What Becomes a Legend Most? Atribute to Beverly Sills

What Becomes a Legend Most? ATribute to Beverly Sills

beth hart

tishard to believe that Beverly Sills turned seventy-five this year. While she I has done more than enough to distinguish five lifetimes, it seems only yes- terday that she enchanted New York with her beautiful Baby Doe and her Cleopatra astonished the international press, who for the first time witnessed her resplendent stage presence, extraordinary musicality, and infinitely expressive voice. She was always a communicator with such a personal touch that the moment she came onstage, she embraced an audience, won it over, and took it with her on a memorable journey. I first heard Beverly Sills when I was twelve years old. I had taken the bus from the suburbs and found my way to City Center to meet my uncle, who was very excited about the New York premiere of an American opera and the so- prano singing in it. Thrilled as I was, I could never have imagined what lay in store for me. The exciting soprano was Beverly Sills and the opera, Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe. Sills’s entrance is vividly etched in my mem- ory: how lovely and friendly she was when she stepped onstage and sang exactly what I had been feeling: “I’ve just arrived from Central City and I don’t know my way about. Cousin Jack there knows so little English, I have to find the way by myself.” I would have done anything to make her feel at home. She made me feel wonderful and seemed to look at me as if she were happy that I came. I was lucky to have had a relative at City Opera who saw to it that I had tickets to every Sills opera, house seats usually a row behind her mother and husband and, years later, her beautiful daughter. At seventeen, quite embarrassed by the notes I had made on the Baby Doe stage bill when I was twelve, I thought, “How ridiculous! Sills didn’t look at you when she came onstage.” The more I saw of her in the years to come, the more I thought I was right at twelve. Something leaps across the footlights, a contagious something that draws people into her world and makes them feel that they are the occasion for her joy. The audience reciprocates. Jerome Hines doi:10.1093/oq/kbh080 The Opera Quarterly Vol. 20, No. 4, © Oxford University Press 2004; all rights reserved. atribute to beverly sills 625 in dialogue with Beverly spoke of the extraordinary way she comes out and faces her audience, “Just your attitude toward us was remarkably captivating. I never forgot it!”1 Just how she welcomes her audience when she is immediately in character is the mystery of her presence.

The Sills Presence

Elusive as it may be, presence is something Beverly Sills has whether she is per- forming, raising money, or asking people to buckle up in a New York taxi. It is in her voice, her manner—in her being. It fills a stage; it fills a room. It may have something to do with presence of mind, a self-command. Personal security figures into it, security buoyed by outstanding musicality, penetrating intelligence, and a core security born of a mother’s capacity to mirror her infant in voice and gaze, telling her who she is and that she is a source of sheer joy. Mothers mirror and love with varying degrees of capacity. Shirley Silverman’s radiating smile, much like her daughter’s, lit up those around her. In it one saw her love, the joy she took in her daughter’s performances, enough to engender the security of her three- year-old charmer chatting and singing uninhibitedly on the radio, the opera star who loved people and communicated it the moment she stepped onstage, the young adult who grew stronger when life was cruel, the woman whose joy and contagious laughter and zest for living outdistanced adversity. Beverly’s colleagues have commented on her presence and security, her intel- ligence and musicality. Erich Leinsdorf has said that Beverly “has a completely unusual degree of security and is one of the few singers who has the kind of personality in her voice that gets across both to other musicians and the pub- lic.”2 “She is a conductor’s dream. . . . She comes to the rehearsal already secure, leaving time for the most subtle detailed work.”3 Julius Rudel has said, “Bev- erly is perfectly secure. She doesn’t have to prove anything. She is a rare intel- ligence, able to understand the architecture of the total production. She’s so quick that you say something once to her and she immediately understands, so finely trained that she immediately executes it, as if it were her own idea, as it often is. I must say that she is the outstanding example of what I find admirable in an opera singer: sensitive, musical, theatrical and cooperative, down to her fingertips.”4 Dramatic gifts are also part of stage presence. Placido Domingo has said that Sills is the greatest vocal actress he has worked with,5 and Schuyler Chapin, call- ing her the greatest actress on the operatic stage, including even the fabled Callas, said, “She could move an audience to tears with no apparent eVort and bring it back to laughter in the same way.”6 To Risë Stevens, “This woman is a phenomenon. She was always a complete singer and when the spotlight comes on she is ready: a polished diamond.”7 Never having known stage fright, Beverly was unusually relaxed before a per- formance. She would typically arrive at the theater at 5:30, eager for the 8:00 626 beth hart

Already becoming a legend—Sills at three. (From Sills family album.) curtain, and once she had walked across the sets and checked her props, she spent the time with friends and colleagues who stopped by her dressing room to chat, enjoy a good time, even drop oV their dogs. Her way of warming up was to transform her dressing room into a haven of hospitality and engagement with others. Beverly says that she loves being onstage: “Everything sparkles, I glow. I’m happy . . . greedy for those three hours. They’re hours of pure joy.” Coming back to the opera stage after her children’s tragedies and singing for the joy of it, she found even greater freedom to sing with her whole being—“it just poured out of me.”8 Reviewing Sills in recital, critics have praised her musicality and struggled to define her special brand of presence: the projection of her enchanting person- ality, her persuasive charm, a remarkably gracious response to audiences, and how, more than any living singer, she understands the pure joy of singing. They praised her courage, a willingness to risk singing the long legato line on a sin- gle breath, pianissimos that leapt into the stratosphere, and the eVect of such accomplishments on the audience. Beverly’s mother saw all of this in the most fundamental light: “What Beverly has,” she said, “is the insides of a person.”9 That perhaps cuts to the heart of the matter. atribute to beverly sills 627

