Contralto Claramae Turner, 92, died in Santa Rosa earlier this month. Besides singing many roles with the San Francisco Opera between 1942 and 1974, she appeared at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, and elsewhere, creating such roles as Madame Flora in Giancarlo Menotti's The Medium. She had a prominent career in musicals, including the role of Nettie in the film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel, singing "You'll Never Walk Alone."
Among her many notable, wideranging accomplishments was singing Erda in a Melchior-Varnay Siegfried, Augusta in The Ballad of Baby Doe with Beverly Sills, Ulrica in Arturo Toscanini's 1954 legendary concert version of Verdi's Un ballo in maschera, and introducing the song "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," written for her in 1954 by George Cory and Douglass Cross (but recorded first by Tony Bennett).
Born in Dinuba, CA, in 1920, she made her San Francisco Opera debut in Les Contes d'Hoffmann in 1945.