Arleen Auger, 53; Operatic Soprano

Arleen Auger, the Southern California soprano who had to go to Europe to find international fame in opera, the concert stage and recordings, died Thursday in Barneveld, the Netherlands, of cancer. She was 53.

Miss Auger had undergone three operations for a malignant brain tumor last year. She died in the city where she had resided during her illness, said Topper Smith, music administrator of the Los Angeles Music Center Opera, who had been the singer’s friend for more than three decades.

During her career, Miss Auger made more than 120 recordings, including dozens of Bach and Mozart pieces, and sang in opera houses and on concert stages from Vienna to Milan’s La Scala and from Moscow to Los Angeles.

Millions of television viewers around the world saw her sing Mozart’s “Exsultate, Jubilate” at the royal wedding of England’s Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson at Westminster Abbey in 1986.

“Arleen Auger is a paragon,” said Los Angeles Times music critic Martin Bernheimer in reviewing her recital at Pasadena’s Ambassador Auditorium in 1988. “She commands a high, wide-ranging soprano of extraordinary sweetness and purity. Yet the sweetness never precludes subtlety, and the purity certainly doesn’t come at the expense of sensuality.”

Bernheimer praised her “remarkable agility at one extreme, passionate lyricism at the other” and, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, noted that she was “the greatest diva ever to hail from South Gate or Huntington Beach.”

“Listening to a song recorded by Arleen Auger, one might be inclined to credit the engineers for some of the apparent perfection. That any singer should be able to sustain such effortless lines, such pure and exquisitely gauged sound so consistently seems unbelievable,” wrote Times reviewer John Henken after her performance at a USC concert in 1989. “Believe it. (She has) musical command of a virtually flawless voice.”

When the coloratura’s album “Love Songs” was released in 1988, Times reviewer Herbert Glass described it as “in a word, perfection.”

“Arleen Auger is the kind of soprano who leaves connoisseurs scratching their heads to come up with new superlatives,” Times writer Chris Pasles noted when the international star went to UC Irvine in 1989 to advise student singers.

She worked tirelessly with young aspirants, she explained, because she never got that kind of professional help when she was growing up in Huntington Beach. She even taught for a time at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

“I feel strongly about artists passing on our experience and knowledge--if anyone wants it,” she told The Times. “I had a very difficult time when I was young in Southern California--and certainly in Europe--finding artists willing and able to pass on their experience. I know how important it is.”

Although she was much in demand at her peak, when she started out in California, Miss Auger recalled without bitterness, “I couldn’t get a job.”

Born Sept. 13, 1939, in South Gate, the daughter of a minister, Miss Auger majored in education at Cal State Long Beach. After studying voice with Ralph Errolle in Chicago, she won a contest that sent her to Europe in 1967.

In contrast to her chilly reception at home, she landed a job immediately with the Vienna State Opera, and made her debut in the formidable role of the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflote.”

“I guess they needed a Queen of the Night on short notice, and I was it,” she modestly told Musical America magazine.

“I had never sung opera before,” she later told The Times. “I had only sung operetta, Strauss’ ‘Die Fledermaus,’ at Cal State Long Beach.”

After seven years with the Vienna opera, she moved into the world of recitals and concerts, beginning with a tour of Japan with the conductor Helmuth Rilling. She soon gained international recognition through a series of recordings of Bach pieces under Rilling’s direction.

Firmly established outside her own country, Miss Auger turned homeward for what was to be her final decade of performing.

On Oct. 2, 1978, she made her Metropolitan Opera debut in New York as Marzelline in Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” and in 1986 returned to Los Angeles for her local debut in the role of Handel’s “Alcina.”

Her U.S. appearances throughout the 1980s included the Aspen Music Festival and the New England Bach Festival and operas and recitals across the country.

Miss Auger was married and divorced twice. She is survived by her parents, Everett and Doris Auger, and a brother, Ralph Auger, all of Healdsburg, Calif., north of San Francisco.