In 1915, she was born into the aristocracy of Vienna, Austria to Luise Hubicki-Sas and Frank Brandstetter; and later grew up in Bratislava, Slovakia. When she was five, her strong-willed mother divorced her father despite society and the Catholic Church she attended forbidding it. And Maria was raised by Emil Prat, a step-father whom she loved. Vienna, "City of Music" resounded with waltzes and symphonies; but as a child there was another music that also enchanted her, the trilling of birds. Their melodies would prompt her to get up, "when everybody was sleeping" and walk out onto her bedroom balcony where she would stand in the moonlight mesmerized by "the ideal, the singing of nightingales and other winged creatures...I was thinking about singing all the time...also Galli-Curci's voice was always on my mind- the sweetness, the lightness, the emotion..."
Professional beginnings
Although unusual for a young woman of the upper class, with her parents' consent she began training in Vienna, as a singer. Her teacher, Wolfgang Steinbruch, "had the upper tones- I loved the sound. He taught me to sing with proper vocal technique- but with emotion! And he focused on the resonance, the vibration, and to always find the support. I loved this. He allowed me to fly!" A few years later, she was appearing on the radio performing Lieder and a cosmopolitan repertoire including folk songs in Slovakian, German, Hungarian, and Czech.
While studying voice, she married Eugen Fodor, who encouraged her to pursue her musical career. It was becoming dangerous to be a Jew and although her husband had a high position in the Slovakian commerce and tourist bureau, his father was Jewish, therefore he soon had to flee their home in Bratislava for Sweden. And at the end of the war, while making his way back to Bratislava, by train, he was shot in the back and killed.
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. She was a favorite soprano of the Austro- Hungarian composer, Franz Lehar who soon cast her in the title role of his The Merry Widow ; and when she played Angele in Lehar's Count of Luxembourg the critics declared it her great breakthrough, praising her tremendous success in the role.
Political activism
From the onset of World War II, Fedorova had also been part of the underground, hiding Jewish people in her cellar, escorting them to safety and providing them with forged papers. During this time she was able to save her Jewish teacher, Wolfgang Steinbruch, from internment in a concentration camp. But as a result of these activities, she was becoming a target for the Gestapo who eventually imprisoned and tortured her.
A few years after the armistice, during the 1950s, she and her second husband, George Zhorella, emigrated to the United States and settled in New York City. The traumas of war had made it difficult for her to think about her past, including her life as a singer. And since she had come to associate the horrors of World War II with the sounds of the music she had made during those years, with a few exceptions,, she chose not to perform, and her career as a singer came to a close.
Singing teacher
It was only through the urging of friends that finally, in the 1980s, she was able to consider re-entering the musical realm. And that is how The Zhorella Method of singing came into use, at Yale University and SUNY Purchase and then in her Upper West Side studio in Manhattan, where she received trainees from all over the world and the bouquets they brought her; and where she specialized in "repairing damaged voices" until a few weeks before her death on April 21, 2017 at the age of 101.
The Zhorella Method
"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."