Insides and Outsides

A person with insides has a core, an individuality, a character, the full quota of human feeling suYciently undefended to be accessible, vividly felt, and expressed. A person with insides holds cherished aspects of love objects (e.g., parents, significant others, beloved arias) in heart and mind as internal presences, identi- fications that motivate, sustain, and reach out, connecting to others and mak- ing meaning. A person’s insides deepen when one has come to grips with life’s tragic and ironic aspects and has all that it takes to reconcile them with the more youthful optimistic and romantic visions. Beverly’s deep and early identification with her mother and her mother’s pas- sion for opera began the story as we know it. One’s first memory is always a key to the soul. Beverly’s was of her mother cranking up the Victrola to play Galli- Curci arias. Having absorbed them from the cradle, somewhere between infancy and her seventh birthday, she fell in love and memorized all twenty-two, mim- icking the Italian, fearlessly singing the ornate cadenzas and embellishments. Already at one with herself at age three, she began her nine-year career as a reg- ular on radio weeklies, endearing herself to a nation with her high notes and uninhibited charm and chatter. It was little Beverly Sills who made the Rinso White soap commercial so popular that many people still remember it. Recognizing her child’s gifts—at the very least a remarkable intelligence, pas- sion, and musicality—Mrs. Silverman took her seven-year-old to audition for Estelle Liebling, who had worked with many important singers, including Galli- Curci. Their relationship would aVect Beverly so profoundly that she said that 75 percent of who she is came from her family, the other 25 percent from Miss Liebling. At seven, Beverly already had vision and a remarkable work ethic. See- ing Lily Pons in Lakmé at the Met, she saw herself on that stage one day. With that in mind she studied French, Italian, and piano and by the time she was fifteen had memorized thirty operas—not just her part, all the parts. Miss Liebling invited her to dinner parties at her home with opera legends such as Maria Jeritza, Grace Moore, and Lauritz Melchior. She introduced her to Bruno Walter and Igor Stravinsky, opening her to a whole world of ideas and ways of thinking and being. Beverly’s two older brothers were early and lasting sources of security. As kids, they looked after her and took her everywhere; their father insisted upon that. Beverly sat between them at the dinner table playing a wise-cracking pacifier, smoothing over their fights, no doubt honing her irrepressible wit. She had the security that comes from internalizing a loving parental relationship, a marriage she hoped to re-find for herself. As if still moved and mystified by it, she tells of how much her father loved her mother—he worshipped her. When she entered the room wearing a new dress, his expression was simply unbe- lievable! “Your mother is the most beautiful woman in the world,” he would pronounce; his children knew there could be no doubt about it.10 Beverly says that if she has a reputation for being cheerful and looking on the bright side, 628 beth hart she learned it from mama, a “great soother of fears and insecurities.11 She inter- nalized her father’s drive, high standards, sense of purpose, and work ethic, qualities that have been a great boon to the world of opera. Beverly had a mind of her own, tough enough to go head to head with her father, whose opposition to her singing career proved to be a mountain she could not move. Her mother, however, could move her husband to do any- thing. With her mother’s support Beverly dropped out of Erasmus Hall High School at fifteen to enroll in the Professional Children’s School and tour with J. J. Schubert, singing Gilbert and Sullivan billed as the “youngest prima donna in captivity.” At nineteen, under the tutelage of Met stage manager Désiré Defrère, she toured with the Charles Wagner Company, traveling the country by bus singing sixty-three Micaëlas in sixty-three one-night stands the first season and, in the second, fifty-four Violettas in sixty-three days. Defrère predicted she would become the greatest Violetta of her generation. Performing on a new stage in a new town, winning over a new audience every night, she was already a trouper who became known throughout her career for singing through bad colds and high temperatures, for jumping in at the last minute to save a performance, for bypassing a normal recovery period after surgery so as to prove to us and her- self that she wasn’t dead. She could wing it, improvise, create, surprise, and infuse every performance with something new. When she was twenty, as she puts it, “before I got going on anything—” her father died of lung cancer.12 At the time she was singing on a cruise ship to South America. Not wanting Beverly to see her father waste away, her family had never told her the truth about his condition and had encouraged her to go. Although she never blamed them for the concealment and tried to understand their reasons, her guilt at having left her father’s side when he was so ill was enduring. As fraught and complex as this relationship was, without Papa Bev- erly felt her very foundation had been ripped from under her and beneath it there was nothing. Whether because of grief, guilt, to honor her father’s wishes, or whatever else may have weighed so heavily upon her, she no longer wanted to sing. It took Miss Liebling’s encouragement to restore her confidence and revive her passion. Several anecdotes from her memoirs tell of encounters with men in a posi- tion to help launch her career. When she was twenty-four, Gaetano Merola, director of the San Francisco Opera, signed Beverly for the full run of the fall season, inviting her to stay at his house. She arrived to find him laid out in a coYn, having died the night before while conducting a performance of Madama Butterfly. His assistant Kurt Adler jumped into the breach and asked Beverly one night to stand in for one of the Valkyries. During the performance her helmet fell oV, and without thinking, she stepped out of place to retrieve it, evoking laughter and applause from the audience. Adler bellowed, “Sills, are you drunk!” Already bothered because she had never thought to try on the hel- met and because her stage savvy had abandoned her during a performance, she atribute to beverly sills 629 thought, “You can take the girl out of Brooklyn, but you can’t take Brooklyn out of the girl,” not saying whether it was pride in her Brooklyn pluck or vul- nerability to a diYcult father figure that reached a heady pitch when she told Adler to “drop dead.” It was a tough break. Although she had sung a success- ful Donna Anna in Don Giovanni and Elena in Mefistofele, her aYliation with the San Francisco Opera was put on hold for seventeen years, to be mediated by a fan. Following her first encore at a concert in San Francisco, a man in the audi- ence called out, “When are we going to get her in the opera, Kurt?” From his seat in the audience, Kurt Adler yelled back, “Next season.” The man said, “We want Manon.” Kurt looked to the stage and shouted, “Will you do Manon?” Sills said “Yes,” and the audience gave them a standing ovation. When she returned to the San Francisco Opera, the helmet, her name still on it, was in her dressing room filled with orchids, a bottle of wine, and a note that said, “Welcome Home.”13 It is a well-known absurdity that after auditioning for the New York City Opera at least five times, Beverly was told she had a phenomenal voice, but no personality! Thinking she had been too demure (as her father may have wished), she arrived at her next audition dressed to kill and announced to the director, Dr. Joseph Rosenstock, that since he had heard her entire repertory, she would sing someone else’s: “La Mama norta” from Andrea Chénier. She won him over with her daring and made her City Opera debut in 1955 as Rosalinda—full of personality. By January 1958, Douglas Moore, the composer, and Emerson Buckley, the conductor, had auditioned over a hundred sopranos to sing the title role in The Ballad of Baby Doe, but none was right and time was of the essence; the opera was to open in three months. Julius Rudel urged Beverly to audition but she declined, protesting that she would be wasting her time since Buckley had already decided that she was too tall. “Bubbela,” Julius said soothingly, “let me at least send you some of the music. See what you think of it.”14 She arrived at her audition wearing spike heels, a towering white mink hat, and quite a chip on her shoulder. “Dr. Moore,” she said, “this is how big I am before I sing, and I’m going to be just as big when I finish. So if I’m too big for your Baby Doe, you can save my energy and your time by saying so right now.” As she looked at Moore for the first time, she said, she saw the kindest face she had ever seen, a perfect gentleman, quite taken aback by her aggressiveness. He walked up to the stage and said, “Miss Sills, you look just fine to me.” After she sang the Wil- low Song, he said, “Miss Sills, you are Baby Doe.”15 In 1955 a big source of security came into Beverly’s life. She was on tour with the New York City Opera in Cleveland when she met Peter Greenough. For both it was love at first sight. If love is the ability to find in another the means to repeat and repair the past, her own insight into the source of her attraction suggests something of what she sought to re-find and master. First, Peter was tall and handsome—the prince every little girl sees in her father; further, she 630 beth hart

“Miss Sills, you are Baby Doe.” (Copyright © Beth Bergman.) saw in him her father’s domineering, stubborn, utterly self-assured nature that her mother could always, but she could never, negotiate. Peter was a second chance to deal with a man as strong and as diYcult as her father. He was twelve years older and because he had never wanted for anything, she could also sym- bolically repair her father’s Depression Era hardships through him. The fami- lies on both sides, Jew and gentile, opposed the marriage—all but Beverly’s mother and Peter’s father. Beverly laughs telling the story of her mother’s reac- tion and endearing response to the news that she had finally met a man she could marry. “The only problem is,” she said, “he is still married to someone atribute to beverly sills 631 else, he isn’t Jewish, and he has three children.” With tears pouring down her cheeks, Mrs. Silverman exclaimed. “Oh why does everything happen to my baby girl!”16 At her small wedding, representing her father’s side of the family, Uncle Syd- ney sobbed inexplicably throughout. He had reached out to Beverly after her father’s death, taking her to dinner several times a week, but after she returned from her honeymoon, he withdrew his aVection, apparently feeling diminished by her love for Peter. A year later he jumped to his death from the window of his law oYce; Beverly was not allowed to see his suicide note. Nothing was easy for Beverly and Peter when they settled in Cleveland with his daughters, quite unprepared to encounter virulent anti-Semitism and scorn for Peter’s divorce and successful custody suit. The chance to return to New York to play Baby Doe provided a welcome reprieve from the hostile atmo- sphere and a chance for Beverly to portray a character in a new opera that would forever be associated with her name. She looked the part of this exquisitely fem- inine woman named by the miners for her soft blonde hair, known to them for having taken over her husband’s mine when he became depressed, working in it, managing it, making it a success, then leaving him when he took to drink. Baby Doe was in the bloom of youth when she arrived in Leadville, Col- orado, attracting the attention of the wealthy silver miner Horace Tabor, thirty years her senior. Sills’s lilting soprano, perfect diction, and personal and vocal charm made a striking impression, as did her depiction of Baby’s character, not as the fortune seeker some others have portrayed, but as she is described in word and music. Beginning with the melancholy “Willow Song,” she etched Baby Doe’s gentle romantic soul in floating pianissimos and lustrous arching phrases; in tense encounters with Augusta Tabor she revealed Baby’s substance and conflicts; in the final aria, sung to her dying husband, she moved the audience to tears. “There was never a moment during those performances when I didn’t believe that he [Walter Cassel] was Horace Tabor,” Sills said, “and each time he died in my arms, he would look up to me and sing, ‘You were always the real thing Baby’ and I would sing in reply, ‘Hush, close your eyes. Rest.’ Then I would take him in my arms and bawl like a baby.”17 She said that the experience stayed with her long after she left the opera house. For one who never had the chance to say goodbye to her father, the scene was a chance to work through her sudden traumatic loss. Horace wanted Baby Doe by his side and cherished her tears; and, as he died in her arms, she sang a moving farewell, both lullaby and tribute to a great and sustaining love. To the extent that one can rework life’s hot crucibles through music and theater, this scene oVered such an opportunity. Beverly cites Baby Doe’s philosophy, “to live and let live,” as the key to her character. Mr. Silverman never knew of his daughter’s success and had never come to terms with her musical career. For a while he refused to speak to her. Fully believing that he knew what was best for his daughter, he couldn’t “let 632 beth hart live.” It was a mark of her psychological maturity that, despite such opposition, Beverly pursued her dream and became who and what she is. She had a con- siderable role model in her mother, who not only supported her but dared to defy her husband’s eVorts to shape the course of his daughter’s life. Mr. Silver- man wasn’t always resistant. When Beverly was sixteen, he surprised her by knocking on her dressing room door after a Merry Widow performance in Detroit. “You sang like an angel,” he said,18 giving her reason to believe that had he lived long enough to know of her triumphs, he would share in them. Her mother, who knew something about insides, claimed that he did, for when- ever she went to the theater, he sat beside her.19 Most opera heroines live and love beyond the space carved out for women by families and social institutions, and Baby Doe is no exception. She pleads with Augusta to understand that Horace is unconventional and must be free to follow his destiny. Beverly must have told herself this many times. Although she grew up in close proximity to two large extended families that embraced traditional European Jewish values, her life was quite diVerent from theirs. The experience of an early childhood radio career, her tours around the country in adolescence, and her relationship with Miss Liebling and her circle exposed her to an array of people who were unusual—worldly, many quite eccentric, with lifestyles and values and ways of being she had never known. With early child- hood identifications and family values juxtaposed to new, very diVerent in- fluences taken in from the wider world, it was her particularly complex devel- opmental task to try on what fit and to consolidate a new self-conceived individual identity. In the unconscious, there is no real forgiveness for “killing oV” a father’s influence, only opportunities for atonement. Yet this kind of separation from the past is essential to psychological maturity. Freud said that removal of parental authority is one of the most painful psychic achievements necessary for the attainment of selfhood and the progress of civilization.20 For those few who manage to carve out a unique identity, guilt is the price, reparation its partial atonement.21 Beverly is a rare, rock-solid person whose contributions to civi- lization are unique and abundant. Her understanding of the value of art is much like Lionel Trilling’s: “A primary function of art is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture . . . and permit him to stand beyond it in an auton- omy of perception and judgment.”22 Events in adulthood seldom have such a profound and pervasive impact as those tied to childhood and adolescence, but the handicaps of Beverly’s chil- dren, by her own account, transformed her, not only her worldview but her singing and her presence. While her core qualities—security, passion, intelli- gence, humor, dramatic instincts, her love of people and connection with them—were in evidence when she was three years old, certainly ripe by the time she sang Baby Doe, she emerged from the shock of having been tried so deeply by her children’s problems a deeper, sadder, taller person, and this change was reflected in everything she did. atribute to beverly sills 633

