Maria Zhorella Fedorova

After her husband's death in 1974, and with the urging of friends, Maria began teaching voice from her apartment in Elmhurst, Queens. Music educators soon learned of her gift, and she was hired by the Yale School of Music to teach undergraduates as early as 1975. She used lessons from her original teacher, as well as principles from the Italian bel canto method, to fashion an unusual pedagogical regimen that did not encourage big, operatic vocal production, but rather a lyrical style more suited to lieder and light opera. She taught the Zhorella Method (as it came to be known) to students at SUNY Purchase and in her Upper West Side studio in Manhattan. Her teaching attracted singers from all over the world, especially theater and recording professionals who had "damaged voices" in need of repair. This third career, beginning in her sixties, sustained her for more than four decades. A remarkable survivor who lived for much of the twentieth century, Madame Zhorella remained active until a few weeks before her death on April 21, 2017 at the age of 101.

"Her style of teaching is one of infinite patience. And she is relentless and time and again would say, "Do it again, do it again- sing deep, sing back, sing deep, sing back". Once when we met at the Metropolitan Opera, she began giving me a lesson in the aisle. She asked, "Are you singing deep? Are you singing back?" And made me show her right there! She has changed my voice. Since I have established this technique with Maria I can sing and talk the night before and not be hoarse the next morning. And after five decades of performing, under Maria's tutelage I recently achieved my first high C, and did so with ease. Her method enables a singer's voice to stay young decades beyond what is considered its 'normal' life-span." (Cabaret and Concert Performer, Steve Ross, New York City, 2015)

As her operatic career blossomed, she married Georg Frank Zhorella, a Czech clerk who expected his wife to keep house rather than work. Moreover, Maria had come to associate the horrors of World War II with her early years in music. In 1949 the couple emigrated to the United States and settled in New York City, effectively ending her professional career as a soprano. With a few exceptions, such as her appearance on The Lipton Hour, where she sang the aria Vilja from The Merry Widow, she chose not to sing in New York. For reasons she chose not to relate she was compelled to look for work to supplement her husband's income. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Maria Zhorella was a fact-checker and librarian for Time Magazine, working at headquarters in Rockefeller Center.

In 1944, at the age of twenty-nine, Maria was invited to join the Vienna State Opera, one of the premier opera houses in the world. At first she played small roles. Among those she most enjoyed was Lola in Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana, and particularly the fat, ugly cook with big bosoms and false teeth in Eugen d'Albert's Tiefland (The Lowlands). Her most frequent role was Aranka in Der Ziegeunerbaron. She sang with such notable male stars as Anton Dermotta and worked with Richard Strauss, then the city's leading dramatic composer. She remembered him as a mentor and inspiration to a young artist making her way on the stage. Her last performance was in May 1949.

Maria Zhorella (also known as Maria Luise Zhorella Fedorova; née Brandstetter; November 8, 1915 – April 21, 2017, was a leading Austrian-born lyric soprano at the Vienna State Opera, in the 1940s; also a political activist, vigorously opposing Nazism in Europe during World War II; and then, for three decades, a singing teacher in New York City.

Maria Fedorova was born in Vienna, Austria in 1915. Her wealthy and aristocratic parents were Luise Hubicki-Sas and Frank Brandstetter; They left Vienna and Maria spent part of her childhood in Bratislava, Slovakia, where her mother's family had roots. When she was five her strong-willed mother divorced Frank Brandstetter, despite society and the Catholic Church forbidding it. So Maria was raised by her mother's second husband, Emil Prat, whom she loved, in Vienna.