FERVOR.

On the day before the Fourth of July, the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson died of complications from breast cancer, at the age of fifty-two. News of her passing aroused little interest outside the classical-music world, since she was hardly a household name, and lacked even the intermittently twinkling, Sunday-morning-television stardom achieved by the likes of Renee Fleming and Yo-Yo Ma. She recorded infrequently in later years; she was shy about being interviewed; she had no press agent. Her fame consisted of an ever-widening swath of ardor and awe that she left in her wake whenever she sang. Among those who had been strongly affected by her work, there was a peculiarly intense kind of grief.

I was one of those people. In recent years, I found it hard to assume a pose of critical distance from this artist, even though I never got closer to her than Row H. In the days after she died, I tried to write about her, and failed. It felt wrong to call her "great" and "extraordinary," or to throw around diva-worship words like "goddess" and "immortal," because those words placed her on a pedestal, whereas the warmth in her voice always brought her close. Nonetheless, empty superlatives will have to do. She was the most remarkable singer I ever heard. She was incapable of giving a routine performance--I saw her twelve times, and each appearance had something explosively distinctive about it--and her career took the form of a continuous ascent. New Yorkers saw her for the final time last November, when she came to town with the Boston Symphony to perform "Neruda Songs," composed by her husband, Peter Lieberson. She sang that night with such undiminished power that it seemed as though she would be around forever. Then she was gone, leaving the apex vacant.

She was born Lorraine Hunt, in San Francisco, the daughter of two exacting Bay Area music teachers. She grew up studying piano, violin, and viola, settling on the viola as her main instrument. She made relatively few public appearances as a singer in her youth, but when she did she invariably caught people's attention. At a concert by the Oakland Youth Orchestra, in 1972, she stepped forward to deliver an aria from Saint-Saens's "Samson and Delilah," and Charles Shere, in a perceptive review for the Oakland Tribune, described a now familiar spell being cast for perhaps the first time: "She simply stood there and sang, hardly even opening her mouth, with an even range, secure high notes, and marvelous control of dynamics in the swells."

By 1979, she was the principal violist of the Berkeley Symphony. When the orchestra decided to mount a production of "Hansel and Gretel" at San Quentin State Prison, she volunteered for the role of Hansel. Under these fittingly unconventional circumstances she made her operatic debut. She took up singing full time while studying in Boston in the early eighties, drawing notice first for her precisely expressive accounts of Bach cantatas at Emmanuel Church and then for her work in radical opera productions, by Peter Sellars, of Handel's "Giulio Cesare in Egitto" and Mozart's "Don Giovanni." She rose to fame in Europe in the mid-nineties, mainly on the strength of an instantly legendary performance in Sellars's production of Handel's "Theodora" at the Glyndebourne Festival, in 1996. She made a belated Metropolitan Opera debut in 1999, in John Harbison's "The Great Gatsby." The ovations that greeted her Dido in "Les Troyens" at the Met, in 2003, signified her assumption of diva status.

"Lorraine's a bit of a nut," people in the music business used to say. They were referring to her Northern California nature--her spiritual pursuits, her interest in astrology, her enthusiasm for alternative medicine. She sometimes unnerved her colleagues with her raucous sense of humor and her braying laugh. In retrospect, her alleged eccentricities seem essential to the evolution of her art. She broke through the facade of cool professionalism ...