As many know, within the span of a few months, Beverly’s two-year-old daughter Meredith (MuVy) was diagnosed with profound hearing loss, and her infant son, Peter Buckeley (Bucky), with multiple handicaps that would make it necessary to institutionalize him. As parents inevitably do, Beverly asked, “What did I do wrong?” For a time she said, “I just walked through the streets asking myself in my despair, if there could possibly be anybody else who was having to suVer like me.”23 Having to suVer is the diYcult feeling that one is alone, singled out, believing for a time that such tragedy, instead of being imper- sonal and arbitrary, is somehow fated or deserved. Immersing herself in her children’s care and education, she thought that her own career was over—as her father may have wished, as she may have needed to deprive herself of something her children could never have. Comparing the loss of her father and her sorrows over her children, Beverly said, “I’d never really known any misery except the death of my father, but death is so final, you know there will come a day when you wake up and the pain will be a little less intense, you’ll begin to adjust to the loss. But there’s a kind of shattering that never goes away. I think mine won’t ever. It’s always with me. There’s never a moment that I’m not aware that there’s something wrong . . . it sits on you for- ever.”24 The guilt associated with her father’s death, perhaps with Sydney’s, and certainly with her children’s problems would cause one either to crumble or to find a way to bear the grief and transcend it. Normal feelings of having been ripped apart are exacerbated by irrational thoughts of being lost from grace, betrayed, somehow to blame—the list is infinite. Such thoughts arise from the unconscious where we all feel like unrepentant sinners and secret murderers; and while they can never be entirely silenced, they can be used and transformed. Beverly emerged more united, alive to her senses and sensuality, freer to com- municate her pain and joy, to imbue her characters with layers of meaning, with soul and humanity. One thing a person can do with an injury that never heals is to sublimate it through constructive activity and to repair it by making things better for others. Beverly found within herself an outward-looking love that moved her to share her personal experience and help raise over eighty million dollars for the March of Dimes, drawing the public’s attention to the special needs of our nation’s children. Upon returning to the stage, she found it heal- ing to lose herself in another person’s life and to discover in herself a new depth and maturity, even serenity. She discovered that she needed to sing and was no longer concerned about whether the public loved her. “It was more important for me to love them,” she said, “and feeling that way turns your whole life around: Living becomes the act of giving and satisfaction the joyful act of singing itself.”25 This is quite a wonderful understanding of the workings of the reparative process and the dynamics of sublimation—the transformation of pain into beauty, the unbearable into the sublime. She came back with a powerfully moving Louise and Marguerite, a memo- rable Donna Anna, and a wonderful portrayal of all three incarnations of Woman in The Tales of HoVmann to Norman Treigle’s three villains. She and 634 beth hart

Sills as Cleopatra, astonishing the international press. (Copyright © Beth Bergman.)

Treigle were such extraordinary performers, whatever they did together bris- tled with excitement. Sills was creating a stir and in a few years everyone, even those without the slightest interest in opera, would know who she was. Cleopatra proved the turning point that skyrocketed Beverly Sills to inter- national stardom virtually overnight. This time the fates were on her side. The 1966 opening of the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center with Samuel Bar- ber’s Anthony and Cleopatra was surrounded by much fanfare, bringing throngs atribute to beverly sills 635 of international critics to town. When things did not go well at the Met, the critics walked across the plaza to see what was transpiring at the State Theater. It was Tito Capobianco’s magnificent production of Giulio Cesare. What they saw astonished them. In a series of da capo arias, Sills brought her unique vocal gifts and her insides to bear on the young queen’s kaleidoscopic personality in all its infinite variety: her daring and impish wit, her grief, her unfaltering hope and courage, her inim- itable charm and feminine allure. Held captive by her ruthless brother who derides her for competing in a man’s world, the queen displays her unflinching spirit in a blistering retort (“Non disperar”), telling him in bright coloratura that he will find love only by looking in the mirror. In “Piangero la sorte mia” the multihued sublimity of her pathos and resounding declamation move Caesar to bind him- self to her cause. Cleopatra’s arias build upon one another, each revealing diVer- ent facets of her character and of Sills’s dramatic and musical virtuosity, such that each time she appeared onstage she created a stir; one could feel the audience’s state of rapt anticipation. Knowing that she loves Caesar, Cleopatra decides to conquer. In “V’adoro pupille” she bathes the senses with such bold and exquisite seductiveness he is awed. Leading into their duet, the nuance in her caressingly tender “Caro” echoed by Treigle’s “Bella” expresses, in a single word, the wonder Caesar and Cleopatra felt in their love for one another. Cleopatra’s nearly suici- dal grief when Caesar risks death could not have been more aVectingly conveyed than by Sills’s haunting pianissimos in “Se pieta,” and from the stage, she felt the response: “An absolute hush came over the audience,” she said, “people were hang- ing on every note and when the curtain came down the death-like silence con- tinued—and then a roar went through the house the likes of which I had never heard. I was a little stunned by it.” Sills explains that she sang “Piangero” and “Se pieta” fil di voce, “high and soft and slowly, as if you are not breathing”—a feat for which she became renowned.26 She sang her last aria, a triumphant “Da tem- peste,” at lightning speed and made it all seem eVortless.

Super Sills

An avalanche of invitations to sing all over the world arrived in her mailbox the next week. When she sang Pamira in Rossini’s L’assedio di Corinto at La Scala, at the end of the dress rehearsal the orchestra gave her a standing ovation. A live recording captures the excitement of that event. Her blazing coloratura and transcendent rendering of Rossini’s long legato lines drove the ecstatic audi- ence to a protracted roar after her every appearance. Sills hit other major inter- national opera houses with equal success, but however great the demand for her to sing around the globe, her husband and children were home, and as of 1968 that was in New York and where she wanted to be. She went on to cut to the core of many of opera’s women, making each fas- cinating. Cleopatra and Queen Elizabeth are two of the most powerful women 636 beth hart in history, Manon and Violetta are two of the most complex and psychologi- cally transforming. Her Lucia is a study in dissociative madness, teeming with insights about the lure and course of psychological derangement. Her comic characters are fun-loving women of unqualified optimism for whom all suVer- ing can be undone, all obstacles to happiness toppled with a good song and plenty of charm. It is not only that Sills’s characterizations are psychologically right, she listens intently to others on stage and never loses sight of the momen- tous implication of events her characters face or the moral and emotional sig- nificance of their situation.

