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<text>
<title>
(1970s) Beverly Sills:The Fastest Voice Alive
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1970s Highlights
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
TIME Magazine
November 22, 1971
Beverly Sills: The Fastest Voice Alive
</hdr>
<body>
<p> It was a crisis in the Brooklyn house hold of Morris
Silverman. Ten-year-old Belle had announced that she wanted to
become an opera star, "not an opera singer, but a star." Papa
was appalled. He had not objected to the piano and singing
lessons for little Belle, or "Bubbles" as the family called her.
He had not even objected when she sang on the radio with Uncle
Bob Emory's Rainbow House, and later on the Major Bowes Capital
Family Hour. After all, this was the era of Shirley Temple.
</p>
<p> But a professional singer? That was too much. Papa, the son
of a Rumanian Jewish immigrant, had worked his way up during
the depression to become a district assistant manager for the
Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. Loving but stern, he was the
kind of patriarch who had never even seen the inside of his
wife's kitchen. He had never seen the inside of the vocal world
either, but he knew what he thought of it. He ruled: "Bubbles
is going to college and become a teacher." It was Mama, the one
behind the lessons and the radio appearances, who stood fast.
"The two boys will go to college and be smart," she said. "This
one is going to be an opera singer."
</p>
<p> A Late Bloomer. And so it came to pass. The two boys went
to college, one to become an obstetrician on Long Island and
the other the president of a publishing firm in Indianapolis.
And Bubbles? Bubbles did indeed become an opera star, and a
smart one at that. She become, in fact, one of the biggest opera
stars the U.S. has ever produced. She sang leading roles at the
world's great opera houses, from La Scala to Covent Garden to
San Francisco, commanded top fees of $10,000 for concert
performances and made recordings that turned into classical
bestsellers. She became a $300,000-a-year, one-woman industry
and, at the same time, the finest singing actress since Maria
Callas. And because she did so as a thoroughly home-grown
talent, she revolutionized the U.S. opera scene. In short, she
became Beverly Sills.
</p>
<p> The transformation did not happen quickly. Beverly was 37
years old when she broke through to international prominence in
a 1966 production of Handel's Julius Caesar at the New York City
Opera. She was 40 when she achieved La Scala. But, having
bloomed late, she is at least blooming the way she does
everything else--exuberantly. Her career surges ahead with
ever growing momentum. Her itinerary looks like an airline route
map, as she crisscrosses the globe to meet this year's schedule
of more than 100 operatic, concert and recital appearances. To
friends who urge her to slow down, she shrugs: "I'm already 42,
what am I saving it for?"
</p>
<p> This month alone, she has already performed a trilogy of
operatic queens at the New York City Opera that amply confirms
her own regal gifts: Elizabeth I on Donizetti's Roberto Devereux,
Shemakha in Rimsky-Korsakov's Le Coq d'Or, and Cleopatra in
Julius Caesar. Starting this week she and the New York City
Opera will recreate all three during a three-week guest stand
in Los Angeles (planned for next spring is a new production by
Beverly and the company of another Donizetti queen, Maria
Stuarda. Early next month, she will give two performances of
Lucia di Lammermoor in New Orleans, then fly to Israel for a
month-long concert tour. After that, her appointment book lists
dates as far ahead as 1975.
</p>
<p> Has Beverly Sills left Bubbles Silverman behind? Far from
it. What might be called the Bubbles dimension in Beverly Sills
is the leaven that, added to her enormous talents, makes her the
extraordinary personality and professional she is. It keeps her
the least pretentious of prima donnas--earthy, quick-witted,
a little bit kooky. It gives her a natural, womanly radiance
that suffuses any room or opera house she is in.
</p>
<p> Moreover, it generates a zest and determination in the face
of suffering, and she has known deep suffering. Her generous,
open nature is also a vulnerable one; she has had to learn to
steel it with stoicism. "People plan and God laughs," she says.
But she laughs too--a billowing, enfolding laugh that is all
the more warming because it is born not of frivolity but of
grit.
