Marta Eggerth at her home in Rye, N.Y. in 2005. She had just released a retrospective album. Her last public performance was in 2011.
Marta Eggerth, an operetta star in Europe and the United States who was almost certainly the last living link to the grand musical confections of Franz Lehar and Emmerich Kalman, died on Dec. 26 at her home in Rye, N.Y. She was 101.
Miss Eggerth at 19.
Her son Marjan Kiepura confirmed the death.
A coloratura soprano, Miss Eggerth was often called “the Maria Callas of operetta” for her vocal facility, great charm and sheer ubiquity — in opera houses, on the concert stage, in the movies and on Broadway — in the 1930s and long afterward.
For decades, she practically owned the title role in Lehar’s most famous operetta, “The Merry Widow”; she sang it thousands of times, often opposite her husband, the celebrated Polish tenor Jan Kiepura.
Miss Eggerth began singing as a child in her native Hungary and became a star as a teenager in Vienna in the period known as the Silver Age of operetta. Ushered in with the premiere of “The Merry Widow” in 1905, it was a time when the sprightly, tuneful work of Middle European composers like Lehar, Kalman and Oscar Straus was performed before devoted audiences worldwide.
With her husband, Miss Eggerth starred in a hit revival of “The Merry Widow” that opened on Broadway in 1943, with choreography by George Balanchine and an English-language book co-written by Sidney Sheldon.
The couple returned to Broadway in 1945 for “Polonaise,” a musical, set to the melodies of Chopin, based on the life of the 18th-century military hero Thaddeus Kosciuszko.
Miss Eggerth, who appeared in dozens of films in Europe, had supporting roles in two Hollywood musicals, the Judy Garland vehicles “For Me and My Gal” (1942) and “Presenting Lily Mars” (1943).
The only child of a banker and a dramatic soprano, Marta Eggerth was born in Budapest on April 17, 1912. A vocal prodigy, she began her career on the Budapest stage when she was about 9.
By the time she was 13 she was singing ingénue roles; before she was out of her teens she had become a sensation when she took over for the ailing star of Kalman’s operetta “The Violet of Montmartre” at the Vienna State Opera.
The young Miss Eggerth went on to star in musical films in Austria, Hungary, Germany, England and Italy; in the 1930s Variety ranked her among the top 10 box-office attractions in the overseas market. Several of her European pictures, including “The Csardas Princess” (1934) and “The World’s in Love” (1935), were later seen in the United States.
With her husband, whom she married in 1936, Miss Eggerth settled in the United States before the outbreak of war in Europe. Both were the children of Jewish mothers.
In New York, Mr. Kiepura sang with the Metropolitan Opera in the late 1930s and early ’40s. Miss Eggerth received her first major American stage engagement in 1940, when she appeared in a featured role in the Rodgers and Hart musical comedy “Higher and Higher,” directed by Joshua Logan.
Mr. Kiepura died in 1966. Besides her son Marjan, Miss Eggerth’s survivors include another son, John Thade.
Miss Eggerth was known for taking scrupulous care of her voice. She abjured alcohol, with the exception of Tokay. (“This is medicine!,” she told The New York Times in 1935.) As a result of this regimen, she was able to perform long past the age when most singers have retired.
In her late 80s, she was heard at Wigmore Hall in London. In her 90s, she sang periodically at Cafe Sabarsky on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Miss Eggerth gave her last public performance in 2011, at 99. That engagement came nine decades after her stage debut, at which — in a fitting testament to her youth, the more innocent era and the sweetness of the musical fare with which she had begun to make her name — she asked to be paid in chocolate.
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