Violetta

One role I saw Sills do in 1958 and throughout her career was Violetta. Beverly does not mention it as a signature role, but I will take the liberty. She was always a fascinating Violetta, uniquely able to capture the life and soul of the real-life courtesan, Marie Du Plessis. Having survived childhood sexual abuse, poverty, and abandonment to become a Paris icon and the most celebrated courtesan of her day, Du Plessis knew something about the absurdities of human existence. Violetta, like Du Plessis, knew she was loved—in her place—and she accepted the limitations society placed on her for living outside of the law; yet, intrigu- ingly, nearing the end of her days, Violetta gives in to the temptation to believe that her suVering, indeed her way of life and impending death, could be undone. Sills portrays Violetta’s transformation from an ironic to a romantic vision of life—a quest for love and absolution—in the most moving, dramat- ically convincing way. Franz Liszt said of Marie Du Plessis, “She was the most complete incarna- tion of woman kind that has ever existed.”27 He was just one of a procession of extraordinary men haunted by this woman’s consumption, her captivating con- versation, and soulful beauty. Another was Alexander Dumas fils, whose novel about his aVair with her was later made into the play that inspired Verdi. Du Plessis has been reincarnated onstage, in film, and in ballet, played by the great Eleanor Duse, Sara Bernhardt, Greta Garbo, and Margo Fonteyn. Her great- est and most enduring incarnation, as Violetta Valéry, deserves no less talent, no less probing dramatic, emotional, and musical intelligence to capture this woman’s appeal and psychological complexity. Sills’s bright coloratura, infectious smile, exuberance, and charisma easily establish the act 1 courtesan’s charm, her sense of being at one with herself and at the top of her world. But from the moment Gaston tells her of Alfredo’s pas- sion, Sills already begins to change and illuminate the moment-by-moment intricacies of Violetta’s conflict between what she knows to be true of her place and what she increasingly longs to believe. She protects the lovesick Alfredo when she tells him in bouncing coloratura, with a slightly ironic smile, that she can’t give or bear such heroic love—friendship she can oVer. atribute to beverly sills 637

Violetta yearns to believe in Alfredo’s love. (Copyright © Beth Bergman.)

But as he persists, we see how moved Violetta becomes, gazing at him as he professes his love, gauging his sincerity, looking away, distressed, searching her soul, taking him in for a moment, almost swooning, trembling from a fever she has never known—then regaining her composure and telling him to forget her, ultimately inviting him to return the next day. In “È strano,” often sung with her back to the audience as her eyes follow him out the door, Sills conveys the depth of her distress in her posture alone. Expressions of terrible doubt alter- nate with those of poignant yearning as she considers Alfredo’s promise to watch over her, to protect and love her. The story follows that of Du Plessis’s eVect upon Dumas fils, who had also lost his mother and was fixated on rec- onciling the split representation of Woman that exists in the masculine uncon- scious from an early age: the redemptive angel mother the little boy imagines to be his alone and the sexual mother who betrayed him by sleeping with his father. As a courtesan with a saintly soul, Violetta embodies these representa- tions, and worldly wise as she is, she desperately wants to believe in this man. “Ah fors’è lui” opens her deeply moving internal encounter with the forsaken dreams of the child she was, who, having long ago given up on illusions of love, is suddenly tempted to risk everything for it. Coming from a place of timeless- ness in which the past infiltrates and pervades the present, her voice is deeply nostalgic. Suddenly triumphing over the lure of illusion, she spins around joy- ously and lifts a glass to the audience, oVering a toast (“Sempre libera”) to a life of pleasure, by which she means the only life a doomed woman can realistically expect to have. Yet Alfredo’s voice haunts her and she sighs, aching to believe. Again she 638 beth hart

Germont (William Walker) tells a frightened Violetta that he has a daughter. (Copyright © Beth Bergman.) regains her composure. Through the exaltation of her “Sempre libera” set against her anguish and desire, the dread of conceding to a longing that will be her undoing, the painful possibility that she will pass up what may be a last chance to fulfill a childhood dream, Sills depicts the paradoxes and uncertain- ties, the inescapable perils of human need, choice, and action in a way no other Violetta approaches. Violetta is content in act 2, and she is loved. As one might have expected, it is she who watches over and protects her lover who so wants a mother that he does not even seem to know he is being supported. In her great and extended duet with Germont, Sills plays out the dynamics of Violetta’s need for another kind of love—the love of a respectable father. She tells Germont that she has changed, that Alfredo’s love has redeemed her, but her voice is rapturous and pleading rather like a prayer, a revelation of an unfulfilled need burning in her gut, a need for his blessing. When Germont praises her nobility, she opens her arms saying just as rapturously, “How sweet your voice sounds now,” again confessing a need so powerful it forebodes the outcome of this encounter. Shov- ing his hand away from hers, she vacillates, repelling him, siding with him; but she is no longer able to conjure the pride and indignation she felt, or at least displayed, when Germont walked in the door. When Germont tells her that he has a daughter and she must leave Alfredo forever, Sills, half whimpering then exploding with grief, implores him. In a violent pleading protest, she reels toward, away from, around him, her “No atribute to beverly sills 639 giammai, non sapete” (“Don’t you know he loves me . . . he promised me . . . I am ill . . . I shall die!”) is so moving that any man but this righteous bour- geois father might take heart, perhaps even question his motives and the world he represents. When Germont again touches her hand, momentarily she ac- cepts, then pushes it away, hating his gratitude, hating her need for it. He goes for the kill, telling her what she has always known: no family will ever accept her. Sills’s “È vero” and transformation of her grief into numbed sacrifice are unsurpassed. It is not only the arsenal of vocal colors and the flawless rhythm and breath support she brings to the long legato line that make her rendering of “Dite alla giovane” incomparably aVecting; it is her exquisite understanding and ability to convey the dynamics at play throughout this scene. At the price of a shortened miserable life, Violetta concedes to Germont; the bonus to her superego is having become respectable in his eyes. Beverly’s arguments with her own father, while not about virgins and whores, were nonetheless about his split representation of Woman. To Mr. Silverman, his daughter’s appearance as a “singing showgirl with false eyelashes” was a transgression, a departure from her role as stellar student and his vision of her as wife and mother. After her second Schubert tour in which she sang musical comedy, he told her that she was a great disappointment to him. Beverly some- times felt that she had betrayed her father by pursuing her dream. According to her extended family, she had dishonored him by marrying a non-Jew. She must know a great deal about longing for a father’s approval, at least as much as she knows about how painful it can be to oppose a father’s authority in order to become one’s own person. Violetta sacrifices her dream and concedes to Germont. At once defeated and fulfilled, she has agreed to become the consoling angel of his family, its redeemer and preserver of bourgeois respectability. Sills’s expression takes on a noble aspect even as she swoons, about to faint. As her E minor sacrifice bright- ens to E major, she asks him to embrace her as a daughter; it will give her the strength to leave his son, who will be heartbroken. Sobbing as she sits at her desk writing to Alfredo when he bounds through the door, Sills depicts Vio- letta’s anguish in hysterical pleas for his love and assurances of her own, promis- ing she will always be near him among the flowers. The scene is a thoroughly wrenching experience, climaxing with the devastating outpouring “Amami Alfredo, amami, quant io t’amo. Addio!” Little wonder that in her 1970 Naples debut she was called back onstage before the act ended to receive the thunder- ous applause. Although she has sung Violetta over three hundred times, Beverly actually did very few with New York City Opera. It was one of my great frustrations that sent me to Boston (1972), to Wolf Trap, and to the Met (1976) to recapture the satisfaction of the few Violettas I heard her sing at City Opera in the late 1950s and in 1963. One unforgettable evening in 1974, I arrived at the State The- ater to see Medea, when the house lights dimmed and Rudel, announcing its cancellation, said that Beverly Sills, on very short notice, had made herself avail- 640 beth hart able to sing La Traviata. I was not the only one in the audience who was ec- static. With no rehearsal, never having seen the production, never having sung it with Rudel, Sills created tremendous excitement onstage and oV. Events had unfolded in act 1 and thus far in act 2 without a hitch, without a clue that Sills was winging it; the rapport she had with the chorus and princi- pals was uncanny. But after Alfredo tosses his winnings at her feet and she col- lapses to the floor in a faint, the tension in the theater was perceptible. That she was acting was not evident until she stood in time to weave her way through the stunned crowd, her voice seraphic, soaring above the chorus as she oVers Alfredo her redemptive love, never for a moment taking her eyes oV him—the eVect was overwhelming. During intermission the audience talked about noth- ing but her performance; strangers spoke to each other, bonded in a thrilling shared experience. That was not unusual at City Opera during the Sills years. Sills was tremendous in act 3. Her powerful “Addio del passato,” Violetta’s plea for her Heavenly Father to smile upon and forgive della traviata, moved the audience to tears. In her dying vision of herself among the angels watching over Alfredo and his future wife, she conveys Violetta’s aching need to become not only the angel daughter of a respectable family but a protective Madonna mother to Alfredo. She also conveys the depth of Violetta’s love that makes her the only truly decent character in this triad, the only one who cares about how her actions aVect everyone else. At the end the audience burst its seams, scream- ing, whistling, stamping, weeping, and hooting as confetti flowed from the bal- conies, covering the evening’s superstar. Some of the excitement came from witnessing a spontaneous performance but nothing can be taken away from the enchantment of such a probing and complete portrayal of Violetta thrillingly sung.