</p>
<p> Beverly habitually arrives at rehearsals with her part
fully memorized, her score shut and her mind open. "I can ask
her to try anything onstage," marvels Tito Capobianco, who has
directed most of her successes at City Opera and whom Beverly
regards as "her" director. She mugs, sings lying down, and once,
in Buenos Aires, even danced the tango with six Argentine
stagehands. All in the cause of easing tensions and clearing the
way for creative work. "Beverly, was that an F and G in your
part?" Conductor Aldo Ceccato once asked during a snarl-up in
a recording session. "It could have been a K and L, the way I
sang it," she replied.
</p>
<p> When she is not singing, she is talking. Speech, no less
than song, pours out of her with the impetus of a natural force--gossip and insights, shopping lists and philosophy, sly jokes
and probing questions. Once, her physician told her that she
needed a tetanus shot. "What will happen if I don't take it?"
she asked. "You might not be able to talk for a few days," he
said. "Quick," she cried, "give me the shot!"
</p>
<p> Never one for warming up before performances (I don't want
to leave the best part of me back in the dressing room").
Beverly has no fussy regimen for protecting her voice. The mere
sight of her casually munching an apple between entrances would
be enough to give most sopranos throat constriction for days.
Stage fright is unknown to her; well-wishers, including many
young people, throng her dressing room before as well as after
a performance, and a relaxed Beverly makes small talk and long-
distance phone calls right up until curtain time. "She has a
completely unusual degree of security and professionalism," says
Conductor Erich Leinsdorf.
</p>
<p> Where this really shows up is in her ability to cope when
things go wrong onstage. Last month, while singing under the
baton of City Opera Director Julius Rudel, she inadvertently
skipped a few bars and hit a high A too soon. "I held up my
hand, and she new immediately what the problem was," recalls
Rudel. "So she held the note until I lowered my hand eight bars
later. To make anything clear to her, a finger, an eyebrow is
enough."
</p>
<p> Even Beverly has her breaking point, however. Once, at a
rehearsal in Manhattan, a conductor reprimanded her: "Don't
interrupt me when I'm speaking to somebody else." Beverly said:
"I'll go you one better, I won't sing when you're conducting,"
and stomped offstage. During the preparations for her La Scala
appearance, she climaxed an argument with the wardrobe mistress
by snatching a pair of scissors and snipping a costume into
pieces. The on-looking cast and chorus burst into applause, an
Italian tribute to a flare of real temperament.
</p>
<p> Beverly is proud of her musicianship, partly because it is
self-earned. "I'm very good," she says unself-consciously. "When
you do something for 30 years you get pretty proficient at it."
Those 30 years go all the way back to a now famous singing radio
commercial: "Rinso White, Rinso Bright, happy little washday
song." That was Bubbles--or rather the young Beverly Sills,
a stage name that was suggested by an agent for its theatrical
ring. By now, Beverly knew where she was going; ahead of her was
an apprenticeship given to few singers of any kind, much less
to opera singers. Primped up in big bows and crisp pink dresses
by Mama (who periodically brewed her own reddener for Bubbles'
auburn locks and brushed it in with a toothbrush), she set off
to sing on the radio, at ladies' luncheons and bar mitzvahs.
</p>
<p> At 16, billed as the "youngest prima donna in captivity,"
she joined the touring J.J. Shubert operetta company, starring
in Gilbert and Sullivan the first season and in The Merry Widow
and The Countess Maritza the second. More dubious engagements
followed on the borscht circuit and to a private after hours
club in Manhattan, where she wheeled a piano around the room and
performed light classics for tips that sometimes totaled $150
a night. In response to Papa's pleas that she at least devote
herself to grand opera, she signed with the Charles Wagner Opera
Co., a provincial touring unit. Opera it was; grand it
definitely was not. Beverly soon was riding up to 300 miles
between dates in a rickety bus, acquiring stiff joints, bags
under the eyes--and a pot of poker winnings. "I once sang 63
consecutive Michaelas in one-night stands of Carmen," she
recalls. "I will never sing Michaela again, for anyone,
anywhere."
</p>
<p> Success Without the Met. Finally, in 1953, at the age of
24, she made her big-time debut with the San Francisco Opera,
singing the secondary female role in Boito's Mefistofele. By
that time Papa had died, but Mama was there, having flown out
and taken a hotel room with a kitchenette so that she could cook
Beverly's dinner before each performance. Two years later, after
seven unsuccessful auditions, Beverly finally joined the New
York City Opera, beginning the stint as a highly regarded
utility singer that eventually led to her emergence in 1966.
