Beverly Sills, 1929-2007
Beverly Sills, the All-American diva from Brooklyn, has died of cancer. Bubbles, as she was known to all, was a big lady with a big heart whose down-to-earth personality, talent and lifelong dedication to Lincoln Center made her a treasure for the city’s arts establishment. I never heard her sing live in her prime but there are those who swear her Lucia and Rosina were among the best. She was a hometown heroine who will be missed.
UPDATE
Steve Smith, Tim Page, Anthony Tommasini
thanks for the correction, brian …
Correct me if I am wrong, but didn’t Ms. Sills also oversaw the world premiere at NYCO, in 1980, of the revised version of Lee Hoiby and William Ball’s A Month in the Country (formerly, Natalia Petrovna, and based upon Ivan Turgenev and commissioned by the Ford Foundation)?
Music critic Harold Schonberg apparently thought that the revised opera’s closing octet was “truer by far”, than the famous quintet of Samuel Barber and G.C. Menotti’s Vanessa; while music critic Paul Hume thought the closing octet comparable to Wagner’s famous Meistersinger quintet and R. Strauss and Hofmannstahl’s famous Rosenkavalier trio.
The third work on that triple bill was by Stanley Silverman to Richard Foreman’s libretto.
I believe that Ms Sills may also have been responsible for the revival, at NYCO, of Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, in 1979.
The third of the new one-act operas, in 1979, may have been by Kirke Mechem –I veeery vaguely recall. I can’t now find a source.
The Moses und Aron was a borrowed production from Germany’s Bonn Opera. (I recall that in the early 1990s, the NYCO produced — years in a row — Moses und Aron, Janacek’s From the House of the Dead, and Tippett’s Midsummer Marriage… There may have then been a break before Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler.)
The MET still owes us (in my opinion) their versions of the final Janacek work, a Tippett work, and Mathis der Maler. (Following NYCO by about a decade, the MET mounted Moses und Aron, in an ‘English’ production, rather than a German production.)
Also a triple one-act bill by Pasatieri, Jan Bach, and someone else who I don’t recall. (It was her first season as GM.) Also worth mentioning is the New York stage premiere of “Moses und Aron,” which (due to labor issues) didn’t actually happen until the Keene era, but was initiated by her. One more worth mentioning: she was responsible for “Sweeney Todd” making the jump into the opera house.
In Boston in the early 1970s, she sang in Nono’s “Intolleranza” with Sarah Caldwell conducting. I’d love to hear that one.
“Rasputin” by Jay Reise.
I believe Akhnaten was also done on her watch
Ms Sills’s Baby Doe, in the opera by Douglas Moore and John Latouche, was also certainly among the best portrayals of this fascinating role. I believe that the premiere of this opera was during NYCO’s all-American season in 1956/57 [?], which was largely under the funding of the then culturally proud Ford Foundation.
When Ms Sills was General Director of the NYCO, from 1979 to 1989, the company mounted world premieres by Christopher, Thulani, and Anthony Davis ([Malcolm] X] and Leroy Jenkins (The Mother of Three Sons — conceived by Bill T. Jones and with libretto by Ann Green). I’m trying to recall possible other world premieres from those years.