ONE OF US

Almost everyone of a certain age who is even slightly interested in opera knows the details of much of the career of the great soprano Beverly Sills, who died of lung cancer on July 3, 2007. She was born in Brooklyn in 1929, the child of emigrant parents, beginning her singing at the early age of seven and appearing as a child, under the name Belle “Bubbles” Silverman, on radio. Sills began her operatic career with the New York City Opera in 1955 playing roles in the mid and late 1960s such as Guilio Cesare’s Cleopatra and Faust’s Marguerite, gradually becoming one of the great American opera performers, despite the fact that she was kept from singing at the Metropolitan Opera by the company’s autocratic, Euorpean-centered director, Rudolf Bing. Her premier there in Rossini’s The Siege of Corinth, shortly after Bing’s death, stopped the show as her appearance was accompanied with wild applause: the audience loved her before she sang a note!

At the height of her career in the late 1960s and early 1970s Sills’s voice combined technique with flexibility and breath control; as Newsweek noted in its obituary of the artist: “She had a trill that could wind a clock, and could color her voice from shimmering silver or almost transparent blue to dark red.” Some of her performances may have lacked consistency, certainly her voice was without the richness and range of a singer like Joan Sutherland; but as one of her most formidable critics, Harold C. Schonberg, noted of her performance in Lucia di Lammermor: “The amazing thing about her Lucia is not so much the way she sings it, though that has moments of incandescent beauty, but the way she manages to make a living, breathing creature of the unhappy girl” She delivered, so he proclaimed, “by far the most believable mad scene I have ever seen in any opera house.”

I saw her performance of Lucia upon the stage the Wolf Trap Farm Park, outside of Washington, D.C., in July 1971. Howard and I must have attended with our dear friend, Bob Orr, for we would not normally have gone back stage to congratulate her; but Bob, a true connoisseur of opera—who most certainly would have seen several of her performances—must have insisted that we do so. I recall that she gracefully accepted our presence in her dressing room and reacted to our praise as if it came from dear friends. It was that easy manner, her un-diva like behavior which made her so popular with American audiences. Just as Julia Childs had demystified and popularized French cooking, so did Sills make opera seem accessible to all, acting almost as an popular ambassador to the genre as a frequent guest on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and singing with performers Carol Burnett, Danny Kaye, even the muppet Miss Piggy. After retiring from singing, Sills served for 10 years as the director of The New York City Opera and, after a two-year stint as host of a weekly talk show, became chairwoman of Lincoln Center and, later, The Metropolitan Opera.

Howard and I saw her perform again in Handel’s Ariodante on the Kennedy Center stage in Washington, D.C. in September 1971. This time we did not attempt to go back stage; perhaps we felt he had no need to having already been made feel we knew her: she was one of us.

Los Angeles, July 23, 2007

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Our friend Bob Orr, whom I mention above, was our next door neighbor in the Adams-Morgan area of Washington, D.C., where we lived for the first year of our move to the District. Bob, who was 13 years older than Howard and I, was a professor of English at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, a former Phi Beta Kappa honor student at the University of Alabama, and a Fulbright Scholar. He’d received his M.A., as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Cornell, and had completed his PhD. at the University of Virginia.

An extremely handsome gay man, Bob took the two of us under his wing, so to speak, particularly when it came to the subjects of food and opera. That year, our first year together, Howard and I were both active in the kitchen, trying out all the new recipes of then popular Time-Life “Foods of the World” series, Craig Claiborne’s The New York Times Cookbook, and Julia Child’s, Louisette Bertholle’s, and Simone Beck’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I don’t think Bob cooked much, but he knew food well, and took us, upon a couple of occasions, to excellent restaurants. We cooked for him several evenings, with him politely critiquing the meals.

But Bob’s great love was opera. As he got to know us better, and began to realize our extreme lack of knowledge of the genre—despite both of us loving music—he began to play from his vast collection of records, describing the plots and characters in a manner that kept us spellbound: “The Marschallin knows that Octavian’s love for her cannot last; she even foresees herself as an old lady having to give him up; it’s all in the way in which you it do it, the grace with which you accept it, she comprehends. And when that times comes near the end of opera, it’s just marvelous the way she accepts it, kiddies (his fond endearment for the two of us) despite her great pain, which is what the opera is really all about—her beautiful acceptance of fate.” Another afternoon he played various arias from Wagner’s Ring Cycle for us, and for the first time we understand why many found Wagner such an outstanding composer. Another day he told us the story of Verdi’s Rigoletto, playing scenes from the opera and recounting various interpretations of its major characters. It was like having an enchanting older brother next door, and for Bob, I am sure, our being there eased some of his evident loneliness—although he often described to us his newest peccadilloes, including sex in the Library of Congress stacks.

One day as he passed our window we could see that something was wrong. He signaled us to the window. “How are you Bob?” we called out in our usual exuberant manner. “Not so good,” he replied, “I’ve been to the doctors. Can I come in?” We opened the door and headed to our couch. “You see, a few years ago, kiddies, I had…cancer, Leukemia, which fortunately went into remission. But now the doctor tells me that it’s back.” We were speechless. Howard’s sister died in childhood of the same disease.

Over the next few months the quality of Bob’s health grew increasingly worse, until he had to undergo surgery at The Johns Hopkins University, where we visited him. “Oh honey, it’s just terrible what they do someone’s body,” he whimpered, “They cut me open everywhere, just to experiment!” We met his mother, who, soon after, transferred Bob to the Vanderbilt University Hospital in Nashville, nearer her and her husband’s home.

Bob asked for us to help him pack up, and to take his huge collection records for our own. We packed up some things, I recall discovering in his boxes of possessions letters from and a photograph of Anthony Perkins, with who he had apparently had an affair. When it came time to take the records, however, we felt uncomfortable, and since both of us felt it inappropriate to speak up about his request, they were packed and mailed along with everything else.

Bob had been named the outstanding teacher of the year at the Naval Academy in 1970, and in 1971, the year we knew him, just before his death, he’d been an equally outstanding mentor and deep friend to us.

Los Angeles, July 24, 2007

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Last night, as I went to bed, I told Howard that I had heard on the news that the great opera tenor Luciano Pavarotti was near death, and this morning newscasters reported that the singer had died at his home in Italy at 5:00 a.m. Pavarotti’s death, along with the passing of Beverly Sills, Gian Carlo Menotti, Frederick Lechner, and Jerry Hadley, has meant, perhaps, the closing of an era during which opera became more popular than ever before. Like Sills, Pavarotti was both a great performer and a popularizer of the form, renowned through his concerts with José Carerras and Placido Domingo described as “The Three Tenors.”

Although I have DVDs of several operas performed by the Italian star, and listen to them often, I never heard Pavarotti in person. This morning Howard related, once again, the single time when he heard Pavarotti sing at the Metropolitan Opera House: “Never have I heard a voice that could so completely filled the entire space, even while singing sotto voce!”

Paul Vangelisti, who has close ties to Modena, Pavarotti’s home town, relates that he had known Pavoratti’s daughter and her boyfriend. Pavarotti, Paul reported, either from knowledge or hearsay, as evidenced by his girth had an enormous appetite. At restaurant dinners the waiters would serve Pavarotti a huge serving of pasta, and the serve an equal portion to be shared by the others at his table. Sometimes, after a secondi and desert, Pavoratti would request another serving of the pasta. In that sense, the singer’s great appetite for food seems to reflect his appetite for music and a larger than normal presence in life.

Los Angeles, September 6, 2007

Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 10 (November-December 2007), on-line