Conspicuously missing from the Sills dossier, then as now, was
the name of the Metropolitan Opera. "I happened in a different
way from Caruso, or Price, or any of the others," says Beverly.
"I made it without the Met. I am a revolutionary."
</p>
<p> The revolution she started has shifted the balance of U.S.
operatic power somewhat away from the Met toward the smaller
companies that shared in her development. It has also paved the
way for future young American singers to build a career on
native grounds without resorting to the borrowed prestige of
Europe or the Met. Norman Treigle, the superb bass baritone who
rose with Beverly in the New York City Opera, says, "Both of us
were busting our cans in the beginning. We made a sort of pact
that we were going to show what the American singer could do."
</p>
<p> What Beverly has shown since 1966 is that an American
singer can take up where Maria Callas left off. Callas, now
virtually retired, had a soaring, flexible voice that projected
a matchless dramatic intensity. In the 1950s, among other roles,
she almost singlehanded revived the ornate bel canto repertory
of Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini. (Bel canto, literally
"beautiful singing," more properly applies to the whole vocal
art of making the fiendishly difficult sound easy.) It is this
repertory that Beverly and her chief coloratura rival, Joan
Sutherland, have since then mastered. Beverly comes by the bel
canto tradition not only through her admiration for Callas, but
through years of study with the late Estelle Liebling. Miss
Liebling was, professionally speaking, a direct descendant of
the 19th century's Mathilde Marchesi, the influential voice
teacher of such fabled bel canto sopranos as Nellie Malba and
Emma Eames.
</p>
<p> The Sills voice is a rich, supple flute; it is precise, a
little light, and floats with ease in the stratosphere above
high C. More than anything, it is agile. "The unique thing about
Beverly's voice is that she can move it faster than anybody else
alive," says Conductor Thomas Schippers. Soprano Leontyne Price
is "flabbergasted at how many millions of things she can do with
a written scale."
</p>
<p> Desperate Need for an Audience. Beverly does not have the
powerful top notes for roles like Tosca or Cio-Cio-San in Madama
Butterfly, and particularly not for Wagnerian roles like
Brunnhilde in Gotterdammerung. But she is ideally suited to bel
canto, and to the French lyric romanticism of Gounod and
Massenet. In these areas she is unbeatable, and even among the
diverse other sopranos in this age of great sopranos--Birgit
Nilsson, Sutherland, Price, Marilyn Horne, Monserrat Caballe--she more than holds her own.
</p>
<p> There is more to an opera performance than voice, of
course. Beverly rightly describes herself as a singing actress,
with equal stress on each word. That is why her live
performances will always be more exciting than her recordings,
successful as those recordings may be (the recent four-LP set
of Massenet's Manon has sold 25,000 copies in a market where
sales of 10,000 for a single LP are considered substantial).
"I'm a visual performer," she says. "I have to act, use facial
expressions, get mood changes across. It's hard to share any of
this with a microphone. I need an audience desperately."
</p>
<p> While preparing a performance of Bellini's Norma for Sarah
Caldwell's Boston Opera last spring, Beverly worked especially
hard on ways to indicate that Norma suffers from epileptic
seizures. When she made her entrance in rehearsal, reports Miss
Caldwell, "She did such a convincing job that several stagehands
rushed out to help her up, thinking she was ill."
</p>
<p> Acting as compelling as that comes partly from shrewd
instinct, partly from careful planning. Beverly, whose IQ is
155, reads voluminously into the backgrounds of her roles and
thinks them through imaginatively. Behind her pigeon-toed
bumpkin in the first act of Manon, for example, lies this Sills
analysis: "She was born with a good bosom and a shock of unusual
colored hair, whatever the color. She probably has gone barefoot
all week except Sundays. Mama had probably caught her in the
hayloft with one of the farm hands and decided that this kid is
too much for her to handle. So she sends her to the convent."
