eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252097836 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2015 |
| Series: | Music in American Life |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Magic of Beverly Sills
By Nancy Guy
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09783-6
CHAPTER 1
The Beverly Sills Phenomenon
The morning of April 8, 1975, newspapers around the United States as well as overseas announced that Beverly Sills had finally made her debut the night before at the Metropolitan Opera, the nation's most prestigious opera house. The Cleveland Plain Dealer headline nicely summed up the milieu: "Pandemonium Greets Beverly Sills in Overdue Met Debut." Sills took the stage as Pamira in Rossini's rarely performed tragic opera The Siege of Corinth (L'assedio di Corinto). Reporting from New York, the music editor of the Dallas Times Herald wrote that it was "far and away the hottest ticket in this town."
Most people in the audience that evening had purchased their tickets as soon as the season was announced the previous fall. Recognizing the enormous demand her debut would create, the Met seized the opportunity to replenish its coffers and made the event a gala, charging its highest prices. Boxes went for $500 (about $2,260 in 2015 dollars), while individual seats were priced as high as $60. Scalpers demanded upward of $100. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, "more than 200 persons thronged the lobby and front doors in hopes of buying returned tickets. Some even wore signs around their necks pleading for tickets." A rumor circulated that one man paid $1,000 for his seat. Those seeking a place in the standing-room section lined up Friday afternoon for tickets going on sale Saturday morning at ten o'clock. The Met Guild announced that demand for the run of five performances was so great that it had to turn down seven thousand ticket requests.
During the previous days, media outlets big and small reported on Sills's upcoming performance. Los Angeles Times music critic Martin Bernheimer remarked: "It was impossible ... to pick up any publication other than the telephone book and not read about Beverly Sills." In fact, Sills's image even graced the cover of the San Diego phonebook. Newsweek magazine wrote: "As the countdown for Beverly Sills' historic debut at the Metropolitan Opera began last week, the commotion approached hysteria. Television, the daily press, the news and fashion magazines all devoured her as if she were America's antidote to Southeast Asia" (Saal 1975, 86). The day after the debut, the front page of the New York Daily News was evenly divided between a bold-type headline announcing that the South Vietnamese presidential palace had been bombed and a large photo of a beaming Sills as she exited the Met stage with the simple headline: "Beverly Bows — Brava!" Charles Wendelken-Wilson, the principal conductor for Sills's performances of Lucia di Lammermoor, Maria Stuarda, and La Fille du Régiment during the 1970s at the New York City Opera, placed her popularity partly within the turbulent context of the Vietnam War era. He reminisced about the warm reception she always received when she made her first stage entrances: "She was the New York girl up there — the hometown lady. There we were still wondering what we were doing over in Vietnam and here she was, the symbol of America at its best" (Wendelken-Wilson interview, August 1, 2008).
On the evening of Sills's debut, the Metropolitan Opera House buzzed with "sheer excitement and electricity" the likes of which had not been seen since the company moved to Lincoln Center in the fall of 1966 (Cincinnati Enquirer, April 9, 1975). Critics came out in droves. Television cameramen prowled the lobbies hoping to capture glimpses of luminaries. These included Hollywood stars Danny Kaye and Kirk Douglas; great singers such as Jessye Norman, Licia Albanese, Rose Bampton, Risë Stevens, Robert Merrill, Bidu Sayou, and Maria Jeritza; and other eminent personalities. Of the general feeling, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Garry Wills reported hearing someone say: "I've been here often when the house was full, but it never seemed so full as tonight." Wills concluded that the "4,000 people seemed to swell or pulse with extra life" (Memphis Commercial Appeal, April 16, 1975).
From the moment Sills made what was meant to be an inconspicuous stage entrance — dressed in a silver-trimmed gown in "Beverly blue" as the press termed it — the audience went wild, shouting, "Brava Beverly." They rose to their feet for an ovation that lasted about two minutes. Newsweek's Hubert Saal observed that it was as if the audience roared with one giant voice, "At last" (1975, 86). The crowd cheered after each of her arias. Applause stopped the performance for about five minutes at the conclusion of her fiendishly difficult act 2 aria. With tears in her eyes, Sills remained in character, silently facing forward as she waited for the cheering to subside. At the opera's end, flowers and confetti rained down on the stage during her eighteen-minute solo ovation. Chapter 3 includes a more detailed analysis of her performance that evening. For now, an excerpt from Harold C. Schonberg's extensive New York Times article "The Total Theater of Beverly Sills" reported: "Throughout the opera she gave — well, a Beverly Sills performance. The singing was warm, eloquent and moving. There were some remarkable leggiero passages. There was radiant Sills femininity, and there was the haunting color she was able to impart to lyric passages. There also were the well-known troubles above the staff. As if anybody cared about that. Beverly was on the stage of the Met, giving all she had. That was the only thing that mattered" (April 13, 1975).
