Marlena Malas

Marlena Malas, who died December 4, 2023, began teaching at Juilliard in 1989. Her students can be heard in the world’s major opera houses and concert venues and her graduates also hold teaching positions at many esteemed conservatories and universities worldwide. In addition to Juilliard and her private voice studio, Malas taught on the faculties of the Curtis Institute of Music and the Manhattan School of Music. She was the chairman of the voice department of the Chautauqua Institute, a summer vocal program for young singers. She also served as a vocal consultant and teacher for the Canadian Opera Company, the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Program, the English National Opera, the Santa Fe Opera, the Castleton Festival, the Chicago Lyric Opera Young Artist Program, and has also taught voice at the Hartt School of Music. She also taught singing master classes at the Blossom Music Festival, the San Francisco Opera Center, the Santa Fe Opera, the European Center for Opera and Vocal Studies in Brussels, the Israel Vocal Studies Center, the English National Opera, the Metropolitan Opera National Council, Westminster Choir College, and Rutgers University. She has also served as a judge for the Metropolitan Opera National Council auditions. Most notably, in 1993, she taught master classes in collaboration with her mentors Joan Sutherland, Richard Bonynge, and Luigi Alva in association with the Sydney Opera House, at their first Opera Symposium.

A native of New York City, Malas, a mezzo-soprano, studied in the Preparatory Division from 1951 to 1953 and graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music. She then sang with opera companies including Santa Fe, Boston, Miami, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, San Diego, and Milwaukee, and made appearances with the Marlboro and Casals Festivals as well as concert appearances with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic. She is featured on a definitive recording of Brahms’s Liebeslieder Waltzes under the direction of Rudolf Serkin and Leon Fleisher.

Malas and her husband, operatic bass and voice teacher Spiro Malas, who predeceased her, lived in Manhattan and had two sons, Alexis and Nicol, and five grandchildren: Sascha, Reed, Grant, Max, and Flynn.