Ruth Michaelis, 85; Noted as Teacher, Performer in Opera

Ruth Michaelis, known in the United States for her productions and teaching of opera and in Europe for her performances of them, died Friday in her sleep at her Santa Barbara home.

The alto and mezzo-soprano was 85, said her companion of 45 years, Imogene Henderson.

Known primarily in West Germany, where she sang with the Munich Opera for nearly three decades, Miss Michaelis was once called a “model exponent of ensemble art” by Times music critic Martin Bernheimer, who first heard her when he was a student in Germany. She was “the kind of performer who made the most of big assignments, yet also managed to elevate the smaller ones far beyond their customary insignificance,” Bernheimer wrote in 1968.

She studied voice and dramatics in Berlin with Hans Beltz and then with Jeanne Robert and Anna Bahr-Mildenburg.

At Munich, where Miss Michaelis made her debut in 1933, she continued to sing into the 1960s even after moving to Istanbul to organize a new state opera school in Turkey’s largest city. She performed often in “Die Meistersinger,” “Der Rosenkavalier,” “Cavalleria Rusticana” and “Otello.”

Born in Posen, Germany, she came to the United States in 1961 at the invitation of Lotte Lehman and taught Lehman’s master classes at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara. The following year she joined the music faculty at USC, teaching voice and staging operas.

She also staged productions for the Pasadena Opera and judged Metropolitan Opera and other auditions in the United States and Europe.

In 1954 she was named a Kammersangerin by the German government, an honorary title reserved for only the finest artists, Henderson said.

Although not Jewish herself, Miss Michaelis devoted the wartime years to helping Jews flee Nazi Germany, using her political and artistic influence to get them out of the country.

“Then at last came the end of the war. . . . Now we could sing to the whole world again,” she once recalled.

Miss Michaelis made her last professional appearance in Santa Barbara in 1966, singing Johannes Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody with the Santa Barbara Symphony.

She was also the author of several books, among them “Church Year in Song,” a collection of religious music for vocalists, and “German Lied,” a work still used in classrooms.

In addition to Henderson, she is survived by a niece in Germany.