Mary Evelyn Moore, a prominent and revered singer, conductor and voice teacher in Great Falls, passed away peacefully June 25 from complications of a stroke. She was born May 2, 1928 in Duluth, Minnesota, where she made her debut playing a ukulele and singing carols for her father’s Rotary Club. She graduated to the violin when she stumbled across one in her mother’s closet. The year she turned twelve her family moved to Great Falls for her father’s new job managing the Crane Co., a plumbing and heating supply business, and Mary finally got the instrument she’d yearned for, a Wurlitzer spinet piano.
After graduating from Great Falls High School in 1945, Mary enrolled at Northwestern University, where she earned bachelor and master’s degrees in music. She remained in the Chicago area for a time, juggling operatic try-outs with private voice lessons and teaching music and music theory at nearby Kendall College. She conducted one small church choir and sang in another under Austin Lovelace, a nationally known composer who introduced her to cocker spaniels and would become a lifelong friend.
Mary’s primary focus in those days was auditioning. Whenever she had a tryout, she would rent a car so she could warm up on the way, swooping her voice several octaves up and back down again while she was behind the wheel. Her lower, mezzo-soprano voice meant that Mary was most often given character actor parts in operas, seldom the lead. Nevertheless, conductors in the area began to take notice of her rich tone. She sang “Messiah” solos with symphonies in Michigan and Iowa and served one summer on the faculty of the Meadowbrook School of Music in Michigan.
For a number of years Mary continued to perform. She was the only professional mezzo soprano in the state and she made the rounds, singing solos with symphonies in Missoula, Bozeman and in Billings, where she played the role of Suzuki in “Madame Butterfly.” For two decades she directed the Great Falls Recital Series which, along with the symphony, offered her the chance to perform as Dorabella in “Cosi fan tutte” and play parts in “Die Fledermaus,” “The Medium,” “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” “Old Man and the Thief,” “Into the Woods,” and as the witch in Hansel and Gretel. She took part in Summer Showcases directed by Bruce Cusker, where her favorite role was that of Mother Superior in “The Sound of Music.”
Over time, though, Mary began to focus almost exclusively on conducting and teaching, adept at coaxing the best performances out of her students. She believed that singing was the purest form of communication. By the time she was 40 she had nearly 75 private voice students coming and going from her tidy white house on Fourth Avenue North. She helped adjudicate many district and state music festivals and conducted choirs at the Congregational Church and Christ United Methodist Church as well as the Symphonic Choir. She played violin with the Great Falls Symphony on the side.
To read the complete obituary and share condolences, click here to visit the Croxford Funeral Home website.
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