Sills's Met debut marked a crucial milestone. She had been singing to sold-out houses regularly for nearly a decade with her home company, the New York City Opera in the New York State Theater only a hundred feet across Lincoln Center Plaza from the Met. Sills had already performed in almost every important opera house in the world. Her exclusion from the Met stemmed from what Sills termed a "clash of personalities" between her and Met general manager Rudolf Bing (Moore 1975, 15). No doubt he resented her and her New York City Opera colleagues for inadvertently stealing his thunder in 1966 soon after the Metropolitan Opera opened its new theater at Lincoln Center with a resounding flop. For the grand opening, Bing had commissioned a new opera, Antony and Cleopatra, from American composer Samuel Barber in an elaborate production by Franco Zeffirelli, who had also written the libretto. Schonberg of the New York Times wrote: "Almost everything about the evening, artistically speaking, failed in total impact." It was "artifice masquerading with a great flourish as art" (September 17, 1966). Writing in more colorful terms, Shana Alexander of Life magazine reported: "Much of what went on was a truly operatic disaster. Being there was a lot like having a front-row seat at an earthquake" (September 30, 1966, 30B).
Eleven days following the Met's fantastic flop, Norman Treigle, Maureen Forrester, and Beverly Sills opened the New York City Opera season with Handel's Giulio Cesare in an elegant Tito Capobianco production. Audience members and the press alike were stunned by Sills's performance. As Winthrop Sargeant observed, with the Julius Caesar performance, there "was an ebullient realization on everybody's part that New York's own opera company and New York's own singers had reached a peak of success that — for the time being, at least — left the big, international Metropolitan Opera behind. And the largest factor in the triumph was Miss Sills — charmingly seducing the Roman Emperor, singing like a nightingale, projecting across the footlights the most attractive of operatic personalities" (1973, 81). She shot to stardom instantly. Suddenly, Sills was invited to perform at major venues around the world. Her success, at what seemed to have been his expense, initiated the feud that smoldered between Sills and Bing until after he retired in 1972. His snubbing of her became a cause célèbre, which ultimately formed a key cornerstone of her public image as an all-American success story.
Rudolf Bing was born into a well-to-do Viennese family, became a naturalized British citizen, and was rumored to prefer European over American singers. At the very least, American singers were expected to build their careers in Europe before starring at the Met. Sills, whose strong will and forthright personality were apparent to all who saw her on television or read her interviews, aired her feelings on this apparent anti-American bias in the press early on. In a December 1968 Cleveland Plain Dealer article titled "Met Waits While Beverly Sills Says: 'I Don't Need Europe,'" Sills was quoted as saying, "Frankly, I resent Mr. Bing's attitude that American singers first must go to Europe to gain experience. Frankly I am trying to destroy this attitude at the Metropolitan. I'll match my experience with anyone's." On the eve of her Met debut, Sills was cited in the New York Times Magazine saying: "In a sense, I revolutionized the operatic scene, because I proved you can make a great international career without the Metropolitan. I'm the only singer who's done that, and I'm proud of that, so it's all worked out for the best. It's all right. It really is" (Barthel 1975, 16). Sills's staunch belief in American talent, operatic training, and performing institutions only strengthened over time. Her national pride was not lost on the American public, whose patriotism was on the rise as the nation's bicentennial celebrations approached.
There was more to Bing's disdain for Sills than the fact that she did not work her way up through the European ranks: she did not put on airs. Sills never lost her Brooklyn accent, which she often peppered with Yiddish expressions. And, rather than hiding that she came from a modest background, she spoke freely of her times of financial struggle. Writing the day after her Met debut for the Herald of Melbourne, Australia, Peter Michelmore explained that Bing simply did not care for Sills: "For an opera star she seemed too happy-go-lucky, too unaware of her stature, and sometimes, when she described an opera plot in Brooklyn street slang, his hair would stand on end."
Bing hurled a classist insult at Sills in his only direct mention of her in his 345-page memoir, which he published the year of his retirement. In discussing his opposition to the New York City Opera taking up residence in Lincoln Center, Bing explained that he initially worried that the two companies might stage similar repertoire. However, over the years, there was only one "fight" related to programming. Naturally, the unpleasantness centered on Beverly Sills. She wanted to perform Donizetti's three Tudor queen operas: Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda, and Roberto Devereux. However, Spanish soprano Montserrat Caballé hoped to undertake the trilogy at the Met. Bing cattily commented, "[W]e finally accepted the fact that Beverly Sills of the City Opera, having been born in Brooklyn, was entitled to priority in the portrayal of British royalty" (1972, 290). This slur was reported in Time magazine in an article reporting on the publication of Bing's book, which only bolstered the perception of Sills's as an all-American diva (October 23, 1972). Throughout her singing career (and even now as her artistic legacy continues to be debated), Sills was targeted by gatekeeping elitists, such as Bing, in retribution for her down-to-earth, often cheery, sometimes imposing, and always Brooklynese manner. Of course, it was precisely these qualities that drew a broad range of people to her and her artistry, many of whom might otherwise never have known opera.
