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If you grew up loving opera in the United States in the 1970s, your American diva of the period was without question soprano Beverly Sills. You read her “self portrait” Bubbles, you collected her recordings, you watched her on television, and you heard her sing live. She sang extensively in the American hinterlands, so you didn’t have to live in New York to see her onstage.

Sills became a phenomenon in the mid-1970s, and the most phenomenal thing about her was that Americans who’d never set foot in an opera house knew about her. Abetted by a brilliant press agent, Edgar Vincent, Sills made herself into a household name. So household that some of her recordings could be ordered from the Columbia Record Club that advertised with an insert in the middle of every issue of the TV Guide that was ubiquitous on 1970s American coffee tables. The story of Sills’ disabled children, her work for the March of Dimes, her bright red hair and her exclusion from the Metropolitan Opera were well known to seemingly the entire American public. She had pushed herself into a spotlight that hadn’t existed before her: Sills was “America’s Queen of Opera”.

Sills was a specifically American phenomenon because her career was squarely founded upon American core values. She was, first of all, completely American, born and bred in Brooklyn, taught by an American teacher in Estelle Liebling, and her path to fame ran through the American provinces. Even as America’s Queen of Opera, Sills toured the country indefatigably; over the course of her career, she performed in 37 states as well as the District of Columbia.

She made it big without the dandified Metropolitan Opera and its bias towards European singers. Her home base was the New York City Opera, the very mission of which was to provide New York with a people’s opera with a strongly American slant, precisely in contradistinction to the international and expensive Met. Sills was a hard-working underdog who made good only after a long period of obscurity and hard work. We Americans have always liked improbable success stories. She was never glamourous (she never learned to dress), and remained throughout a smiling woman of the people. When she, as she often did, appeared on talk shows, she was downright folksy. Compare that to the highfalutin’ intolerably pretentious persona another American, Maria Callas, projected when she was being interviewed. Sills was the opposite of the American divas who’d pretend they didn’t know the English word for something.

Furthermore, Sills embodied that most American of virtues: individualism. She spurned European influences, never mind that opera is a European invention. Her approaches to her roles dismissed tradition. She collaborated with Roland Gagnon, a coach who himself was very much an American individualist, and developed a style that was uniquely American.

In a way, Sills embodied a Wild West approach to opera. She made her own laws. Imagining her as a coloratura gunslinger isn’t all that difficult. She basically did shoot her way to the top. I can easily imagine her drawing a Peacemaker on a conductor who objected to one of Gagnon’s weirder cadenzas. Although even Sills herself would have admitted that the role was unsuited to her vocally, on the level of temperament, Minnie in La Fanciulla del West would have been a perfect fit for her.

Although her countless opera, concert and recital appearances throughout the country played a large role in popularizing her as America’s greatest home-grown diva, Sills had an even better tool for self-promotion at her disposal: television. Live televised opera was in its infancy in the late 1970s, and no singer was televised more than Sills. Over a span of six years, PBS audiences got to see her in Manon, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, The Turk in Italy, The Daughter of the Regiment, La Traviata, Roberto Devereux, The Merry Widow and Don Pasquale. Her gala farewell from the stage of the New York State Theater was also telecast; it constituted something of a national event.

Compare those nine telecasts to the single live opera PBS televised during the period with Joan Sutherland: Don Giovanni during the second season of Live from the Met.

Sills’ television campaign ran beyond operatic fare. She did a turn on The Muppet Show, was a frequent guest on the talk show circuit (she even hosted the Tonight Show on two of Johnny Carson’s many evenings off) and for two seasons hosted her own series of Sunday morning interview programs, Lifestyles with Beverly Sills. Sills was practically inescapable. No wonder everyone had heard of her.

The Sills career divides itself into five segments: her precocious childhood years, the galley years (1951 through 1966), the brief artistic prime (1966 through 1970 and possibly into 1971), the years of superstardom (1972 through 1977) and what amounted to a four-year farewell tour (1977 through her retirement in 1980.)