Manon

Beverly has modestly said that if she is remembered for anything, it will be for her Manon. Coached in the role in 1953 by Rosa Ponselle, who conceived of Manon as a slut, the young Sills resisted, argued, and ultimately created Manon in the way she uniquely understood her many facets and transformations. We meet Manon, dizzy with excitement as she awaits her cousin at a courtyard in Amiens. While not quite oblivious to her cousin’s uncouth nature, she never- theless openheartedly tells him of her intoxicated feelings, laughing, twirling joyfully—her flights of fancy and outbursts of passion expressed in soaring cadenzas mirroring Manon’s wish to have wings and fly to paradise. Far from a slut, this Manon is a girl whose passions have nowhere to go, who gazes at the ladies in fancy dresses with such yearning to know what a woman is that one wants to protect and mother her, let her try on grown-up clothes and grown-up roles. Sills draws us to Manon’s innocence and confusion about her sexuality and her desire, so troublesome to others that she is being sent to a atribute to beverly sills 641

Sills’s Manon is particularly guilty and deeply conflicted. (Copyright © Beth Bergman.)

convent. Like Des Grieux (like Marie Du Plessis and Dumas fils), she has no mother. Guilty about her giddiness, she tries to subdue it, but she doesn’t know why and whirls about, embracing the world she longs to experience. In one of opera’s most evocative encounter scenes, the handsome young Chevalier Des Grieux sees Manon sitting on a swing, and in spoken dialogue rhapsodizes over her beauty. Sills beams, pleased to tell Manon’s story. He promises to rescue her and they hop in Guillot’s coach and head for Paris, where Manon loves and betrays that love, caving in to her cousin and his cronies who exploit her. In her farewell to life with Des Grieux (“Adieu notre petite table”) Sills kneels as if in prayer, caressing their little table, weeping, guilty for what she is going to do, sincerely sorry for her lover, feeling unworthy of his love. Not a slut, not just an innocent betrayed, this Manon is deeply conflicted. Her Gavotte (“Profitons bien de la jeunesse”), the entire Cours-la-Reine scene, is more than a coloratura showpiece. No longer the whimsical girl, Sills plays the sophisticate presiding over an admiring crowd, queenly and a bit detached, for she has lost not only her lover but something precious in herself. Her magnificent cadenzas and knowing worldly wise demeanor give way to anxious queries when she overhears Des Grieux’s father say that his son is enter- ing the priesthood. So suddenly the life she is living is shorn of its allure, and she rushes to St. Sulpice to win him back. Sills’s seduction scene is terrifically exciting, a tour de force that had people on the edge of their seats and always brought down the house. Contrite, beg- ging his forgiveness, apologizing feverishly for her cruelty, Sills takes a long 642 beth hart glance and, seeing that he is wavering, knows what to do. With her hands caress- ing his body, her eyes sparkling through tears, she reminds him of what they had and lost: Is this no longer my hand pressing yours? Is this no longer my voice? Am I no longer myself? Remember! Look at me! Am I no longer Manon? I love you. I will not leave you here. Come! Harold Schonberg wrote that Sills’s insinuating, caressing “m’ai-je plus mon nom? Ah, regarde-moi was enough to make any man sigh for a lost youth. Sexy? My, my!”28 The applause went on as if it were the final curtain. Acknowledging the clamor, Beverly, grin- ning and bobbing her head in her characteristic way, seemed to be saying that she too savored the moment. She describes how this Manon began at New York City Opera. In rehearsal she and Julius had a rare but vehement argument about the fast tempo he set for the St. Sulpice scene; it didn’t work for her sensual way of doing it, and in per- formance she began to lisp. Thinking at first it was her way of paying him back, Rudel knew otherwise when he looked up at her and saw that she was mortified and couldn’t stop it. As a toothless six-year-old who endeared radio audiences with her engaging chatter and toothy diction, she was never self-conscious about her lisp. However, it continued beyond the time her teeth grew in and had to be corrected by elocution lessons. Beverly says that whenever she is exhausted or terribly upset it might recur. To argue vehemently with Julius about such an important scene in such a major role when they almost always agreed on matters of artistic taste seemed more than she could bear. She may have feared that going head to head might, as with her father, get her nowhere. Just as importantly, Rudel’s opinion naturally meant something to her. She remembers his first compliment (“You sang like a goddamn goddess”) after a performance of Donna Anna and cites others in her memoirs. One cannot for- get how much the lisping six-year-old aimed to please and wished her father could have been more approving of her radio engagements (in a sense, her seduction of the public). By opposing her and rushing through this sexy scene, robbing it of its sensuousness, Julius may have seemed like her disapproving father and the lisp a way to revert to the innocent pre-sexual child. Perhaps because she plays a particularly conflicted Manon, Beverly may have identified with Manon’s guilt, the feeling that comes over her when she arrives at St. Sulpice and asks her Almighty Father to forgive her for wanting what she wants, for what she has become. These are my associations, but as with all symptoms, many thoughts, con- scious and unconscious, and many experiences, past and present, converge to produce something like a lisp and make something like an argument with Rudel such a harrowing experience. He was in fact her friend, the conductor about whom she said, they were so attuned it was as if they were on a wavelength all their own. “Sometimes when I was tired, I’d look down at the podium and Julius would smile at me and nod his head reassuringly and I’d know he was ready to provide me with whatever I needed. Just the way he would say, ‘Is everything all right?’ was tremendously comforting.”29 atribute to beverly sills 643

Bel Canto Beverly

After Manon, Sills portrayed many bel canto heroines, bringing to them a dra- matic credibility that most exponents of the style do not; she made them liv- ing, convincing characters. Perfectly suited to her voice, her radiant Elvira was graced by her enchanting characterization and eVortless delivery. Queen Eliz- abeth, which she considers her greatest artistic challenge, electrifies. It was impossible to take one’s eyes oV the suVering, commanding, rampaging, heart- broken queen—a powerhouse of a woman broken by love. Sills’s every gesture, expression, and tone were laden with meaning. Even when she was silent, sit- ting on the throne awaiting Robert’s verdict, she told a compelling story in body language alone. Her Lucia is uncommonly gentle, her introverted incipient madness made clear from the start as she fixes on the blood-red fountain and the ghost of the murdered girl who beckons her to her dreadful fate. Sills startles, making us aware of her vision, describing the specter on the fountain’s edge, the mystery and appeal of the supernatural world she already inhabits. Calmly she tells of how the woman speaks to her, calls to her, then mysteriously, frightfully, in ascending phrases and a liquid descending scale, she relates how she vanishes into the limpid water turned red with blood. Edgardo is the light of her day, she declaims, telling us she will not give in to her brother’s schemes, even though he bullies and shames her into what he hopes will be eternal submis- sion. When he curses her, Lucia lifts her eyes to the vast expanse that alone can end her misery and unite her with her beloved. In her mad scene, fully disori- ented in time and place and hallucinating her desire, Sills’s voice is disembod- ied until she sings the only melody she can keep straight, that of her pledge to Edgardo. In a scramble of brilliant, wild coloratura she depicts the final stages of Lucia’s crumbling psyche in a portrayal that is engrossing, psychologically true, convincing, and beautifully sung. John Steane says that her Lucia presents the most detailed psychological study on record.30 Beverly injects her own personality into her comic roles, improvising, embell- ishing, making them more than they are. Her Marie, Rosina, Norina, and Fiorella brought out aspects of her talent that delighted audiences. They were full of mischief, sparkle, and infectious fun, and at times they became the Bev- erly we all love, inviting us to join in.31 Each was a tribute to her comedic artistry and inimitable rapport with audiences. I love her zany Rosalinda, her irreverent Queen of Shemakha, and Hanna Glawari’s tender sensuality when she comes onstage to strains of the “Merry Widow Waltz” to put an end to Count Danilo’s misery and tell him that she loves him, oh, so much. The Siege of Corinth was the vehicle for Beverly’s long overdue Met debut, and it was an occasion no one wanted to miss; seven thousand people begging for tickets had to be turned away. Schuyler Chapin says that more has been writ- ten about the event than anything in Met history.32 The premiere benefit audi- ence, in a celebratory mood, was restless for Sills to step onto the stage and 644 beth hart

In body language alone, Sills tells a compelling story as Queen Elizabeth (Roberto Devereux). (Copyright © Beth Bergman.) greeted her in the middle of a scene with such an ovation that tears came to her eyes and she had to step upstage to compose herself. At the end there was an eighteen-minute uproar with tears and joy enough to document America’s love aVair with its reigning diva. After a long and emotional evening followed by an Opera Guild party, the next morning Beverly was back on that stage—doing the soft shoe with Danny Kaye for a television special for children. Chapin says atribute to beverly sills 645

Lucia lifts her eyes to the vast expanse that alone can end her misery. (Copyright © Beth Bergman.) she did it as a last minute favor for him and for the Met,33 but Beverly, absorbed in this role as in any other, looked as though nothing could have made her hap- pier than bringing opera to her young audience with her good friend, big fan, and fellow Brooklynite, Danny Kaye. Beverly retired from the stage before the public was ready to let her go. The end was Menotti’s Juana la Loca, which the composer had written in honor of 646 beth hart