As part of her meteoric rise to fame following her brilliant performance as Cleopatra in fall 1966, Sills gained significant, mainstream media attention. A vital facet of her image known to the American public by the time of her Met debut was that she had overcome crushing setbacks and personal tragedies. Foremost among these were her two children's disabilities. Her eldest, Meredith, known affectionately as Muffy, is profoundly deaf. As the extensive November 22, 1971, Time cover story on Sills put it: "In a piece of Sophoclean irony, Muffy would never hear the sound of her mother's singing" (81). Sills's second born, Peter, called Bucky, was diagnosed as severely developmentally disabled, autistic, and epileptic. The family was forced to institutionalize him when his care became more than they could manage at home.
The New York Times Magazine's lengthy feature article, "The True Story of Beverly Sills: Who Leads a Kind of Soap Opera Life on the Grand Opera Stage," was one of the first detailed depictions of her personal sorrows (September 17, 1967). Sills's story reached a much broader audience with Life magazine's two-page "close-up" photo essay, "Unpretentious Prima Donna," published January 17, 1969. Life was one of the most important general weekly magazines in the United States from the late 1930s through the early 1970s (Doss 2001, xiii). Just a year after the Sills profile appeared, each issue of Life was estimated to reach as many as forty million people. Divided almost equally between text and photos, the Sills piece covered many biographical themes that were repeated over and over in the popular press for the next decade and a half, including her steel-willed determination and down-to-earth manner, her children's disabilities, and her long road to operatic stardom. The article's three photos depicted Sills as a performer and as a wife and mother. There was a large color image of her as the spectacular and exotic Queen Shemaka in Rimsky-Korsakov's Coq d'Or; an adorable shot of her bending down to kiss her nine-year old daughter, who was in her school uniform and, as the caption relays, had just returned home from her school for the deaf; and a rather zany photo of Sills and her husband enjoying drinks sitting outside on lawn chairs. The article begins with a quote from Sills: "Opera is a wonderful opportunity to be someone else for three hours a night; it's good to take on someone else's tsuris." The author explains that tsuris is Yiddish for troubles and concludes that Sills's use of the word "tells a lot about this lady whom critics consider one of the world's few great coloratura sopranos. She is unaffected and unsinkable — she has a son who is mentally retarded and a daughter born deaf" (Dunn 1969, 37). Her absence from the rosters of the Metropolitan Opera comes up briefly as Sills says dismissively, "Sure, I'd like to sing there ... but they'll have to offer me a role that will make me happy" (ibid.).
The April 21, 1969, Newsweek cover story, which followed her debut at Milan's famed La Scala opera house, told of how doctors diagnosed her daughter's profound hearing loss just two months prior to their discovery of her son's devastating maladies. Highlighting her indomitable spirit, writer Hubert Saal noted that her initial reaction was to give up her singing career; however, "instead of disabling her," these tragedies "propelled her to the pinnacle of her art" (1969, 69). Saal's article also appeared in a condensed version in the Reader's Digest, a magazine with an enormous circulation that frequently celebrated "the possibilities of the American Dream and extolling the optimism of that view of life" (Sharp 2000, xiv). Sills's life story certainly contained many of the themes central to the American dream with its ideology that an individual can attain success through strenuous effort and perseverance.
Sills was a self-admitted workaholic. This topic was illustrated many times over in the five-page Time magazine cover story. As she crisscrossed the globe in 1971, the year of the article's publication, her itinerary included more than one hundred operatic, concert, and recital appearances. When asked why she kept up such a grueling schedule, Sills quipped, "I'm already 42: what am I saving it for?" (Time, November 22, 1971, 74). Her compulsion for hard work stemmed in no small part from her need for escape from her personal woes. Performance was a perfect vehicle as she could take on Violetta's or Lucia's or someone else's troubles for three hours a night while forgetting her own. Time touched upon this subject briefly as it reported on moments of "piercing sadness" — as when Muffy puts her fingertips on the speaker to "feel" the sound of her mother's voice, or when Beverly "grows uncharacteristically abstracted, her voice trailing off, the brightness fading from her face" (82). As those close to her knew, in these moments, she was probably thinking of one of her regular visits to see Bucky. "But such moments are over quickly, because Beverly shakes them off firmly: there is work to be done" (ibid.).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Magic of Beverly Sills by Nancy Guy. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.