Sills began singing as a child, and was still a child when she began serious vocal studies with Estelle Liebling, a pupil of the fabled 19^th century teacher Mathilde Marchesi. Her many years of work with Liebling equipped Sills with a formidable and rock-solid vocal technique. The registers were rigorously and properly blended. The upper range extended to the F over high C. Her breath control was remarkable, her legato flawless, and her ethereal pianissimi were worthy of the epithet. She had a trill that a bird would envy and a facility in coloratura that can justifiably be described as spectacular.

The career was slow in starting, but, by 1955, she had at least made it as far as the New York City Opera, the company with which she would be most closely associated for the rest of her career. The City Opera wasn’t the Met, but it was New York. Sills made her debut as Rosalinde in Die Fledermaus, and spent the next 11 years as the operatic answer to a utility player. During that time she did score one major personal success: the title role of Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe. To get an idea of how perfectly Moore’s high-lying lyric lines suited her voice, consider this video in which (in the presence of the composer) she sings Baby Doe’s Willow Song. The pianissimo high D in the reprise is about as ravishing as any sound emitted by the human throat has a right to be.

Baby Doe didn’t make her a star, however. That came with the City Opera’s move to its glitzy new Lincoln Center home, the New York State Theater. For the company’s official opening night in the new house on September 27, 1966, Sills assumed the role of Cleopatra in Handel’s Giulio Cesare. Stories abound as to the lengths to which Sills had had to go to get the role away from Phyllis Curtin, but one can argue that the ends justified the means. Having given the performance of her life, at age 37 and after eleven years of singing opera regularly in New York, Sills became an overnight sensation.

Her career immediately skyrocketed. A good way to chart its path is to consider the succession of roles Sills sang with the City Opera up until her retirement in 1980. The same season as Cleopatra, she sang the Queen of the Night in a new production of The Magic Flute (with Curtin still cast as Cleopatra, that was supposed to have been Sills’ plum assignment for the inaugural State Theater season), along with Donna Anna, Konstanze in The Abduction from the Seraglio, and the three heroines in The Tales of Hoffmann, a specialty act of hers that New York had first heard during NYCO’s last season at the City Center.

Although she kept Konstanze, the Queen of the Night (briefly) and (of course) Cleopatra in her repertoire, and (as a stunt) sang the three leads in Puccini’s Il trittico on one evening in 1967, she would thereafter appear almost exclusively in new productions mounted especially for her, nearly always with Tito Capobianco as director and his wife Gigi Denda as his assistant. The Capobiancos, along with Gagnon as coach and Vincent as PR man, helped to create what today would be called the Sills brand. José Varona’s costumes helped coalesce the visual aspect of the brand. Sills brought her considerable gifts to the brand as well, but, without this team behind her, her success would not have been what it was.

The series of new productions at the City Opera was as follows (the names in parentheses are the productions’ directors, set designers and costume designers):

• fall 1966: Giulio Cesare (Capobianco/Lee/Varona)
• fall 1966: The Magic Flute (Montresor/Montresor/Montresor)
• fall 1967: Le Coq d’Or (Capobianco/Lee/Varona)
• spring 1968: Manon (Capobianco/Eck/Varona)
• fall 1968: Faust (Corsaro/Lee/Varona)
• fall 1969: Lucia di Lammermoor (Capobianco/Eck/Varona)
• fall 1970: Roberto Devereux (Capobianco/Lee/Varona)
• spring 1972: Maria Stuarda (Capobianco/Lee/Varona)
• fall 1972: Les Contes d’Hoffmann (Capobianco/Lee/Varona)
• fall 1973: Anna Bolena (Capobianco/Lee/Varona)
• winter 1973/spring 1974: I Puritani (Capobianco/Toms/Toms)
• fall 1975: The Daughter of the Regiment (Donnell/Montresor/Montresor)
• spring 1976: Lucrezia Borgia (Capobianco/Bardon/Hall)
• fall 1976: Il Barbiere di Siviglia (Caldwell/Pond & Senn/Skalicky)  
• spring 1978: The Merry Widow (Capobianco/Toms/Toms)
• fall 1978: The Turk in Italy (Capobianco/Conklin/Conklin)
• fall 1979: La Loca (Capobianco/Vanarelli/Vanarelli)

Note the absence of a new production in 1977, when, instead, Sills stepped into revivals of two productions not originally made on her. She sang six performances of Louise and five of Adele in Die Fledermaus. I may be reconstructing events incorrectly, but I believe that these performances were fairly late-in-the-game replacements for a planned production of Bellini’s Il Pirata. Singing the role of Imogene would have been impossible given Sills’ vocal circumstances in 1977, whence the choice of two far, far less vocally challenging roles. The 1978 production of The Turk in Italy – an ensemble opera that made fewer demands on what was left of Sills’ voice – was the guise in which the aborted Pirata production finally made it onto the stage.