As absorbed in this role as any other, Sills brings opera to children with her buddy Danny Kaye. (Copyright © Beth Bergman.) her fiftieth birthday. It was still unfinished by the time of its premiere, but she and Tito Capobianco moved the mad scene to the beginning and wrote dia- logue for the opera’s dramatic end. It worked beautifully, and Beverly gave an unforgettable performance as the tormented Juana, imprisoned by her husband and son to prevent her from claiming the Spanish throne that was rightfully her own. It was her last performance on the stage of New York State Theater with a company that had been her home base for twenty-five years. Because City Opera is a repertory company, where one could sometimes see Beverly two or three times a week in diVerent productions, when she retired, it left a big hole. “It’s very diYcult to know when to quit,” Beverly said. “It’s like watching yourself get a new wrinkle everyday and thinking that this is the last one until finally you shriek, ‘My God’ and say ‘That’s it! Enough.’ For someone who lived her whole life in the public eye, it is not easy to give it up. It gets in your blood atribute to beverly sills 647 and when the cheering stops, I will certainly miss it.” Her friends told her she shouldn’t stop, and so did her mother. But her mind was made up—enough is enough! “To go on past the point where I think I should would break my own heart. I think my voice has served me well and I’d like to put it to bed . . . qui- etly and with pride.”34 Beverly did not want to make compromises onstage or limit her repertory. “I had too much common sense, too much pride for that. I didn’t stay too long at the fair.”35

Sills the Impresario

It was early in 1979, while in transition to director of the New York City Opera Company, that Beverly tapped my boyfriend and me on the shoulder during an intermission and invited us to join Camerata, an opera guild for people in their twenties and thirties. She established it as part of her plan to involve young people in opera, to get them together with the company playing baseball, attending aVordable gala balls, working telethons, and much else. While I thought that sitting in a room with Beverly Sills working a telethon might be intimidating, it was far from that. I recently discovered that the sister of one of my clinical psychology doctoral students works with Beverly at the Met today. She told me what that was like: “Despite her stature,” she said, “Beverly is com- pletely grounded. She has a talent for making people feel important. Because she is so interested in what you have to say and takes it to heart, we confide in her as if we had always known her. Because she is so comfortable with who she is, we are drawn to her and want to have that special contagious something and we want to give something back. Beverly really transcends her talent. It’s much more about the person she is.” What she said struck me as an interpersonal par- allel to how Beverly aVects an audience from the stage—the same reciprocity, warmth, relatedness, and contagious something leap out and draw people to her. That people want to give back to Beverly Sills is part of what makes her the best fundraiser on the planet. When she writes a letter asking for money, it is not something to throw away; it is discussed on the Internet; people want to rally out of respect and gratitude for all she has done. Beverly learned how much people want to give back when she was a little girl. Having told Major Bowes, the host of her radio weeklies, that she would like a sled, they poured in from devoted fans. On other occasions she mentioned that her mother wouldn’t let her have a long dress and how much she wanted a Mickey Mouse watch. Truck- loads came her way. Today when she meets with CEOs to ask for a million dol- lars, she takes them to the opera with her to see what their money can do, cre- ating a reciprocity that cultivates fans and friends. “She is an empire unto herself,” Mayor Koch said. “Nobody questions her. That is not because she makes them tremble, but because she tames them with her stature, good humor and disarming eVervescence. Everybody accedes—willingly, not morosely—to 648 beth hart her requests, which are not really requests at all. They’re orders from above.”36 I hadn’t attended more than two Camerata meetings when Martha Sykes, president of the Opera Guild, called to ask me to organize Beverly Sills’s com- pany farewell party to be held 2 April 1979 on the promenade of the State The- ater. I should get fine restaurants to donate food and plan for over a thousand (or was it two thousand?) people. I was in the middle of my doctoral disserta- tion and did not see how I could possibly do it, but there it was—a chance to give back. Contacting, by foot or by telephone, the owners and managers of every fine to fabulous restaurant in New York to ask for a donation of food became an education in Beverly’s reach and meaning to people. Everyone told me a story: what she said when they went backstage or wrote in reply to a fan letter, what opera or song they particularly loved, how funny she was clowning with Carol Burnett, how she delighted their kids cavorting with the Muppets. Many spoke of her courage in the face of tragedy and her work for the March of Dimes. It seemed that everyone knew and loved her. The party was a blur to me as I pored over lists of what food was to be picked up from which restaurant at what time and by whom. I do remember Beverly walking up to me and saying with a big smile, “Be sure to save some of the white chocolate mousse from the Palace for me!” It was funny; I had no idea how she knew what was coming much less what would prove to be the culinary spectacular of the party. At times while we were working in the caverns of the State Theater, strains of “Wien, Wien nur du allein” drew us down the corridor to find Bubbela and Chuyluss Darlink (as they called one another) teamed up for some musical fare. To us it was a gift. As if she didn’t have enough to do in a day, Beverly showed up at baseball games between the Camerata and the company and cheered for both teams. (Sam Ramey, by the way, is a great pitcher.) Singers and stagehands told many stories about working with Beverly, and it was clear that her ready smile, wit, and hard work meant something to everyone. Her first two years as director were diYcult. She says they were almost im- possible: “I never moved so fast, scrambled so much, worked so hard and felt less appreciated in my whole life. . . . There was a sense of ‘Who does she think she is running an opera company?’. . . There are people who hope I don’t suc- ceed, that I will take this company down the drain with me. I’m sorry these sen- timents exist. I’m not going down the drain and neither is the Company. I’ll withstand all the gossip and malice but I feel sorry for the people who spread it.”37 While it might be expected that envy would beleaguer a woman in a pow- erful position, for a beloved prima donna to suddenly become a target was painful, and Beverly spent many tearful nights making tough decisions that would enable her to direct the company without having to run an obstacle course. When she had realized that City Opera was six million dollars in debt, Peter advised her to put the company in Chapter 11 and resign. Not one to accept defeat, the intrepid director threw herself into fundraising, working eighteen- atribute to beverly sills 649 hour days, making countless speeches, radio, and television appearances, and having breakfast, lunch, and dinner with CEOs and potential patrons. In her first year as director she raised five million dollars. Creative solutions to the deficit arose out of dire necessity and Beverly’s ingenuity. To save the cost of shipping sets and costumes to the warehouse, she compressed City Opera’s two seasons into one extending from July through November. She approved clever down-to-earth advertisements, expanded the repertory, upgraded the artistic product, identified and nurtured new talent, and successfully negotiated with the unions, winning a one-year wage freeze. She accepted invitations to sit on prestigious corporate boards and cultivated relations with mayors and media luminaries. As part of her campaign to make opera accessible to the people, she introduced supertitles, fighting the elitists who insisted that they would dis- tract audiences from what was important. With the added titles, ticket sales soared, and as a result, she was able to cut prices by 25 percent. By 1986 City Opera was on firmer ground than it had ever enjoyed. All it took was a Her- culean eVort—and Beverly Sills. There was at least one time when she missed what she had left behind. Bev- erly opens her second autobiography with a moving account of her visit to the New Jersey warehouse where the sets and costumes were stored, including those of every opera she had sung in. What she felt walking across those sets— remembering where she had put notes she had written to herself and others in drawers and pockets of costumes, reading them, thinking of those perfor- mances, hearing the cheers—overcame her. She made this visit just two years into her directorship, two years of superhuman eVort and painful battles, suc- cess still more a lion-hearted determination than something yet achieved. For the first time in twenty-five years, it occurred to Beverly Sills that no one would ever again be shouting, “Brava diva.”38 From director of City Opera to chair of Lincoln Center (1994–2002) Bev- erly continued to be a vehement advocate and lobbyist for the arts. She devel- oped music programs for public school children and continued to extend clas- sical music to the largest possible audience. If people didn’t know her from opera, they knew her from television specials and talk shows, including her own: Lifestyles with Beverly (winner of four Emmys) and Skylines. She also won an Emmy for the BBC Profile in Music. She narrated the Philharmonic’s Young People Concerts, the PBS series In Performance at the White House, and much else. After eight years on the job and having raised seventy-five million dollars for Lincoln Center, she retired “to smell the roses,” but six months later she said she became allergic and needed new mountains to climb. She became chair of the board of the Metropolitan Opera, serving as a liaison between the Met man- agement and board, representing the artistic side of what an opera house does, making critical decisions that will include helping to choose Joseph Volpe’s replacement.39 She remains visible as a host and fundraiser and continues to use her knowledge of business and budgets and people to keep opera alive in a 650 beth hart diYcult post–9/11 world of economic decline, with a government that wants to further cut its meager support for PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Love of the World

