that way," said Graham. "I was never so inspired by a colleague on the stage as I was by Tatiana, because she just gave everything." Mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato confessed that during the time before the role of the Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos ultimately "clicked" for her, "my preparation for Strauss's naïve Komponist seemed to be way too slow. I had also been listening to the consummate artist, Tatiana Troyanos, a great deal, and I was thinking, 'I just can't do this role justice. I won't be ready. I just can't sing it like her.'" Final season Troyanos died on August 21, 1993, in New York, at the age of 54, of cancer. Nine years after her death, Opera News identified this as breast cancer, initially diagnosed in the mid-1980s and later in remission, which was found only in July 1993 to have metastasized to her liver. Her earlier cancer diagnosis had been undisclosed at the time; the Opera News article, by Eric Myers, now reported that "through all her treatments, she valiantly, strenuously battled illness and nerves and kept most of her singing engagements." She was survived by her mother, Hildegard Fournier, and a brother. She was interred in Pinelawn Memorial Park, Long Island, New York. The year after her death, the Metropolitan Opera performed a concert in her memory; Music Director James Levine wrote, "The idea that we are gathered here ... to pay memorial tribute to Tatiana Troyanos is incomprehensible. What it means, of course, is that our Metropolitan Opera family has lost one of the most important, beloved artists and friends in its entire history." Although described as "an exceedingly private person offstage," Troyanos had become known increasingly to suffer from inner ear and sinus problems, along with severe performance anxiety (Opera magazine said she was, "by all reports, someone caught between a rock and a hard place: her stage fright was equalled only by her love of singing"). Her death, however, was unforeseen and "came as a shock to the close-knit opera community," as Tim Page wrote at the time. "Ms. Troyanos had kept her illness to herself and continued to perform almost to the end." She had last sung at the Met—the last of three performances of Waltraute (a role debut) to Gwyneth Jones' Brünnhilde in Wagner's Götterdämmerung, conducted by Levine—on May 1, 1993. That April and May, she also sang in Mahler's Third