There was a further late 1970s project that failed to make it onstage. City Opera’s artistic director Julius Rudel’s memoirs record that Sills, no doubt in a valedictory mindset, was to have sung the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavailier with the company in 1978. The ridiculous idea was abandoned, and the planned Rosenkavalier was replaced by borrowing San Diego Opera’s handsome Merry Widow. It was a very wise decision.

Although Sills sang Violetta at the City Center, it wasn’t one of her NYCO roles after the company’s move to Lincoln Center. In 1974, however, she did sing a single performance of Traviata, the opera being an emergency replacement for one of several performances of Medea that had to be cancelled when Maralin Niska went down for most of the season.

Sills often sang Violetta elsewhere during her years of superstardom, everywhere from Naples to Venice to the Met to San Francisco. Away from City Opera, she also sang Pamira in L’assedio di Corinto (for her La Scala and Met debuts), Ginevra in Handel’s Ariodante (Washington), Norina in Don Pasquale (the Met, Boston, Houston), Thaïs (San Francisco and the Met), Norma (Boston, Hartord Newark), a return to Rosalinde in Fledermaus as a farewell vehicle (Houston and Boston), and, lost in Boston, I Capuleti e i Montecchi and Rigoletto.

Many of these non-City Opera roles were the roles Sills sang at the Met. As she obviously couldn’t sing the same roles in two adjacent theaters with two very different price scales, other roles had to be found for Sills to sing for the more prestigious company. Rarely were they as interesting as what she was singing concurrently across the plaza.

The single most important turn the Sills career path took was the shift into the bel canto repertoire. She sang her first performance of Lucia di Lammermoor in Fort Worth in 1968, and never looked back. One has to realize, however, that Sills had never sung a bel canto opera onstage prior to those Fort Worth Lucias. She didn’t attack the repertoire that made her famous until she was 39 and had been singing professionally for nearly two decades.

The result of the foolhardy switch to bel canto was unfortunate and swift: she ruined her voice. The key date here is October 15, 1970, the night of her first performance of Elisabetta in Roberto Devereux, a dramatic soprano assignment that was completely beyond her means and forced her to push her instrument mercilessly. As a result, one can date her prime from the night of her first Cleopatra on September 27, 1966 to the Devereux premiere. That is perhaps being a bit harsh: the bloom managed to remain on the instrument for perhaps another year, but, by 1972, the voice was noticeably not what it had been even a year previously.

That’s not to say that every Sills performance after October 15, 1970 was bad. On the contrary, Sills was the kind of tireless trouper who always gave a performance, regardless of her vocal estate. I first saw Sills when I was nine (I had a strange childhood) as Elisabetta in Roberto Devereux in 1973. I actually have some dim memories of that performance, but the Sills I saw, loved and remember is Sills vintage 1978 through 1980. I remember those performances extremely well, although, as a starry-eyed teenager, I may have thought more of them than objectivity warranted. (That said, I do recall being in the elevator at the San Diego Civic Theater during the second intermission of Fledermaus and pontificating adolescently that, while Sills, appearing as Adele opposite Joan Sutherland’s Rosalinde, had no voice left, no one could have sung a better Laughing Song.)

Sills only went into comedy when the state of her voice forced her to seek out less demanding vehicles. She sang Norina 30 times between 1978 and only 1980; she needed over seven years to rack up 21 performances of Marguerite. The problem is that, just as the bel canto repertoire didn’t suit her, neither did most of her comedy parts.

