Christa Ludwig, the reigning mezzo-soprano of opera stage

Christa Ludwig, a mezzo-soprano who reigned for decades over opera stages on both sides of the Atlantic, was 17 when World War II ended and gave some of her first performances at an American Officers’ Club in her native Germany. Homesick U.S. servicemen requested Gershwin and paid her in cigarettes.

During a bitter wartime winter, she had kept warm with a coat made from a gray horse blanket. When she found herself with no clothing suitable for her serenades, she again used the materials at her disposal and fashioned a red evening gown, with black sleeves and white shoulder puffs, from old Nazi flags.

“They weren’t useful for anything else anyway,” she wrote years later in a memoir, “In My Own Voice” (1994). “None of the soldiers ever guessed what I was wearing.”

From those beginnings, Ludwig, who died April 24 at 93, went on to one of the most illustrious careers in 20th-century opera. Her death was announced by the Vienna State Opera, where Ludwig sang for decades. Music critic Donal Henahan, writing in The New York Times, once described her as “the Lotte Lehmann of her generation,” a reference to the acclaimed German-born soprano who died in 1976.

Ludwig performed on European stages including Milan’s La Scala, the Paris Opera, London’s Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and the Bayreuth Festival in Germany and collaborated over the years with influential conductors including Karl Böhm, Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein.

At the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, she gave 119 performances in 15 roles between 1959, when she debuted there as Cherubino in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” and 1993, when she gave her final Met performance as Fricka in “Die Walküre,” the second installment in Wagner’s Ring Cycle. She retired the next year.

Appreciations of Ludwig noted that her repertoire spanned the works of the Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi, who was born in the 16th century, to those of the 20th-century 12-tone composer Alban Berg. She also ranged from the mezzo-soprano to the higher soprano register. But Ludwig became especially known for her interpretations of Mozart and Wagner.

In Richard Strauss’s opera “Der Rosenkavalier,” she played both the Marschallin and her young lover Octavian (a trouser role, like Cherubino, in which a female singer represents a male character onstage). She sang Leonore in Beethoven’s “Fidelio” and said she felt a particular affinity for Kundry in “Parsifal,” Wagner’s story of the quest for the Holy Grail.

One of few recitalists who also excelled on the opera stage, Ludwig was also celebrated for her interpretations of the lieder, or art songs, of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Mahler. “Many singers do not understand that (lieder) cannot be sung without flesh and blood and emotion,” The New York Times once quoted her as saying at a master class. “It is like an opera in two or three minutes.”

A particular achievement in this genre was her performance of Schubert’s song cycle “Winterreise,” or “Winter Journey,” based on texts by the German poet Wilhelm Müller. The cycle was traditionally performed by male singers — although Lehmann was a notable exception — before Ludwig offered an interpretation that critics came to regard as definitive. One of her seminal recordings, made for Deutsche Grammophon, was a performance of “Winterreise” with piano accompaniment by James Levine, the longtime music director at the Met.

“I think that women can sing the cycle with great empathy for the wanderer,” Ludwig wrote in her memoir. “It’s a journey of the soul,” she continued, “which bring us, consciously or unconsciously, a bit closer to our goal, whatever we choose to call it, and from which there is no turning back.”