When Beverly Sills retired from the stage, she felt she had sung every role she wanted to do with one exception: the Marschallin from Strauss and Hof- mannsthal’s Der Rosenkavalier. Sills as the Marschallin would be a pairing of two truly great women in opera who have much in common. People love them for sharing their private fears and feelings, for their spacious way of seeing and car- ing, and for the way they were able to rise above what seems unbearable in life and transform it into the sublime. In fateful moments both drew from their despair and found within themselves unknown depths that inspired people who suVered with them, rooted for them, and took heart from their courage. Hugo von Hofmannsthal created the figure of the Marschallin as one of his several female characters who transform into a higher, better self. Deeply con- cerned about Europe’s declining values at the turn of the century and people’s defenses against knowing it, Hofmannsthal believed that change depended on finding ways to help people become aware of who they are. He put his faith in the power of a woman’s love and in the power of opera. “Art is the signature of civilization,” Beverly once said. “It is through the arts that we have always known who we were and who we are.”40 Art awakens us to our values, fears, individual conflicts, and anxious collective dreams, and art transforms us. When the Marschallin confronts her spiritual void and her use of Octavian to fill it, she begins to change. She puts Ochs in his place and reaches out to youth, bringing Sophie and Octavian together, and while she can hardly believe what has happened to her or what she has lost, she knows what she must do. Emerging from her despair a more integrated and better person, she reaches out and aVects everyone around her. No operatic character engages audiences and critics like the Marschallin; no opera singer has had such an eVect on the public as Beverly Sills. No one has done more to bring opera to the people, to youth and young children, or has been a more eVective spokesperson for the arts. No one has done more to raise money for children with disabilities and to support so many worthy causes and institutions. “Art is the signature of civi- lization,” Beverly says, but in this country it is not the government but the peo- ple who know and care about its enriching, civilizing power. On 6 March 2004, Beverly Sills announced a campaign to raise a hundred fifty million dollars to insure the continuation of the Met broadcasts around the globe, telling us what they have meant to people, how they have aVected people’s lives, how something shared by a world audience brings people to- gether. At this time of peril and escalating global tensions, the ties that bind are more important than ever. “There is an arts world in this city and it is proba- atribute to beverly sills 651 bly the most democratic group of people in the world,” Sills said. “We’re very fortunate because we’re joined together by something that’s really larger than ethnic groups, minority groups, or any other kind of group. We’re joined by a passion which supersedes what we do in churches, synagogues, bedrooms, kitchens and oYces. It goes way beyond that.”41 Her family life has not become any easier. MuVy, who worked so hard to have a normal exchange with life, was stricken with multiple sclerosis in 1991 at the age of thirty-three. Mrs. Silverman died in 1996, and Peter has suVered a stroke. Beverly has spoken of the tremendous peaks and valleys in her life. The legendary career of a “street kid” from Brooklyn has assumed a magical fairy- tale quality, revolutionizing the field for the American opera singer, humaniz- ing opera, and bringing it to the nation. But her family life, so riven by tragedy, makes her story less a fairy tale than one of transcendence. If she listens carefully, Beverly must hear people shouting brava diva while listening to her recordings, watching her videos, reliving precious memories, knowing all that she continues to do with her talents, energy, intelligence, and passion to make a diVerence in the world. If the goal of life and mental health is about actualizing our unique qualities, doing our best to make a contribu- tion, to make meaning, to give and accept love, to care about each other and the world we share, Beverly has certainly done it. Through courage and the joy of singing, by devoting herself to what she passionately believes in, she has transformed all that she is, including her sorrow, into the sublime. If she has done it with more enthusiasm than most of us could muster, with more talent, brains, common sense, and love for people, and if she has endeared herself to a nation with her good humor, stature, and persuasiveness and earned hun- dreds of millions for the arts and charity, if she works harder and has more energy and tenacity than most of us, can our response be anything but Brava Beverly? We salute you on this year of your seventy-fifth birthday for who you are, for the value and magnitude of your contributions. You are one of the cen- tury’s great singers; you are one of its great women. In the words of Baby Doe, we will remember you always and forever. May your strength and your love sustain you through decades to come.

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Beverly Sills: A Selective Discography

The following discography is not complete but lists some of Sills’s most significant recordings of complete operas and recitals. These have appeared in a bewildering number of formats on a variety of labels. Rather than providing an exhaustive tracing, I have simply given the label and catalog number of the most recent CD incarnation of which I am aware. 652 beth hart

Operas Bellini: I Capuletti e i Montecchi. With Janet Baker, Raimund Herincx, Robert Lloyd, New Philharmonia Orchestra, John Alldis Chorus, conducted by Giuseppe Patanè (recorded 1975). Not currently available on CD. Bellini: Norma. With Shirley Verrett, Enrico di Giuseppe, Paul Plishka, New Philharmonia Orchestra, John Alldis Choir, conducted by James Levine (recorded August 1973). Not formerly released on CD; “Mira o Norma” included in Deutsche Grammophon’s compliation Beverly Sills: The Great Recordings (see below). Bellini: I Puritani. With Nicolai Gedda, Louis Quilico, Paul Plishka, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Ambrosian Opera Chorus, conducted by Julius Rudel (recorded 1973). Deutsche Grammophon 2GWM3 471 207-2. Charpentier: Louise. With Gedda, Dunn, Van Damn, Orchestra and Chorus of Théâtre National de L’Opéra de Paris, conducted by Julius Rudel (recorded 1977). Not currently available on CD. Donizetti: Anna Bolena. With Shirley Verrett, Stuart Burrows, Paul Plishka, London Symphony Orchestra, John Alldis Chorus, conducted by Julius Rudel (recorded August 1972) Deutsche Gramophon 289 465 957-2; also available as part of Donizetti: The Three Queens, Deutsche Grammophon 289 465 967-2. Donizetti: Don Pasquale. With Donald Gramm, Alfredo Kraus, Alan Titus, Lon- don Symphony Orchestra, Ambrosian Opera Chorus, conducted by Sarah Caldwell (recorded 1978). EMI CDMB 66030. Donizetti: La fille du régiment. With Grayson Hirst, Fernando Corena, Muriel Greenspon, American Opera Society Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Roland Gagnon (recorded live, Carnegie Hall, 13 February 1970). Opera d’Oro opd 1275. Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor. With Carlo Bergonzi, Piero Cappuccilli, Justino Diaz, London Symphony Orchestra, Ambrosian Opera Chorus, con- ducted by Thomas Schippers (recorded August 1970). Deutsche Gram- mophon 2GWM2 471 250-2. Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor. With Alfredo Kraus, Gianpiero Mastromei, Jose Nait, Orchestra and Chorus of the Teatro Colon di Buenos Aires, con- ducted by Juan Emilio Martini (recorded live, 25 June 1968). Arkadia cdmp 474.2. Donizetti: Maria Stuarda. With Eileen Farrell, Stuart Burrows, Louis Quilico, Londone Philharmonic Orchestra, the John Alldis Choir, conducted by Aldo Ceccato (recorded June 1971). Deutsche Grammophon 289 465 961-2; also available as part of Donizetti: The Three Queens, DG 289 465 967-2. Donizetti: Roberto Devereux. With Robert Ilosfalvy, Peter Glossop, Beverly Wolf, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Ambrosian Opera Chorus, conducted by Charles Mackerras (recorded June 1969). Deutsche Grammophon 289 465 964-2; also available as part of Donizetti: The Three Queens, DG 289 465 967- 2. atribute to beverly sills 653

Handel: Giulio Cesare. With Norman Treigle, Maureen Forrester, Beverly Wolf, Spiro Malas, New York City Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Julius Rudel (recorded April-May 1967). RCA 6182-rg. Handel: Giulio Cesare Highlights. With Norman Treigle, Orchestra and Cho- rus of the Teatry Colón, conducted by Karl Richter (recorded live 1968). VAIA 1184. Lehar: The Merry Widow (excerpts, sung in English). With Glenys Fowles, Alan Titus, Henry Price, New York City Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Julius Rudel (recorded 1978). Not currently available on CD. Massenet: Manon. With Nicolai Gedda, Gérard Souzay, Gabriel Bacquier, New Philharmonia Orchestra, Ambrosian Opera Chorus, conducted by Julius Rudel (recorded July 1970). Deutsche Grammophon B 0002470. Massenet: Manon. With Plácido Domingo, Richard Fredericks, Nico Castel, Orchestra and Chorus of the New York City Opera, conducted by Julius Rudel (recorded live, NYCO, 1969). IMC Italian Music Company cdi 205008. Massenet: Thaïs. With Sherrill Milnes, Nicolai Gedda, John Alldis Choir, New Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Lorin Maazel (recorded 1976). EMI 7243 5 65479 2. Moore: The Ballad of Baby Doe. With Walter Cassel, Frances Bible, The New York City Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Emerson Buckley (recorded June 1959). Deutsche Grammophon 289 465 148-2 gh2. OVenbach: Les contes d’HoVmann. With Stuart Burrows, Norman Treigle, Susanne Marsee, Nico Castel, London Symphony Orchestra, John Alldis Choir, conducted by Julius Rudel, (recorded July-August 1972). Deutsche Grammophon 2GWM2 471247. Rimsky-Korsakov: Le coq d’or. With Norman Treigle, Enrico di Giuseppe, Muriel Greenspoon, New York City Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Julius Rudel (recorded live 7 November 1971). Gala gl 740; Bensar ol 11971. Rossini: Il barbiere di Siviglia. With Nicolai Gedda, Sherrill Milnes, Renato Capecchi, Ruggero Raimondi, London Symphony Orchestra, John Alldis Choir, conducted by James Levine (recorded 1978). EMI CDBU 85523 2 (reis- sue removes Rosina’s additional aria as well as some other music to fit the opera onto two CDs). Rossini: L’assedio di Corinto. With Shirley Verrett, Justino Diaz, Harry Theyard, Ambrosian Opera Chorus, London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Thomas Schippers (recorded 1975). Not currently available on CD. Rossini: L’assedio di Corinto. With Marilyn Horne, Franco Bonisolli, Justino Diaz, Chorus and Orchestra of La Scala, Milan, conducted by Thomas Schip- pers (recorded live, 14 April 1969). Opera d’Oro opd 1271. Verdi: Rigoletto. With Mignon Dunn, Alfredo Kraus, Sherrill Milnes, Samuel Ramey, Philharmonia Orchestra, Ambrosian Chorus, conducted by Julius Rudel (recorded 1978). emi CDM 66037 2. 654 beth hart