Although Sills had an expansive personality and a knack for getting laughs during her many talk show appearances, that sense of humor didn’t translate well to the operatic stage. She had an unfortunate tendency to overplay her comedic hand. Someone once remarked to me that Sills was a great tragedienne and a mediocre comedienne. He may have had something there; recall that Sills’ operatic reputation was based on her performances of serious roles like Cleopatra and Lucia. I saw Sills almost exclusively in comedy, and recall myself as having been particularly enchanted by her Norina. I can now admit that I was to a large degree delighted by Sills’ Norina because it was Sills, not because it was Norina. I laughed at the relentless mugging, and my strongest visual memory of the evening is Sills sitting down like a klutz with her legs apart in the second act. I’m slightly uncomfortable that I’d found it hilarious at the time. But what did I know? I was all of fourteen.

That Devereux when I was nine aside, the only serious role I saw Sills perform live was the title part in La Loca. The opera was hobbled by the fact that the composer, Gian Carlo Menotti, hadn’t finished writing it in time for either the world premiere in San Diego in the spring of 1979 or the New York premiere that fall. There just wasn’t any music, although I do recall that there was something about a number (three? four?) of “very handsome horses” at the very beginning of the opera that at least had a bit of a hook. The rest is a blank.

That didn’t prevent Sills, even in the absence of anything that could be called music, from giving one hell of a performance. In a word, she sold the piece, and I recall her as having been particularly affecting in her death scene. La Loca wasn’t great opera, and it wasn’t great Sills, but, if Sills’ Cleopatra, Manon and Lucia had been like her mad queen Juana, no wonder she exploded into superstardom.

While Sills was by far the most famous American opera singer of her generation in America, she was completely unsuccessful in imposing herself on the international operatic public. I recall an Italian friend asking me in 1984 about a record made by some strange American soprano who sang all kinds of weird cadenzas and ornaments. I knew he meant Sills’ Bellini and Donizetti arias record, which was a commonplace among American record collectors. For a young Italian opera fan, however, Sills was an obscure oddity.

(The cadenzas and ornamentation on that record are indeed bizarre and excessive. So much so that the album could more properly be titled Arias by Bellini, Donizetti and Roland Gagnon. It was very much the work of two American individualists operating outside of the Italian tradition.)

My friend was from Milan, and perhaps that is why he’d heard of Sills at all. Sills’ one important international credit, on which she dined out on for the rest of her career, was a new production of Rossini’s L’assedio di Corinto at La Scala in the spring of 1969. She appeared as a late replacement for a pregnant Renata Scotto, and scored a triumph in the role of Pamira. The follow-up engagement was another story. Brought in for three performances of Lucia (in another production designed for Renata Scotto), she failed to repeat her success of the year before, a fact she blamed in both her memoirs, the relentlessly cheerful Bubbles from 1976 and the acid-penned Beverly from 1987, on a merry-go-round of tenors and the casual way revivals were rehearsed and performed at La Scala. Sills was only one of several Lucias that season, and most certainly didn’t receive the attention that had come with a new production the year before. No doubt management’s expectation was that Sills would drop her Lucia into the existing framework, with just enough rehearsal time to make sure that she knew not to trip over the giant sofa in the first scene of act two. Sills didn’t take well to such treatment (compare it to what she was getting with the Capobiancos at City Opera) and blamed it for the foreshortening of her La Scala career.

I’d venture that there was another reason for those Lucias to have failed. While the oddity of Sills’ approach and Gagnon’s wildly excessive ornamentation were interesting and exciting in an opera like L’assedio di Corinto that no one knew, her arrogant disregard for the accepted Italian style must have annoyed an Italian audience when it came to Lucia. Practically no other opera in the Italian repertory has accrued a set of performing traditions as extensive as Lucia; ignoring those traditions was not going to play well in Milan. Sills’ eccentric ornaments must have grated on Italian ears: it was one thing to do an un-Italian Lucia at the City Opera or in the American hinterlands. Attempting one in the holy of holies of Italian opera was another story altogether.