</p>
<p> Dual Tragedy. Beverly is also quick to sense which roles
are unsuitable for her. Of the Queen of the Night in Mozart's
The Magic Flute, she says: "I threw out that broad very quickly.
I realized that she wasn't for me when I realized that I could
address 250 Christmas cards in my dressing room between her
first act aria and her second act aria."
</p>
<p> For Roberto Devereux, Beverly's researches convinced her
that at the time of the opera's action, Elizabeth I would have
been a much older woman that is usually portrayed. Appearing at
rehearsal one day made up as a 60-year-old, Beverly persuaded
the company that she was right--including Director Capobianco.
Onstage, that makeup lends a harsh poignance to the climactic
moment when Elizabeth, her voice dry and pinched, sentences her
recalcitrant lover Essex to death.
</p>
<p> Beverly's acting did not always have such bite, such depth.
Where did it come from? Age and experience can account for some
of it, but not all. To explain it, many of her friends go back
to a story that began in Cleveland in 1955. Beverly was making
her first tour with the New York City Opera. She met Peter B.
Greenbough, a tall, burly Boston Brahmin who was financial
editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a paper partly owned by
his family. Peter could do nothing right, or so it seemed. First
he winked at her. "My God," thought Beverly, "that's not a very
novel approach." Next he sent her a mash note on the inside of
a matchbook cover. Then, dining her in his 25-room house on Lake
Erie, he lit a fire, but forgot to open the chimney flue; the
smoke routed them both, coughing and wheezing. "Mama," reported
Beverly when she got home. "I think I've met a man I finally can
marry."
</p>
<p> There were complications: Peter was still in the process
of divorcing his first wife, by whom he had had three daughters,
one mentally retarded. "Also," said Beverly, saving the worst
for last, "he's not Jewish." Mama wept and cried out: "Why does
everything have to happen to you?" But soon Peter, who is
descended from John Alden on both sides of his family, was
plying Mama with books, flowers and Yissishisms--"A toast to
MGM, meine ganze Mishpocheh [all my family]." In 1956 the couple
were married in Estelle Liebling's living room, standing on the
same spot on the rug where Bubbles had stood for so many vocal
lessons.
</p>
<p> Their daughter Meredith ("Muffy") was born three years
later, and Beverly eagerly curtailed her operatic schedule to
spend more time at home. WIthin a year, she and Peter began to
suspect what was confirmed just before Muffy's second birthday:
the child was almost totally deaf. In a piece of Sophoclean
irony, Muffy would never hear her mother's singing.
</p>
<p> At almost the same time, Peter and Beverly had a son, Peter
Jr. ("Bucky"), who they learned was mentally retarded. Beverly
took off a full year from performing to work with Muffy in a
school for the deaf and try to come to terms with her dual
tragedy. "The first question you ask," she says, "is a self-
pitying `Why me?' Then it changes to a much bigger `Why them?'
It makes a whole difference in your attitude."
</p>
<p> The Joy of Performance. From New York, Julius Rudel tried
to coax Beverly back to work with chatty "Dear Bubbela" letters.
Finally he wrote more formally, pointing out that she still had
a contract. "I told her to go back," says Peter. "I said it
would be good therapy." Reluctantly, Beverly complied. Muffy was
making progress anyway, learning to lip-read and talk. Bucky,
however, was a hopeless case. When he was six, Beverly made the
excruciating decision to put him in the same institution in
Massachusetts where Peter's retarded daughter was already
lodged. In the same day, she sang all three heroine's in
Puccini's trio of one-act operas, Il Trittico, at the City
Opera. Says Director Frank Corsaro: "It was the only hysterical
performance I have ever seen her give." Since then, says Rudel,
"She has matured so greatly. While basically she has not
changed, she has become much more profound. And yet, you always
feel the joy of the performance."
</p>
<p> The joy is always there with Beverly, whether of the
performance or of some ordinary daily activity. "Hang-ups don't
exist for my sister," says Brother Stanley, the publisher. "If
there is a hang-up, she'll solve it. That's the key to her."