Verdi: La traviata. With Nicolai Gedda, Rolando Panerai, John Alldis Choir, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Aldo Ceccato (recorded July 1971). EMI 7777 69827 2. Verdi: La traviata. With Alfredo Kraus, Mario Zanasi, Chorus and Orchestra of the Teatro San Carlo, Naples, conducted by Aldo Ceccato (recorded live, 17 January 1970). Opera d’Oro opd 1263.

Recitals Sills recorded a number of aria and song collections, most of which have not been reissued in their original form. Many of the selections have appeared in various CD compilations; of those, three have drawn particularly heavily on the early recital programs: The Singers: Beverly Sills (London/Decca 2DSR 467 906-2); The Art of Beverly Sills (Deutsche Grammophon 289 471 766-2), and Bev- erly Sills: The Great Recordings (Deutsche Grammophon 289 474 947-2).

Bellini and Donizetti Heroines. Arias from I Capuleti e i Montecchi, La sonnam- bula, Linda di Chamounix, Lucia di Lammermoor, Roberto Devereux, and Ros- monda d’Inghilterra. Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Vienna Academy Choir conducted by Jussi Jalas (recorded June 1968). Universal Millennium Clas- sics, umd 80468 380468-2; excerpts included in Deutsche Grammophon’s The Art of Beverly Sills and Beverly Sills: The Great Recordings. Scenes and Arias from French Opera. Arias from Manon, Louise, Hamlet, Mignon, Robert le diable, and Les Huguenots. Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Ambrosian Opera Chorus, conducted by Charles Mackerras (recorded 1969). Not reis- sued as a whole on CD; excerpts included in Decca’s The Singers: Beverly Sills and Deutsche Grammophon’s The Art of Beverly Sills and Beverly Sills: The Great Recordings. Beverly Sills Sings Mozart and Strauss. Arias from Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Zaïde, Daphne, concert aria, K. 418, and songs by Strauss. London Philhar- monic, conducted by Aldo Ceccato (recorded 1970). Not reissued as a whole on CD; excerpts included in Decca’s The Singers: Beverly Sills and Deutsche Grammophon’s The Art of Beverly Sills and Beverly Sills: The Great Recordings. Welcome to Vienna. Arias and songs by Lehár, Korngold, J. Strauss II, Heuberger, and Sieczynski. London Philharmonic, conducted by Julius Rudel (recorded 1971). Not reissued as a whole on CD; excerpts included in Deutsche Gram- mophon’s The Art of Beverly Sills and Beverly Sills: The Great Recordings. Beverly Sills Concert. Songs with instrumental obbligato by Adam, Schubert, Arne, Handel, Caldara, and Bishop. Members of the Chamber Music Soci- ety of Lincoln Center, Charles Wadsworth, piano (recorded March 1972). Not reissued as a whole on CD; excerpts included in Decca’s The Singers: Beverly Sills. Plaisir d’Amour. Songs by Lenoir, Bizet, Liszt, Gounod, Koechlin, Delibes, Poulenc, Martini, and Dell’Acqua. With the New York Philharmonic, con- ducted by André Kostelanetz (recorded October 1975). Sony smk 60576; reis- atribute to beverly sills 655

sue adds four songs by Granados, Ponce, and Castellaños, recorded by Sills and Kostelanetz in 1961. The Music of Victor Herbert. Selections from Orange Blossoms, Naughty Marietta, The Enchantress, Mlle Modiste, Eileen, The Only Girl, and The Fortune Teller. With London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by André Kostelanetz (recorded 1975). Not currently available on CD. Up in Central Park: Duets from Operetta & Musical Comedy. Selections by Bern- stein, Herbert, Romberg, Friml, and O. Straus. With Sherrill Milnes, New York City Opera Orchestra, conducted by Julius Rudel (recorded 1978). Not currently available on CD. notes

1. Jerome Hines, Great Singers on Great “Beverly Sills: Red Hair and Low-Cut Singing (New York: Limelight Editions, Dresses,” horizon, 1 December 1997, 1990), p. 311. http://www.horizonmag.com/2/sills.htm 2. Hubert Saal, “The True Story of Beverly (accessed 3 August 2004). Sills,” New York Times, 17 September 1967, p. 34. 19. “Beverly Sills, Bubbles: A Self 3. Hubert Saal, “La Sills at the Summit,” Portrait,” Women’s Day, 8 March 1997, p. 202. Newsweek, 21 April 1969, p. 75. 20. Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on 4. Saal, “True Story,” p. 34. Sexuality III, Transformations of Puberty,” 5. Placido Domingo, My First Forty Years Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 86. Freud, vol. 7 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 6. Schuyler Chapin, Sopranos, Mezzos, p. 227. Tenors, Bassos and Other Friends (New York: 21. Hans Loewald, “The Waning of the Crown Publishers, 1995), p. 97–98. Oedipus Complex,” Collected Papers on Psycho- 7. Saal, “La Sills at the Summit,” p. 69. analysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 8. Ibid., p. 75. 1980), pp. 384–405. 9. Joan Barthel, “Bel Canto Beverly: At 22. Lionel Trilling, preface to Beyond 46, a Superstar Makes Her Debut at the Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning Met,” New York Times, 6 April 1975, p. 63. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 10. Beverly Sills, On My Own (New York: 1965), n.p. Bantam-Audio, 1987), cassette. 23. Lothar Römer, “Art Is the Signature of 11. Natalie Gittelson, “Mom Sills and Civilization: The Soprano Beverly Sills,” in Bubbly: Two Lives in Tune,” New York Times, booklet accompanying Gaetano Donizetti, 13 May 1979, p. 15. Lucia di Lammermoor (Westminister Legacy, 12. “Faubion Bowers Interviews Beverly 289 471 250-2, 1970/2002), p. 12. Sills,” Opera News, 19 September1970, p. 19. 24. Barthel, “Bel Canto Beverly,” p. 16. 13. Beverly Sills and Lawrence Linderman, 25. Beverly Sills, Bubbles (New York: Beverly: An Autobiography (Toronto: Bantam Warner Books, 1976), p. 114. Books, 1987), p. 72. 26. Sills and Linderman, Beverly, p. 166. 14. Beverly Sills, introduction in booklet 27. Christopher Morgan, Don Carlos and accompanying Douglas Moore, The Ballad of Company (New York: Oxford University Baby Doe (Deutsche Grammophon 465148, Press, 1996), p. 202. 1999), p. 8. 28. Harold Schonberg, “A Lavender and 15. Sills and Linderman, Beverly, pp. Lace Manon,” New York Times, 22 March 121–22. 1968, p. 54. 16. Sills, On My Own. 29. Andrew Porter, “Musical Events: 17. Sills, introduction, Baby Doe, p. 9. Beverly!” New Yorker, 10 November 1980, p. 18. James Moody and Susan Malus, 178. 656 beth hart

30. J. B. Steane, The Grand Tradition 36. Frank Bruni, “Diva Among Divas,” (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), New York Times Magazine, 6 January 2002, p. 401. p. 22. 31. Schuyler Chapin, Musical Chairs: A 37. George Heymont, “Beverly Sills: Life in the Arts (New York: Putnam, 1977), Tough Talking,” The Advocate, 10 July 1984, pp. 416–17. p.49. 32. Ibid., p. 414. 38. Sills and Linderman, Beverly, p. xii. 33. Sills and Linderman, Beverly, p. 172. 39. Schuyler Chapin, personal communi- 34. “Sills’ Operatic Finale May Be in San cation, 8 February 2004. Diego,” San Diego Union’s Wire Service, 10 40. Beverly Sills, “Money for the Arts,” January 1977. New York Times, 6 October 1975, p. 29. 35. Richard Dyer, “Queen of the Opera,” 41. Heymont, “Beverly Sills: Tough Talk- Boston Globe, 24 November 2000, p. E-15. ing,” p. 49.