Remembering Beverly Sills

By the time Beverly Sills, who was born Belle Silverman in Brooklyn in 1929 and died yesterday of lung cancer, became an "overnight" sensation, she had been singing professionally for some 20 years, with a track record of solid performances with Sarah Caldwell's Opera Company of Boston and the New York City Opera.

Then City Opera General Director Julius Rudel had the idea of staging Handel's Julius Caesar with bass-baritone Norman Treigle in the title role. Apparently Sills had to resort to a barrage of threats, including quitting the company, to persuade Rudel to cast her as Cleopatra, but she eventually succeeded, and in 1966 she was the sensation of the operatic world. Luckily, RCA Victor made the audacious decision to do a studio recording based on the City Opera production, and for anyone who doesn't know Sills's singing, her virtuosic and meltingly winning incarnation of the kittenishly manipulative young queen Cleopatra, wrapping the aging Caesar around her little finger, still seems to me the place to start. In both strictly vocal and artistic terms, Sills's Cleopatra is as completely finished a piece of singing as you're going to hear.

Singing of that caliber doesn't usually pop out of nowhere, and when it does, or seems to, it's a big deal in the music world. The only thing was that Sills was 37 at the time, and in a sense was older than that--she had a lot of mileage on that voice. While she had some prime singing years left (still ahead of her was a wildly successful La Scala debut in Rossini's Siege of Corinth in 1969--the broadcast performance may be the most spectacular record we have of her in full coloratura bloom), the voice soon started showing signs of serious wear.

It's one of the ironies, or oddities, of her career that by the time she became really famous, she could do progressively less of the things for which she deserved to become famous. It didn't help that the international record companies were still slow to embrace her, and so when she recorded roles like Donizetti's "three queens" (Elizabeth I in Roberto Devereux and the title roles in Anna Bolena and Maria Stuarda--all juicy roles, but except perhaps for Anna Bolena not among Donizetti's stronger operas), the recordings were undertaken by the near-moribund Westminster label.

But it's easy to see her appeal, especially to American audiences. Her personal openness, charm, and good humor--all of which were totally genuine, as far as I know--translated well to TV. And a lot of people knew, because there wasn't much about her life that was secret, that all that good humor came in the face of more than her share of tribulation. Her cherished daughter Muffy was deaf or nearly so, and her cheished son Bucky was developmentally disabled.

In her eary memoir, Bubbles: A Self-Portrait (1976), Sills herself talked about the period when she and her husband confronted the eventually inevitable decision to entrust Bucky to institutional care. One of the challenges Julius Rudel came up with for her was the heroines of the three unrelated one-act operas that make up Puccini's Il Trittico. One wonders how she got through even the one performance she sang of all three roles.

Obviously you think of Suor Angelica. The title character is a young woman from a noble family (her own mother and father having died when she was an infant) that packed her away to a convent after she was knocked up as a teenager and gave birth to a baby boy. After seven years of total silence from the outside world, Angelica is suddenly visited by her formidable and unforgiving "princess aunt," her Zia Principessa, her mother's sister. She quickly learns that there is no kindness intended by the visit, which is prompted by the impending marriage of Angelica's sister--

To one whose love has enabled him to overlook
the disgrace you have brought to our noble family.

Angelica begs for news of her baby, and finally her aunt relents, informing her that the child died two years before. In the opera's one indisputably great piece of music, Angelica, left alone, sings:

Without your mama, my baby, you died!
Your lips, without my kisses grew pale, cold, cold!
And you closed, my baby, your beautiful eyes!
Not being able to caress me, you folded your little hands in a cross!
And you died without knowing how much your mama loved you.

She goes on to imagine the boy as an angel in heaven, wondering when she will see him in heaven. And then, the aria proper completed, Puccini pushes the whole thing way over the top. The hysterical Angelica takes poison, then realizes she has committed a mortal sin, and prays to the Virgin for grace. Amid a vision of a choir of angels praying for her, she sees the Virgin pushing her child toward her as she dies.