Today Beverly and Peter, who long ago gave up journalism to help
with her career, have virtually resumed the normal, amiable
chaos of their early life together. They have a nine-room
apartment overlooking Manhattan's Central Park ("Isaac Stern
always says he lives on top of Beverly Sills, because he's on
a floor above us"). There they entertain (Peter is a graduate
of the Cordon Bleu cooking school), play bridge (Peter is a
tournament champion), or just relax (Beverly can do a crossword
puzzle in 20 minutes, in ink).
</p>
<p> If their relationship has been strained by the something
that, in Beverly's words, "is basically troubled between us
genetically," they do not show it. They still have their private
jokes and rituals, such as when Peter kisses Beverly's cheek
before she goes onstage and they both whisper their favorite
good-luck word: "Merde." Beverly has learned to live with the
occasional insinuations that Peter's wealth has floated her
career. Once a music publication reported that Peter had bought
Westminster Records so that Beverly could record anything she
wanted. "I wrote a letter to the editor," she says, "and said
it wasn't Westminster Records he bought, it was Westminster
Abbey."
</p>
<p> Sometimes, says Beverly, "you try to be all things to all
people. Well, a great tragedy in your life makes you decide that
it's not so necessary to please everybody. Now I can afford to
be selfish." An example of what she means by selfishness is
deliberately raising her fees so high that, in some cases,
engagements will fall through, leaving her free to be with her
family.
</p>
<p> Work to Be Done. At home, she and Peter try to bolster
Muffy's self-confidence by sending her on errands to buy hard-
to-pronounce items like toasted-almond ice cream. Beverly once
arranged for Muffy to be in a procession of candle bearers
during the death scene in Lucia. As Beverly lay "dead" in the
scene, she found that her view was blocked by Raimondo, the
chaplain. She stage-whispered: "Raimondo! Move your ass! I can't
see Muffy!"
</p>
<p> There are still moments of piercing sadness. Such as when
one of Beverly's recordings is on the phonograph, and Muffy puts
her fingertips to the speaker to "feel" the sound. Or when
Beverly grows uncharacteristically abstracted, her voice
trailing off, the brightness fading from her face. Then, as
those around her know, she is probably thinking ahead to one of
the monthly visits she and Peter make to Bucky (whenever she
travels she wears two ring watches, one set to local time, the
other to eastern time, so that she can think what Bucky is doing
at any given hour). But such moments are over quickly, because
Beverly shakes them off firmly; there is work to be done.
</p>
<p> Loyalty to Past and Future. Work indeed is something of an
escape from those moments, and this may be one reason why
Beverly drives herself so unremittingly in her career. For her,
performing is not only a fulfillment of her aspirations to
artistic excellence, not only an outlet for her avidly
competitive desire to come out on top, but also a balm. Tito
Capobianco has always been struck by the way she actually seems
to yearn for the stage. Mama knows why. "When Beverly gets
onstage," she says," All her worries are behind her."
</p>
<p> Goran Gentele, who will succeed Rudolf Bing next year as
general manager of the Met, recently took Beverly to lunch to
discuss the possibility of her singing with the Met in the
seasons ahead. It must be a tempting offer for someone who may
not have all that many years of singing left. But, says Beverly,
"I'll be delighted to be a guest at the Metropolitan, but just
that, just a guest."
</p>
<p> She is fiercely loyal to the New York City Opera, as she
is to all the people who gave her support when she needed it.
Two years ago, Beverly was approached with flattering offers by
a top-ranking New York manager--the same manager who, a decade
earlier, had kept her cooling her heels in his outer office for
2 1/2 hours before telling her he could not use her. Now Beverly
cut him off with one clean stroke. "I'm not interested in
working with anybody," she said, "who keeps a singer waiting 2
1/2 hours."
</p>
<p> Loyalty is a cardinal virtue with Beverly. Nowhere does he
show it more strongly than with her family, particularly with
Mama. When she made her debut at La Scala, long a dream of hers
and Mama's she wrote a postcard home that said: "We made it,
Mom. You and I." There, in seven words, is the whole story of
their remarkable bond.
</p>
<p> All of Beverly's recent experience--her return to work,
her resumption of life--amounts to a kind of loyalty not only
to her future but also to her past. She disavows nothing and
rejects nothing, despite the pain it may have brought. That,
after all, is Beverly's way of keeping faith with Bubbles. "You
know, there's a big difference between being a happy woman and
a cheerful woman," she explains. "A happy woman doesn't have
any cares at all. A cheerful woman might have loads of cares,
but she goes on in spite of it all. Happy I'll never be, but
I'm as cheerful as I can be."
