Lorraine Hunt on AllMovie

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, the San Francisco-born, mezzo-soprano vocalist, enjoyed a flourishing opera career, unexpectedly cut short in middle age as she crested the pinnacle of success. The daughter of a local conductor and a voice teacher, Lorraine Hunt gravitated naturally toward a musical career, training rigorously on the viola in her youth. She formally studied that instrument -- and vocal performance -- at San Jose State University. Upon graduating, she first made a name for herself as a violist with the San Jose Symphony, but subsequently moved to Boston with a paramour and worked as a freelance musician, exercising her skills at Emmanuel Church in Boston's Back Bay area, while she continued to study voice at the Boston Conservatory.

Hunt broke through as a vocalist in 1985, at the Pepsico Summerfare Festival in Purchase, NY, when the legendary opera producer Peter Sellars cast her as the assault weapon-brandishing terrorist Sesto, Pompey's son, in his radical contemporization of Julius Caesar. The opera divided critics; Hunt herself drew limitless praise. Thus marked the official onset of a stunning operatic career, highlighted by collaborations with such notables as Nicholas McGegan, conductor of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (with whom she recorded several Handel works on the Harmonia Mundi label), and William Christie. Hunt also re-teamed with Sellars on many successive occasions.

She met Peter Lieberson, a classical composer, in 1997, when he enlisted her to perform in his opera Ashoka's Dream. The couple fell in love and were wed soon after Lieberson obtained a divorce from his first wife. They stayed married for the following eight years, during which time Hunt Lieberson battled -- and overcame -- breast cancer. At some point in the mid-2000s, she contracted a "long illness" (unspecified in the press) that made it particularly difficult to perform. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson passed away from her condition at 52, on July 3, 2006.