Berlioz's La damnation de Faust,[20] Debussy's La damoiselle élue and Trois ballades de François Villon [fr],[16] Mozart's Great Mass in C minor[25] and Verdi's Quattro pezzi sacri.

[27] Ewing's relationship with the English director Peter Hall began when they worked together in a production of Così fan tutte at Glyndebourne in 1978.

[6] "We played piano duets", Hall recalled, "and found that we both hated the dead conventions, the laziness and the silliness of much opera production".

[26] When Hall visited her in New York the following year, their friendship metamorphosed into romance:[28] "I am deeply in love with Maria Ewing", he confided to his diary on Christmas Day.

Lotfi Mansouri thought her "highly gifted", but described her conduct in San Francisco Opera's 1993 production of Salome as "a nightmare...She became difficult, stubborn, and wrongheaded.

[17] The critic and musical historian Peter G. Davis condemned her 1986 Metropolitan Opera Carmen as "a loopy Gypsy who might have just landed from the moon as she lurched spastically from one scene to the next without allure, consistency, credibility, or vocal distinction.

Maria started off with maybe the most full-scale and versatile gifts of any artist I ever worked with, able to sing every language, every style, recital, oratorio, opera, the whole business".