Eleanor Steber, 76; Star at Metropolitan Opera

Eleanor Steber, who began singing solos as a child in West Virginia and went on to become a prima donna at the Metropolitan Opera, died Wednesday.

Miss Steber died of congestive heart failure at the Attleboro Nursing Home in Langhorne, Pa., said Martha Moore Smith, her personal representative.

The singer’s age, widely misreported throughout her career, was 76, said publicist Randall Fostvedt.

Miss Steber became a soloist at age 5 in a church in Wheeling, W. Va.--but forgot the words to her song.

The soprano was confident by the time she debuted at the Met in 1940 as Sophie in “Der Rosenkavalier.”

“Thank heaven, all thought of its being my debut left my mind entirely and I was caught up in the swell of the music,” she later recalled.

As her voice matured, she undertook heavier roles, such as Donna Anna in “Don Giovanni.”

In all, she sang 404 Met performances in 33 roles through 1966. She was known especially as a Mozart interpreter, portraying such heroines as the Countess, Fiordiligi, Pamina, Donna Elvira and Constanze, the latter at the Metropolitan premiere of “The Abduction From the Seraglio,” in 1946.

“Mozart led to everything else,” she said in a 1987 interview. “It naturally led to Strauss. You learn how to sing through singing Mozart, and you can then do Bellini, Donizetti. Mozart was a purist.”

Miss Steber appeared throughout the world in recitals and musical comedies and as featured soloist on television’s “Voice of Firestone.” Her weekly radio hour in the 1940s blended classical and pop.

Sir Rudolf Bing, then the Met’s general manager, dismissed her without explanation in 1963, three years after a New York Times article had proclaimed her “indispensable” to the opera company.

She returned, at the Met’s behest, in 1966 to sing Minnie in “Girl of the Golden West.”

Miss Steber headed the voice department at the Cleveland Institute of Music from 1963 to 1973, then taught at the Juilliard School of Music. In 1975, she established the Eleanor Steber Music Foundation to help the careers of young singers.

“I’m offered old-lady parts in musicals,” she complained in 1980. “Why don’t they write a show about Tugboat Annie and ask me to do it?”

Survivors include a sister and a brother. Her two marriages ended in divorce.