Everything about Victoria de los Angeles, Spain’s greatest classical singer, who died on Saturday in Barcelona, was one-of-a-kind – starting with her name.

In full, it was Victoria de los Angeles Lopez Garcia, and it wasn’t arrived at easily, as the singer herself explained. “The de los Angeles comes from my mother’s brother Angel, who was also my godfather. There were problems with the name, actually. You see, Maria de los Angeles was a common name, and quite acceptable to the powers that be, but I was the first Victoria de los Angeles. We had to get special permission from the priest to use that combination.”

She was born to Bernardo Lopez, a Catalonian caretaker, and Victoria Garcia, a Castilian, in Barcelona, on November 1, 1923. Admirers of her singing aren’t surprised she was born on All Saints Day. Again and again, de los Angeles’s is the voice people celebrate as pure, healing, imbued with integrity, wisdom, even grace.An AIDS worker in the 1980s recalled many of his clients requesting he bring to the hospital CDs or tapes of the singer: hers was often the last voice they wanted to hear. (“I can’t listen to Callas on my deathbed, for God’s sake,” one of them said.)

The singer, who charmed audiences worldwide for nearly 60 years, in fact came to the performing arts despite severe shyness. As a little girl, de los Angeles’s forthright sister, Carmen, dragged her to the Conservatorio of the Barcelona Liceo. Amused teachers dismissed the sisters, telling them to come back later. They did, when Victoria was 16, and at her audition an instructor summoned the director of the Conservatorio to join them, likening the teenager’s voice to that of Claudia Muzio, one of the greatest Italian sopranos.

De los Angeles’s shyness was conquered after singing at a Red Cross benefit during the Spanish Civil War. Standing onstage in a grown-up, borrowed black dress, the warm applause following her first number inspired the young artist. She sang so well and for so long she annoyed the benefit’s headliner.

Five decades of equally successful recitals followed. “The voice was just unnaturally gorgeous,” said teacher David Stein, who first heard the soprano in 1956. “She had a sound I would associate with the taste of a great raspberry, a tropical, rich fruitiness. Her voice was sexual, but invitingly, tantalizingly sexual – not dangerously.”

De los Angeles’s career as a soloist began in earnest in 1944. A quick success in her native country, she debuted in opera a year later as the Countess Almaviva in “Le Nozze de Figaro,” a favorite role. In 1947 she traveled to Geneva to enter an international music competition, the Concours Internationale. Making it to the finals, she went to bed early and slept through the late-night voting that selected her as the winner. The young singer was soon debuting and triumphing on stages all over Europe, drawing extra excitement for her facility in nearly all the languages classical singing demands – Spanish, Italian French, German, and English – and in every style. De Los Angeles was one of the very first singers to master the entire breadth of classical music’s canon, from the first operas of Monteverdi to contemporary Spanish and French songs.

On October 24, 1950, she was scheduled to make her heavily hyped American debut at Carnegie Hall. During the Atlantic crossing, de los Angeles fell ill, and to the Carnegie managers’ dismay postponed the concert. Nine days later, to a house packed with luminaries including Marian Anderson, Isaac Stern, and Artur Rubinstein, she sang her program, including what was to become a signature, a finale of Spanish songs she sang and played on her guitar. Although the New York Times was at best phlegmatic – “Now [that] the tumult is over, it is to be said that Miss de los Angeles gave a series of singularly uneven performances” The rest of the audience disagreed: word of mouth and better reviews enabled her manager, Sol Hurok, to book two additional sold-out concerts.

Six months later, on St. Patrick’s Day 1951, de los Angeles made her Metropolitan Opera debut, as Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust. In an era so rich with remarkable performers that opera journalist Roy Wood has taken to calling them “Opera’s Greatest Generation,” de los Angeles was especially beloved. She was never as famous (or controversial) as Maria Callas, she did not have the volume of Renata Tebaldi or Zinka Milanov, but, as novelist and essayist James McCourt (a close friend who has been writing a book about the diva) put it, “She was unquestionably unique among her colleagues – and they all knew it.”

De los Angeles sang for a decade at the Met, drawing on a versatility few could match; her repertoire included operas by Verdi and Wagner, Puccini and Rossini, Gounod and Debussy. Her Met career ended after she reluctantly appeared in von Flotow’s “Martha,” an opera that doesn’t get revived often – for a reason. “She sang several great roles at the Met,” said Robert Tuggle, director of archives for the Metropolitan, “such as Mimi in ‘La Boheme,’ ‘Butterfly,’ ‘Manon.’ But the ‘Martha’ was a great mistake. The whole production was unsuccessful, and not amusing.”

Another opera house controversy was over, of all roles, Carmen. Her 1960 recording was an instant classic, and although the singer offered to play Carmen early in her Met career, the chance eventually arrived in 1978, with the New Jersey State Opera. Stein recalls, “It was not all that well received, but I loved her Carmen. She made the character truly feminine – no attempt at the femme fatale, hot chili pepper gypsy. She was able to suggest the seductiveness of pure, girlish femininity.” A year later, she repeated the role at the New York City Opera, but it did not go smoothly, and de los Angeles sang only the first performance.

But her recital career continued, astonishingly, into her mid-70s. There were rumors of financial problems, but “Something else drove her,” said longtime friend Richard Miller. “In the mid-1970s, her mother died, and Victoria regrouped. Her programs changed, she kept going.” Her voice aged but became even more communicative. Singing mostly Spanish songs, she developed an urgency and vocal purity that continued to delight listeners. Her longevity allowed a generation of opera lovers too young to have heard de los Angeles’s greatest colleagues to discover her for themselves.

In 1998, having already lost her husband and her second son, de los Angeles was called from the stage to be told that her first-born, Juan Enrique, a diabetic, had fallen ill. Three days later, he died, and his mother’s singing at the funeral was said to be her last in public. Her final years were quiet, private ones.

De los Angeles is survived, appropriately, by her own voice. “I never want ed to make a recording in my life,” she told a biographer. “I am by nature a perfectionist, and I never believe that what I am doing is good enough.” Fortunately, starting in 1941, she was recorded by the HMV (later EMI) label, and left us more than 80 recordings, including 21 complete operas and dozens of albums of ancient and modern songs in numerous languages. Much of her recorded legacy has already been remastered for CD.

On most of them, she reveals the rhythmic verve and delicate but entrancing gift for style and poetry that made her so precious a performer for so many listeners. “What she did so extraordinarily,” said David Stein, “was to suggest fragility, vulnerability. Without doing anything, simply through her voice and persona, she brought out the gentleness, the humanity, of Mimi, Desdemona, Melisande. That quality was needed in music. It’s usually very scarce in opera, but with Victoria it was very much on display.”