</p>
<p>Sutherland: A Separate Greatness
</p>
<p> Besides Beverly Sills, the other leading heiress to Maria
Callas' artistic legacy is the Australian coloratura soprano
Joan Sutherland. Sutherland, 45, sings many of the same roles
as Sills and, like Sills, was a late bloomer--she burst onto
the international scene with a Lucia di Lammermoor at Covent
Garden in 1959. Otherwise the two are a study in contrasts:
separate conjunctions of greatness. Each has her passionate
following. Ask a Sutherland admirer about Sills' voice and he
might say, "Pretty but thin." Ask a Sillsian about Sutherland
and he might retort, "Beautiful but boring." Still, all would
probably agree with Conductor Thomas Schippers that "We haven't
had the luxury of comparing two such singers for 50 years."
</p>
<p> Sutherland began by thinking of herself as a dramatic
soprano. She feared high notes until her husband, Conductor
Richard Bonynge, tricked her into extending her upper voice
by playing her music in higher keys. Originally bright and
youthful-sounding, her voice darkened as she transformed herself
into a coloratura. There is a suggestion of Callas' famous middle
register in Sutherland's vocal center--a tone that sounds as
if the singer were singing into the neck of a resonant bottle.
</p>
<p> Today the Sutherland voice towers like a natural wonder,
unique as Niagara or Mount Everest. Sills' voice is made of more
ordinary stuff; what she shares with Callas is an abandon in
hurling herself into fiery emotional music and a willingness to
sacrifice vocal beauty for dramatic effect. Sutherland deals in
vocal velvet, Sills in emotional dynamite. Sutherland's voice
is much larger, but its plush monochrome robs it of carrying
power in dramatic moments. Sills' multicolored voice, though
smaller, projects better and has a cutting edge that can slice
through the largest orchestra and chorus. Sometimes, indeed, it
verges on shrillness.
</p>
<p> On the coloratura high wire, both singers emerge as
phenomenal. Each has staggering facility in florid runs, trills,
leaps and arpeggios. Both have been accused of overdecorating
their music, though each plans embellishments so tastefully and
executes them so brilliantly that only stringent purists object.
</p>
<p> In slow, legato music, Sills has a superior sense of rhythm
and clean attack to keep things moving: Sutherland's more
flaccid beat and her style of gliding from note to note often
turn song into somnolence. Sills' diction in English, French and
Italian is superb; Sutherland's vocal placement produces mushy
diction in any language, but makes possible an even more
seamless beauty of tone than is available to Sills.
</p>
<p> Sills is both a born actress and a highly developed one; her
keen awareness of what every move looks like from the auditorium
enables her to capitalize on even her shortcomings (which
include a tall and outsize frame). Swinging her generous hips
through an Oriental dance in Rimsky-Korsakov's Le Coq d'Or, she
even looks sexy in a Mae West sort of way. Sutherland (with a
equally tall and outsize frame) has worked hard to make herself
into an acceptable actress, but her stage temperament is
essentially a stolid one. Usually she gets her best effects by
wearing flowing capes and tunics and standing magisterially
still whenever she can.
</p>
<p> In private, Sutherland is a mother (of a teen-age son) and
a woman with a boisterous sense of humor. Less competitive than
Sills, and hindered by a history of back ailments, she ranges
out from her home in Switzerland on a schedule of engagements
that is merely busy, not frenetic. Her career is directed, her
voice guided, and many of her performances conducted by her
husband.
</p>
<p> On a concert stage, Sutherland appears imposing and
grandiose, like a friendly monarch. Stills strides onto a stage
bobbing her head and grinning, like an elegant shepherdess.
Where Sutherland sails into a fast aria with grand nonchalance,
Sills is likely to bounce up and down with infectious self-
enjoyment. Sutherland usually finishes with a smile and a regal
bow, Sills with a somewhat defiant toss of her head as if to
say: "There! Top that!" So far, nobody has been able to top
either of them.
</p>
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