Born: 1936 (California)

Died: May 23, 2016 (Santa Barbara, CA)

Elizabeth Mosher, soprano, was the winner of the 1964 Naumburg Award. She earned her bachelor of music and master of music degrees from the University of Southern California. With a Fulbright Scholarship, she also studied at the Hochschule fur Musik in Hamburg, Germany. While in Europe she was engaged at the Biel-Solothurn Opera in Switzerland where she sang 18 leading roles. Returning to the US in 1963, she was given two Martha Baird Rockefeller Grants, winning Naumburg the following year. In 1966, she won the American Opera Auditions resulting in a debut in Milan at Teatro Nuovo in Mascagni's L'Amico Fritz.

Her teaching career included at: the University of Michigan, 1970 to 1979; the University of Arizona, 1979 to 1997; and the University of California at Santa Barbara. 1997 to 2005. She also served on summer faculties at the National Music Camp, Interlochen, MI; American Institute of Musical Studies, Graz; and the Universoty of Miami in Salzburg. Her many students have sung with the Metropolitan Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Glyndebourne, Covent Garden, and San Francisco Opera.

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Excerpt from The New York Times review, December 4, 1964

Miss Mosher Sings Town Hall Recital

"Vocally, she is exciting. Her tones are clear and consistent in quality and sometimes big, thrillingly so. She can leap to any part of her range with ease. Her enunciation is splendid; every word is clear without sacrifice of beauty of sound. She offered songs and arias of Handel, Debussy, Wolf, Mahler, Richard Strauss, Rossini, and the first performance of Jacob Druckman's The Sound of Time, a 1964 Naumburg vocal commission, set to poems of Norman Mailer...Charles Wadsworth accompanied."

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