Kathleen Deanna Battle was born on 13 August 1948 in Portsmouth, Ohio, the youngest of seven children of a steelworker father and a mother active in the gospel music of the family’s African Methodist Episcopal church. Encouraged by her high-school music teacher Charles Varney, she won a scholarship to the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, where she studied voice with Franklin Bens and worked with Italo Tajo. She took a master’s degree in music education and taught music in a Cincinnati public school while continuing private study. An audition for the conductor Thomas Schippers in 1972 led to her professional debut as soprano soloist in Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto. She made her opera debut in 1975 and later studied with Sylvia Olden Lee and Daniel Ferro.

Battle first became known through concert work with major American orchestras in the early and mid-1970s, then built a leading opera career through the 1980s and early 1990s in lyric and coloratura soprano roles. Her light, silvery timbre and precise coloratura made her one of the most recorded sopranos of her generation, and in 1985 the critic Michael Walsh called her the best lyric coloratura in the world. Her association with the Metropolitan Opera ended with her dismissal in 1994, after which she concentrated on recording and the concert platform. She returned to the Metropolitan Opera House after a twenty-two-year absence for a concert of spirituals in November 2016, and appeared there again in May 2024. Her career has also been notable for bringing the African American spiritual into mainstream concert programming.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Battle