Homenaje

an obituary by Christopher Webber

The death of Ana María Iriarte Beruete, who has died in Madrid, the city of her birth, at the age of ninety-eight (January 23 1927 – February 3 2025) marks a poignant severance of Spain’s links to its musical past. As an internationally-famed soprano/mezzo soprano in opera and zarzuela, the creator of the Foundation which bears her name, and a tireless promoter of Spanish music, nobody better deserved her reputation as a ‘National Treasure’. Her voice was a rarity, on the cusp of mezzo and lyric soprano, well suited to an unusually wide range of roles. Its size, cutting edge and individuality – conveying unshakable, rock-solid pride and character if sometimes (at least in the recording studio) at the expense of subtle nuance – made her instantly recognisable, as an unfailingly vivid and positive presence.

Following intensive study in Madrid’s Royal Conservatoire (under Lola Rodríguez Aragón); Vienna (including with Erik Werba); Milan (with Elvira de Hidalgo, the teacher of Callas and Herrero); and Paris (with Pierre Bernac); she made her operatic début in 1945, aged eighteen. Rapidly gaining popularity, in classic mezzo-soprano roles such as Amneris, Charlotte (Werther) and Carmen, she also took in such soprano staples as Puccini’s Butterfly and Tosca. Her sensational Madrid début followed in 1946, in the title-role of La favorita opposite Mario Filippeschi. Iriarte’s strong stage presence and acting ability led to her casting as the theatrical Cecilia in the operatic version of Las golondrinas, alongside Raimundo Torres and Celia Langa; but her participation in a series of concerts with the Madrid Chamber Orchestra, under Ataúlfo Argenta, proved even more important to her future. The conductor was to become her major champion, inside and outside Spain.

In 1949 she participated in the premiere of Jesús García Leoz’s zarzuela La duquesa del candil with Matilde Vázquez, Manuel Gas and Manuel Ausensi, and two years later starred in a high-profile zarzuela season at Teatro Español, playing three central repertoire roles – Casta in La verbena de la Paloma, Manuela in Agua, azucarillos y aguardiente and Mari-Pepa in La revoltosa. That same year she toured Europe with Argenta’s National Orchestra of Spain, and sang El amor brujo under him in the Royal Festival Hall, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. In Vienna she sang in Monteverdi’s Orfeo (in a pioneering, original instrument production), as well as Stravinsky’s Cantata and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.

By 1956 she had matured into a mezzo-soprano of international stature. José Tamayo cast her as La Beltrana, alternating with Inés Rivadeneira in an all-star production of Doña Francisquita at Teatro de la Zarzuela, opposite Ana María Olaria and Alfredo Kraus. Soon afterwards she repeated her Madrid triumph in a German-language production at Vienna’s Volksoper, as the only Spanish singer in the cast, while also singing Carmen and Delilah in Paris.

Meanwhile she continued the extraordinary task of recording a huge number of zarzuelas (plus Granados’s Goyescas) with Argenta for Alhambra’s series, widely distributed both inside and outside Spain – and it was her husband, the Spanish director of Columbia Enrique Inurrieta, who sourced the money to enable the series. Several of those recordings remain outstandingly vivid and rich, notably her wittily determined Paca in Música clásica, her imperious hero-heroine in La viejecita (which won her a Lucrecia Arana Prize), and perhaps best of all her smouldering, darkly emotional Coral in La Reina Mora. Her recordings of Falla’s El amor brujo (for Columbia) and his Popular Spanish Songs (Pathé) proved commercially as well as artistically successful at home and abroad. Meanwhile in Vienna, she recorded Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky with the Vienna State Opera chorus and orchestra, under Mario Rossi (Fontana).

Argenta died in 1958, and two years later – aged only thirty-two – Iriarte made the decision to retire from the stage, prompted by the birth of her daughter. Her final appearance was as Carmen, in Bordeaux. For over half a century she devoted herself to teaching, both singing and acting, at home and abroad, while also creating the Ana María Iriarte Foundation, with the joint aims of promoting unpublished music from Spain and beyond, and fostering the careers of young singers. One of the latest fruits of her work was to finance and take charge of the overall artistic direction of the world premiere of her friend Joaquín Nin-Culmell’s La Celestina at Teatro de la Zarzuela (2008, reviewed here) In 2010, she instigated an International Zarzuela Competition, again to encourage promising young singers.

She received many awards for her work, including that Lucrecia Arana National Singing Prize, the 1952 National Theatre Award, and a Grand Prix du Disque that same year, for her recording with Argenta of El amor brujo. In 2013 she was awarded the Prize of the Sociedad de Artistas Intérpretes o Ejecutantes de España (AIE) in recognition of her lifetime of service to music theatre. For this leading spirit in Argenta’s famous series of recordings, which introduced zarzuela to so many people around the world, no award could have been better merited.

© Christopher Webber 2025

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5/II/2025