Barbara Smith Conrad, 79; mezzo soprano

Barbara Smith Conrad, an acclaimed mezzo soprano who died May 22 at 79, sang on the most illustrious stages of the world, from New York's Metropolitan Opera to the Vienna State Opera. But it was the stage upon which she did not perform — as a 19-yearold student at the University of Texas at Austin in 1957 — that propelled her to national attention as a musical talent and unexpected figure in the civil rights movement.

After training her voice at her family's Baptist church, she enrolled in the music program at UT-Austin in 1956, the first year black students were accepted as undergraduates.

During her first year on campus, Conrad was chosen to play Dido, the queen of Carthage, opposite a white student as her lover in a production of the Baroque composer Henry Purcell's opera "Dido and Aeneas." The interracial pairing was a controversial, even shocking choice for a university in the throes of desegregation. Conrad's casting drew the ire of white UT students, who menaced her in phone calls, and segregationists in the Texas state legislature, who agitated about withdrawing funds for the university if she was not replaced in the production. When university officials submitted to the legislature's demands, Conrad was publicly gracious, allowing that administrators were "trying to achieve the most harmonious fulfillment of integration at the university."