“Apart from a fabulous technique, she worked from the words, from the text,” Ms. Andriesen said. “She could color her voice.”
A 1990 recording by Ms. Alexander and the pianist Roger Vignoles of Aaron Copland’s song cycle of 12 Emily Dickinson poems was lauded for the great tenderness and delicacy she brought to “Nature, the Gentlest Mother” and her brash forthright rendering of “There Came a Wind Like a Bugle.” Gramophone magazine commented that in the Copland songs, Ms. Alexander had “exactly the right unaffected lyric mezzo quality.”
Her range was considerable: Her 1989 Glyndebourne Festival Opera performance of “Jenufa,” later released on DVD, was well-known for its intensity and passion in a role that is among the most technically challenging in opera. A Gramophone reviewer wrote that she sang the heroine role “with warmth and fervor which exactly captures Jenufa’s open and loving nature.”
Roberta Alexander, an only child, was born in Lynchburg, Va., on March 3, 1949, and grew up in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Her father, Robert Alexander, was choir director at Wilberforce University, America’s oldest historically Black private university. Her mother, Roberta (Dabney) Alexander, was a soprano who, like her father, had studied with the pioneering Black composer Undine Smith Moore.
Under her parents influence, she became a little too enthusiastic about opera from an early age, telling the Sydney Morning Herald she “wasn’t allowed to go to concerts unless I didn’t sing along.” By 8, she made her professional debut in a local staging of Kurt Weill-Maxwell Anderson opera “Lost in the Stars,” replacing a boy who could not memorize his lines.
Ms. Alexander enrolled at Central State University, a historically Black college in Ohio and the alma mater of the opera singer Leontyne Price, and received a bachelor’s degree in music education in 1969. She graduated from the University of Michigan in 1971 with a master’s degree in music and soon moved to the Netherlands. She made her debut in 1975 with the Netherlands Opera in Rossini’s “La Cambiale di Matrimonio.”
