Marie Powers

Marie Powers (June 20, 1902 – December 29, 1973) was an American contralto born in Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Daniel Powers and Rose Anne Powers. All four of her grandparents were of Irish birth. She pursued formal training in music and language at Cornell University, continued her studies in New York under Frank La Forge, and earned a master's degree from the Royal Conservatory in Florence, Italy. Through her marriage to Luigi Crescentini, an Italian count who died in 1938, she was also known as Countess Crescentini.

Powers built her early professional career in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, singing with the Paris Opera and performing at La Scala under conductor Arturo Toscanini. After returning to the United States in 1937, she worked as a contralto soloist in concert performances of Verdi's Requiem, Handel's Messiah, and Constant Lambert's Rio Grande, and gave recitals for community groups.

Her Broadway career, which spanned from 1944 to 1961, became closely identified with the work of composer Gian Carlo Menotti. In 1947, Italian writer Lanfranco Rasponi introduced Powers to Menotti, who was casting the role of Madame Flora, a fraudulent psychic, in his opera The Medium. The production was staged on Broadway alongside another Menotti one-act opera, The Telephone, or L'Amour à trois. Powers's portrayal of the role earned her recognition for her dramatic abilities, and she reprised Madame Flora on live television in 1948 and in a film version directed by Menotti in 1951. She also appeared on Broadway in The Consul. In 1950, Robert Wahls of the Daily News described Powers as a first-ranking contralto and one of the few singers with an unfailing sense of theatre.

Beyond her work with Menotti, Powers appeared in the 1957 Broadway revival of Carousel and took the role of the Queen Mother in the original 1960 Broadway production of Becket, which starred Laurence Olivier and Anthony Quinn. In 1964, she directed and performed in a production of The Medium at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. Two years later she toured Asia and Australia, appearing on radio and television programs. Powers died of heart failure on December 29, 1973, in New York City, at the age of 71.