B.K.S. Iyengar, famed yoga teacher, dies at 95

Before he became one of the West’s most influential teachers of yoga, B.K.S. Iyengar was a frail baby in a poor family in India. Born in 1918 during a worldwide flu epidemic, he survived infancy only to struggle with other deadly maladies, including malaria, typhoid and tuberculosis.

The illnesses left him a pathetic, bony-chested weakling for whom the future appeared dim.

“I was,” he quipped later, “an anti-advertisement for yoga.”

No one, including Iyengar, could have predicted what a difference a few years would make. The once-scrawny youth who was told he would not survive to adulthood began studying yoga at 14 and teaching at 18. He gradually built a reputation that spread to the West, where he helped lay the foundation for the explosive growth of yoga as a practice and industry and attained rock-star status with tens of thousands of followers, including such celebrities as actresses Ali MacGraw and Annette Bening.

His seminal 1966 book, “Light on Yoga,” became a worldwide best-seller, with more than 1 million copies sold in 17 languages.

“No other individual has been as influential in turning yoga into a phenomenon that somehow retains the essence of its mystical aura while being continually made and remade in the image of a modern commodity,” Joseph Alter, a University of Pittsburgh anthropologist who has written widely on the history and development of yoga in the West, said Wednesday.

Iyengar was 95 at his death Wednesday in Pune, India, said officials of the Iyengar Yoga National Association of the United States, which promotes his teachings and certifies Iyengar instructors in the U.S. Iyengar, who was still doing extended headstands well into his 10th decade, had been hospitalized for heart and kidney problems.

He was born Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar on Dec. 14, 1918, in Bangalore, India. The son of a teacher, he was one of 13 children.

His wife, Ramamani, died in 1973. His survivors include five daughters, Geeta, Vanita, Suchita, Sunita and Savita; and a son, Prashant.

Famed soprano Albanese dies

Licia Albanese, a revered Metropolitan Opera soprano who achieved superstar status in the postwar era for her emotionally intense and technically accomplished portrayals, particularly of the doomed geisha in “Madama Butterfly” and other Puccini heroines, died of natural causes Friday in New York. She was 105.

She had been attending performances until late last year, but “at 105 she felt it was time for her to go,” her son, Joseph Gimma Jr., said this week.

The Italian-born singer made her debut at the Met in 1940 as Cio-Cio San, the geisha wife of an American naval officer in the beloved Puccini opera. It was one of 17 roles Albanese performed at the Met over the next 26 years, including her widely admired Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata” and the title role in Massenet’s “Manon.”

In her farewell performance on the closing night of the Met’s old house in 1966, she fittingly reprised her “Butterfly” role, stirring critics and the audience with a dramatic gesture at the end of the famous aria “Un bel di.”

She was born in Bari, Italy, on July 23, 1909. One of seven children in a musical family, she “wanted first to be a ballerina, then actress,” she said in a 1994 Associated Press interview. “After I find out I had a voice, I combine everything.”

In 1945 she married Joseph Gimma, who had grown up on her street in Italy. They did not meet until she arrived in America.

Gimma, an investment banker and former chairman of the New York State Racing Commission, died in 1990.

In addition to their son, Albanese is survived by two grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.