Soprano Zeani was renowned for versatility, acting

Virginia Zeani, a Romanian soprano with a brilliant, powerful voice and striking looks who overcame childhood poverty and the perils of war to become a fixture on the opera stage, died Monday in West Palm Beach, Florida. She was 97.

Her son and only immediate survivor, Alessandro

Rossi-Lemeni, said she died in a nursing home “after an extended cardiac respiratory illness.”

Leading tenors relished performing alongside Zeani. “A woman blessed with beauty both physical and vocal, she was in addition a very gifted actress,” Plácido Domingo once wrote. The conductor Richard Bonynge ranked her among the top four sopranos of the 20th century. And according to

Zeani, Maria Callas’s husband, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, confided to her that she was “one of the very few sopranos that my wife is frightened of.”

Yet Zeani failed to gain the mass following and adulation of Callas and other contemporary divas, like Joan Sutherland and Montserrat Caballé, during her 34 years of opera appearances, and she was almost forgotten in retirement despite an illustrious second career as a voice teacher.

Her insistence on remaining close to her family in Rome kept her from venturing more often beyond Europe, limiting her career in the United States. She once even turned down a contract from the Metropolitan Opera.

Zeani conceded she had done little to make recordings that would have brought her to a wider audience. “The rise of the publicist and the work that record companies do in selling their artists is how stars are made today,” she said in “Virginia Zeani: My Memories of an Operatic Golden Age” (2004).

“In my time, very few singers apart from Callas, Sutherland and Caballé had such support behind them,” she said. Only in recent years have recordings of her performances become widely available.

Zeani was known for her versatility. While she practically owned the role of Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata,” performing it 648 times, she also ranged far beyond Verdi, singing 69 roles in operas by Rossini, Donizetti, Puccini and Wagner, among many others. Contemporary composers sought her out for premieres of their operas.