Sills’ only other extended European engagement was a run of eight Lucias in London in the winter of 1970-71. This time, she blamed the performances’ lack of success on a Joan Sutherland cabal. The reality is more likely that the British public didn’t like Sills’ Lucia for reasons similar to those she faced in Milan. True, Sutherland’s Lucia deviated from Italian tradition in some ways, but those deviations were at least rooted in an existing tradition. Recall that Sutherland’s star-making 1959 Lucias were conducted by that doyen of the Italian repertoire, Tullio Serafin. If you knew Toti dal Monte’s Lucia (or even Callas’), you’d be able to make sense out of Sutherland’s performance. Sills, on the other hand, must have come off as just plain weird. British audiences could well have seen it as a performance stemming from some opera house in the Wild West.

And with good reason: that’s what Sills’ Lucia basically was. It is no coincidence that Sills sang the first of her 102 performances of Donizetti’s mad heroine in Fort Worth.

As for the rest of Europe, Sills’ career at the Vienna State Opera consisted of a single Queen of the Night in 1967. That puts her in the club of non-luminaries such as June Linden and Gisela Vivarelli whose Viennese careers also consisted of a single Queen of the Night.

Sills sang a single Violetta with success at the San Carlo in Naples in 1970. Although her memoirs make it seem as though this was a run of performances, it was in actuality a one-off that can be heard in its entirety on YouTube. She sang another one-off Traviata in Berlin, and three more Violettas in Venice two years later, but, a few scant concerts apart, that was it for Europe.

Passing over four performances in Mexico City (and one very late Rosina in Guanajuato), Sills did score a substantial success in Latin America’s most important opera house, the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. She sang short runs of Cleopatra, Manon and Lucia there, apparently with success (but note how her career there ended with Lucia.) Nonetheless, fifteen performances in Buenos Aires do not a glamourous international career make.

Even her American career was astonishingly parochial. For a supposedly world-famous diva, Sills sang an awful lot in productions that travelled from San Antonio to Shreveport to McAllen, Texas.

One of Sills’ first professional engagements was with the San Francisco Opera in 1953. She returned to the company in full triumph mode in 1971 to sing Manon; Traviata, Lucia, Daughter of the Regiment and Thaïs would follow. Thus at least one of the United States’ three leading opera houses capitulated to the Sills phenomenon. On the other hand, she never sang with Chicago Lyric Opera, and her fraught history with the Metropolitan Opera is an important part of the Sills legend.

Sills relentlessly reproached the Met’s general manager Rudolf Bing for not having thrown open the portals of American’s leading opera house to her following her success next door as Cleopatra. (Bing eventually admitted in his memoirs that he simply didn’t care for her.) Only in 1975, three years after Bing had retired, did Sills get to make a Met debut in a new production of L’assedio di Corinto that was portrayed as a combination coronation and redressing of a serious wrong. Although she returned to the Met as Violetta, Lucia, Thaïs and Norina, she never really became part of the Met, and, the Pamira-coronation aside, never really a piece of Met history.

What Sills never admitted was that she did far better not singing at the Met than she would have had Bing hired her in the late 1960s. First and foremost, not being hired by the Met gave her something to complain about ad nauseam on talk shows. Americans love underdogs, dislike uppity foreigners and decry injustice: the battle between Sills and the Met couldn’t have been a better piece of PR if someone had invented it. Being “ignored” by the Metropolitan Opera made Sills a lot more famous in this country than singing with the Met would have made her.

Second of all, not singing at the Met allowed her to become prima donna assoluta at the New York City Opera and the recipient of that string of tailor-made new productions that made her famous and defined the her brand. Had Sills moved across the plaza to the Met, she’d have had to get on line behind Sutherland, Scotto, Moffo, Peters and even Karola Àgay and Gail Robinson to get so much as a single Lucia.

Although her artistic success was genuine and deserved, the Sills career was nonetheless far more than a purely operatic phenomenon. One can rightly argue that Beverly Sills Mania had something in common with the Jenny Lind Mania that engulfed the country in the 19^th century. And Sills didn’t have P.T. Barnum promoting her, either. (On the other hand, she had television.) Sills accomplished some great things with the New York City Opera; she also proved that you could ride City Opera stardom to the covers of Newsweek and Time. However, it was Newsweek and Time more than Lucia in Omaha that cemented Sills’ national fame and made her an object of national interest. For that man in the street who knew nothing of opera but had heard of Beverly Sills, she was more famous for being famous than she was famous for being an unforgettable Manon.