There are decent video remembrances of Sills in some of her good roles, notably the title roles of Manon and La Traviata. I think that in the end the role that I remember her in most fondly, apart from Cleopatra, and perhaps Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, is Elvira in Bellini's I Puritani. (She's seen here with Luciano Pavarotti as Arturo in Philadelphia, 1972.*) When she sang it at City Opera the voice was already pretty shop-worn, but the higher and lighter set of the role seemed to find a freshness we hadn't heard in a while. And her conscientious artistry made the role come alive.

*CORRECTION FROM COMMENTER: "The photo wasn't of Sills and Pavarotti in Puritani, but in Lucia (which they sang in San Francisco in '72) — the scene in which Edgardo (Pavarotti) crashes the wedding of Lucia (Sills) and curses her out."

When the Met revived Puritani for the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, I accepted an invitation to a performance, not realizing that Netrebko wasn't even scheduled to sing it. So there I was, thinking that, while the opera is widely ridiculed (this is an opera in which the heroine, after all, goes mad not once, but twice), I love it. But the performance was so hatefully clueless that by intermission even I couldn't remember why.

If I were to try to explain, we would have to look at the scene in Act I between Elvira and her uncle Giorgio--or, more properly, the stalwart Puritan commander Sir Giorgio Walton, who is much closer to her than her father, Sir Giorgio's brother, the magisterial Lord Gualtiero Walton. Unbeknownst to Elivra, Uncle Giorgio has a story to tell her, a story of almost unimaginable courage, far exceeding any bravery he has ever demonstrated on the battlefield. No, he has done something he's never done in his life: stood up to his brother.

Elvira is about to be married to the Puritan stalwart Sir Riccardo Forth. Lord Gualtiero has promised her hand, and the wedding is set for this very day. Elvira, alas, is in love with Lord Arturo Talbot--"alas," because that's an impossible match, Arturo being Catholic. Nevertheless, Sir Giorgio has gone to his brother to persuade him to allow the unthinkable. It is, for him, the story of a lifetime, and he's damn well going to tell it for all it's worth, except that Elvira, once she understands the nature of her uncle's story, only wants to know one thing: What happened? It's a scene of almost comically heart-rending delicacy: Elvira trying to race her uncle along to the denouement, Giorgio using the form of the musical stanzas to force the story back to the way he means to tell it.

I don't even remember who sang Sir Giorgio with Sills at City Opera (Richard T. Gill, perhaps? in the pretty decent recording made around this time it's Paul Plishka), but I do remember her playing the scene for all its considerable worth, with her surge of hope as she realizes what her uncle has done for her but can't control her need to find out how it came out. Finally we learn that Lord Gualtiero, told that his daughter, if forced to marry Sir Riccardo, will die, at first held firm, insisting that he had promised him Elvira's hand. But Giorgio, no doubt shaking in his boots, stood his ground, and in the end his brother came around. And just as Giorgio reveals this, from outside we hear the hunting horns sounding a fanfare and the chorus of Puritan soldiers heralding the arrival of Elvira's beloved Arturo.

I know it sounds hokey in the synopsizing, but in the doing--provided it's done with real conviction and sincerity--it can be magical. Conviction and sincerity were qualities that usually figured in Sills's work--and in Puritani she went on to float her great aria "Son vergin vezzosa" with a freshness and hope that made Elvira for once real.

A relatively recent addition to the Sills discography is a video recording of a performance that has circulated for decades in the audio underground: the 1969 concert performance of the original version of Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos given by Erich Leinsdorf and the Boston Symphony, in which Sills sang the significantly more difficult original version of one of the operatic repertory's most challenging coloratura showpiece roles, Zerbinetta.

We should also take note of her post-career career. She had a long and not entirely run running City Opera, then mostly she kept getting dragged back into fund-raising wars for musical institutions dear to her. Obviously she was a formidable fund-raiser, and much as she may have hated getting dragged back into it, she doesn't seem to have been able to say no. Of course there was also a lot of TV work--and a lot of charity work.

You get the feeling she didn't like letting people down.