Oralia Dominguez - obituary - Telegraph Oralia Dominguez was born at San Luis Potosí, north of Mexico City, on October 25 1925. Her father wanted her to be a teacher, but one of her own teachers encouraged her to enter singing competitions. She studied at the National Conservatory in the capital and in 1945 made her debut in Puccini's Manon Lescaut. By 1950 she was appearing with Mexico City Opera, where she sang Amneris in Aïda while Callas took the title role - this was the occasion when the Greek soprano first reached a high E flat, not written by Verdi, at the end of the second act, an achievement that she was later to repeat in Europe and on disc . The first concert of Oralia Dominguez's European debut tour - a recital at the Wigmore Hall in January 1953 - drew rapturous reviews. Later that year she appeared in Adriana Lecouvreur at La Scala, with Renata Tebaldi, and recorded the Verdi Requiem under Victor de Sabata. In Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage, which was premiered at Covent Garden in January 1955 conducted by John Pritchard, Oralia Dominguez sang Sosostris, a clairvoyant based on the character in TS Eliot's poem The Waste Land. "I can only say that I know my part," she said of the complex opera. The music is most interesting but I cannot talk about anything else. I am not even sure why my face is painted blue. That summer she sang Mistress Quickly in Glyndebourne's production of Falstaff at the Edinburgh Festival under Carlo Maria Giulini. It was a role that, in Spike Hughes's words, "she immediately claimed as her own and rightly monopolised in all subsequent Glyndebourne productions of the opera." In 1962 Oralia Dominguez spent a Glyndebourne season under a silly headdress as Arnalta in Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea, conducted by John Pritchard, which she would revive the following two seasons. By the mid-1960s she had all but vanished from the British stage, spending most of her time with the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf. She did, however, return to Covent Garden in 1967 to sing Mistress Quickly in Verdi's Falstaff, this time opposite Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's Sir John . She appeared with the Lyric Opera of Chicago in Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, while her recording legacy includes Wagner's Ring Cycle under von Karajan, in which she sings Erda . Her farewell performance was in Verdi's Requiem in Mexico City in 1982 . In retirement she lived in Milan. Oralia Dominguez, born October 25 1925, died November 25 2013