Therein lie rub, irony and paradox: Sills possessed a real and major talent and briefly achieved true greatness as a singer. But her glory years and her years of mega fame didn’t coincide, so that people knowing Sills as American operatic royalty never got a clear idea from her televised performances in the late 1970s of what had made her an operatic star in the first place. That’s a shame: America missed a chance at learning what truly wonderful opera singing sounded like, and, instead, got to know the unsteady and glaring tone of the late Sills. On a musical level, it’s questionable just how much Sills got Americans in the street actually to like opera.

There was a Faustian bargain involved. Fame such as Sills’ always comes at a price, and, for Beverly Sills, that price was a direction of energies away from the roles that truly suited her and the resulting ruining of what had once been a truly remarkable voice.

An ambitious soprano in the late 1960s needn’t have looked very far to see that the path to operatic superstardom was paved with bel canto roles. The most obvious example of this was, of course, Maria Callas, who had only withdrawn from the stage the year before Sills’ success in Cesare. The reigning queen of bel canto was Joan Sutherland, both Callas’ successor and an anti-Callas, and there was also the newcomer Montserrat Caballé, who had been New York’s overnight operatic sensation the year before Sills, and who rapidly became an international megastar, riding high on operas such as Lucrezia Borgia and Roberto Devereux.

Compare this to Sills, a highly accomplished Mozartean and clearly a great Handel singer who found the French repertoire highly congenial. Indeed, her Manon could well have been her greatest achievement. Her major accomplishment before Cleopatra had been the title role in The Ballad of Baby Doe, a role written for a high lyric soprano such as Sills was at the time.

Sills was a lyric coloratura in the best sense of the term. The term is more often than not applied to singers who are neither lyric fish nor coloratura fowl. In Sills’ case, she was exceptional in both lyrical coloratura music. She had been equipped with a spectacular florid technique, and it is hard not to be caught up in the perfection of her singing of bravura music. That said, her greatest genius may have lain in lyrical passages), particularly when they can be approached using her superb legato and fil di voce effects.

Sills ought to have continued along the repertoire lines that had brought her to fame Instead, perhaps forgivably greedy for superstardom, she chose a road rather more traveled all the way to superstardom and vocal ruin.

There can be no question that Sills’ shouting and pushing of her voice to fill out the dramatic soprano lines of Elisabetta in Roberto Devereux damaged an instrument she would continue to damage with, in particular, the other Donizetti Tudor Queens. (Lucrezia Borgia hardly helped, although, by the time she got to the role, it was too late.) I would, however, place the fatal error a couple years earlier than the Devereux premiere, back with her first Lucia in Fort Worth in 1968. Although her Lucia, a much lighter assignment than the roles she subsequently sang had its positive aspects, Lucia was her first mistake. Elisabetta only magnified it.

The problem lies in the fact that Sills never really understood or appreciated the bel canto repertoire. Whereas she trusted Massenet’s music in Manon, she (in collaboration with the Capobiancos and Gagnon) embarked on Lucia in the belief that the music was somehow lacking, most particularly in “drama”.

Part of the mistake was that she approached her bel canto roles from the libretto, not from the music. She read Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, just as she assiduously studied up on the real-life Tudor queens, and made the fallacious assumption that, because the libretto of Lucia doesn’t follow Scott, there must be something wrong with the opera. (This explains the complete misunderstanding of the plot she provides in her second memoir, a purportedly scholarly explanation of why Raimondo, and not Enrico, is the villain of the piece. Anyone with half an ear listening to both characters’ music ought to be able to discern which of the two is the bad guy.)

This is what led Sills (and her team) to the misbegotten excesses that marred so much of her work in this repertory. Consider her near-total rewriting of “Regnava nel silenzio” in Lucia, the better to “communicate” the ghostliness of the story. She leaves Donizetti’s notes far behind, despite the fact that those notes served 150 years’ worth of Lucias well, including the ur-“dramatic” Lucia, Callas.

