Elizette Bayan

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Elizette Bayan, born Maria Elizette de Magalhães Melo Bayan on 28 October 1938 in Viseu, Portugal, was a Portuguese opera soprano. She began singing with an orchestra at age ten in Coimbra and studied piano and singing with her mother before training at Lisbon’s National Conservatory of Music. She continued her studies at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, supported by a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship, and she studied with Gino Bechi.

Bayan made her professional debut in 1967 as Rosina in The Barber of Seville with the Portuguese Opera Company in Lisbon. In 1969 a Salzburg competition earned her a spot at Mozart Week, with later performances in Brussels and Ghent. She sang for ORF in Salzburg and performed at the Rittersaal of the Salzburg Residenz in 1971, and she premiered the cantata Dom Garcia by Joly Braga Santos at the Vilar de Mouros Festival that year. She also took part in sacred music concerts under conductors such as Michel Corboz and performed in Lisbon Cathedral and at the Gulbenkian Foundation.

In Paris she worked with French Radio and Television and the Portuguese Cultural Centre under Corboz. During her career she sang with tenors Plácido Domingo, José Carreras, and Alfredo Kraus, and with baritone Renato Bruson. She was a resident singer at the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos in Lisbon, where she performed many leading roles and premiered new works by Braga Santos and António Vitorino de Almeida. She also appeared abroad, including a performance of Rossini’s La scala di seta with the Vienna Chamber Opera, and gave a notable performance of Bellini’s I Puritani at the Teatro Massimo Bellini in Catania, where she sang an encore aria.

Her awards include the Tomás Alcaide Prize and the Bordalo Prize in 1971. In 2005 she was named Grand Officer of the Order of Prince Henry by the Portuguese president Jorge Sampaio. Elizette Bayan died on 29 May 2025 in Lisbon at the age of 86 and was buried at the Olivais cemetery.