At the root of the problem lay the fact that Sills’ voice was simply not big enough to fill out the sweeping dramatic lines in the bel canto operas she took on. As the best part of Sills’ voice (before she ruined it) was the top, key moments were pushed upwards simply so they could be heard, although even then some forcing was required. Unlike sopranos like Sutherland or Leonie Rysanek, whose voices got bigger as they went up the scale, Sills’ teacher Estelle Liebling had very carefully perfected a voice that was even in scale and size from top to bottom. Her high E-flat was not particularly more ringing than any other E-flat in her voice. At the other end of the scale, Sills compensated for the underpowered lower register that plagues every high soprano by not only using chest voice, but also resorting to vulgar shouting.

Sills states several times in both her memoirs that she was always willing to make an ugly sound when dramatically necessary. A greater musical neologism would be hard to find: the entire challenge of the bel canto repertoire is to be dramatic while making beautiful sounds.

A good example of this making the extremes more extreme can be heard in what should be the key moment in Maria Stuarda, Maria’s denunciation of Elisabetta in which she calls her a “vil bastarda”. She begins as a fishwife, and goes on to scream, not only at the top of her lungs, but also at the top of her voice. It ruins the moment. Donizetti’s notes are extremely effective, when sung by a singer who trusts them. Leyla Gencer shows how the written notes can be tremedously effective. Gencer’s half of the Donizetti Renaissance, conducted in Italy around the same time as Sills’ with the City Opera, was founded on the utmost respect for the maestro’s written notes.

I need to include a further example, as I continue to find it Beverly’s Most Egregious Excess. It comes in the final scene of Roberto Devereux. After singing a reasonably eloquent but small-voiced account of “Vivi, ingrato”, she finds herself faced with some very dramatic recitative and the role’s climax, the even more dramatic cabaletta “Quel sangue versato” that requires little in the way of coloratura and much in the way of voice to fill out very intense lines lying in the middle of the voice. The performance that has come down to us is Sills’ second, so that the voice is still intact as it is being misused. While her performance of the cabaletta this early in her career can be deemed effective, she goes completely off the rails in the recitative immediately preceding it.

After discovering the treachery of both Sara and Nottingham that led to the execution of Essex, Elisabetta rounds on them in a musical paragraph that begins “Tu perversa” to Sara and that ends with her calling Sara an “alma rea” and Nottingham a “spietato cor”.  These are moments of tremendous dramatic intensity that call for a dramatic soprano’s reserves of voice in the middle range. Sills responds to them with a hideously hollered “spietato cor” using chest voice and everything but singing to make what she thinks is an important dramatic point.

Sills clearly never trusted Donizetti; I’m not even sure she even liked his music all that much. He was a means to an end, and would have been very surprised to learn that he needed Beverly Sills and Roland Gagnon to put his music across.

The case with Bellini is much the same. Although she did some good things indeed with Elvira in I Puritani, the voice had already been irreparably damaged by the time she got to her 1973 recording of the opera and the City Opera production in 1974. Her silly Norma (which she dared not bring to New York, but sang in Hartford and Newark instead) is an excellent example of just how wrong her approach was. In her first book, she says that Norma, the supreme test of an Italian dramatic soprano, is an opera she thinks is funny. In her second, she claims that the role is easy to sing. By that, I assume she means the comparative lack of coloratura passages in the part; what she fails to understand is that Norma is as much a neo-classical opera as a Romantic one, and that its greatest challenges may well lie in its Gluckian recitatives. Her two comments show a total lack of understanding of what Norma is about. The comments also show actual contempt for Bellini’s music. If she thought Norma was such a laff riot, why did she even bother taking on the opera?

How can one make October 15, 1970 the cutoff date for Sills? It’s not just the strain that Devereux placed on the voice but that was also the date on which she began singing in a way that nature had never intended. That was the night she began trying to sing like a dramatic soprano, and it affected all of her subsequent music making. The effortless silvery purity that made her so enchanting a singer during her brief prime had been sacrificed to an effortful pushed sound that threw her registers out of the careful alignment into which her teacher, Estelle Liebling, had put them. While there are still lovely performances after that date, I don’t think one can debate the fact that that night was the beginning of the end.