Opera in a post-Beverly Sills America

New York Times
March 20, 2005
Wanted: A New Cheerleader for Opera
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

OF all the times Beverly Sills was host of the "Tonight" show, her favorite was in 1977, when her guests were three of her closest confidantes: the comedian Carol Burnett, the perky singer and television host Dinah Shore and the pop chanteuse Eydie Gorme. The women got into a spat over who was whose best friend, then kidded the wholesome Ms. Shore about her current beau, the heartthrob actor Burt Reynolds.

It's a situation almost impossible to imagine today: a major opera singer as guest host of the day's most popular television show, joking through it with three of pop culture's biggest stars. Certainly no classical artist of the last 50 years has been as recognizable to a large swath of the American public as Ms. Sills during her heyday.

In 1980, after a slow-starting but sensational 25-year singing career, she embarked on a second career as the most influential administrator for the performing arts in New York, first as general director of the New York City Opera, then as chairwoman of Lincoln Center and finally as chairwoman of the Metropolitan Opera. She used her media stardom to dazzle boards, raise funds, set organizational priorities and proselytize for the performing arts as the host of innumerable television broadcasts, like "Live From Lincoln Center."

It's hard to imagine the American performing arts scene without Ms. Sills. Who will take her place as a media personality, as the public face of opera and the performing arts?

Sad to say, no one. The cultural climate that allowed Beverly Sills to thrive has changed beyond recognition. Today, if opera singers appear on a late-night talk show at all, they are typically shunted to the last few minutes to sing a lone aria. David Letterman and Jay Leno seldom chat with a soprano.

Recently the young, gorgeous and immensely gifted Russian soprano Anna Netrebko sang one short Puccini aria on the "Tonight" show. At the time, she was starring in Gounod's "Roméo et Juliette" at the Los Angeles Opera, electrifying audiences and getting rave reviews. The production featured a love scene with a scantily clad Ms. Netrebko and the handsome Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón that got lots of publicity.

Besides being an exciting new singer, Ms. Netrebko has a story to tell. As a struggling student in St. Petersburg, she scrubbed floors at the Maryinsky Theater, the home of the Kirov Opera. Just a few years later she was a star in the company. American news organizations have paid attention: Ms. Netrebko has been profiled on "60 Minutes" and, recently, on "World News Tonight" on ABC.

Yet on the "Tonight" show, she sang an aria at the end and got a congratulatory handshake from Mr. Leno, and that was that.

Ms. Sills says that entertainment television has simply closed the door to opera.

"In my day you could make an impact on the public," she said during a recent interview in her apartment overlooking Central Park. "I did lots of television. That's not available to an opera singer today. The requirements are different. There is not a prayer in the world today - I don't care how good a talker or communicator you are - that someone like David Letterman would turn over his show to an opera singer."

Ms. Sills thinks that American society is paying the price for the generation that lost arts education in the public schools. Sooner or later that generation was going to take charge of the corporate and media world, she said, and "we have a lot of catching up to do."

But last month Ms. Sills, 75, announced that she was resigning from the Met and bowing out of public life. Some personal demands precipitated her decision. In January she placed her ailing husband in a nursing home. But apart from the needs of her family, the time has simply come, she says, to step aside. New York arts institutions that long relied on her fabled ability to get any chief executive on the phone when she called to raise money will have to cope without her.

"I will never raise one dollar more, except for a few medical causes," she said. "I don't want to give advice. I feel like a great burden has been lifted off my shoulders."

With her combination of brilliant singing and spunky vitality, Ms. Sills was a media natural who demystified the performing arts for average Americans. Her career embodied an archetypal American story of humble origins - the big Jewish gal from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, who, as Bubbles Silverman, began singing on a children's radio show when she was 4 - followed by years of struggle, family crises and final triumph.

At a time when singers in the United States routinely went overseas for training and performance opportunities, Ms. Sills was a product of her native land who did not even perform in Europe until she was 36. People who knew nothing about opera and assumed all sopranos were unapproachable divas took Ms. Sills's self-deprecating humor to heart.

When asked about her sensational 1969 debut at the La Scala opera house in Milan, Ms. Sills pooh-poohed the ovations she earned from the city's notoriously picky opera fans, saying in a Newsweek cover story, "It's probably because Italians like big women, big bosoms and big backsides."

Though she essentially had a light, lyric coloratura soprano voice, Ms. Sills sang with a vibrant and enveloping sound. Possessed of an exemplary technique, she could dispatch runs and trills with effortless accuracy. Yet there was something refreshingly clearheaded and stereotypically American about her artistry. Her singing was rhythmically incisive, expressive without being sentimental, verbally alert.

But for all her success as a singer, Ms. Sills credits Johnny Carson with emboldening her to embrace television, as she explained in "Beverly," her 1987 autobiography. "It was Carson who first told me: 'If you come on the "Tonight" show, you'll humanize opera. Show 'em you look like everybody else, that you have kids, a life, that you have to diet.' "

So Ms. Sills followed his advice, went on television and talked about her life, including, in more revealing moments, the anguish of raising her two children, both born with disabilities. Her daughter, Meredith, called Muffy, was born deaf; her son, Peter, called Bucky, is severely retarded and has been cared for in an institution since he was 6.

Ms. Sills, as Carson knew instinctively, was a classy and appealing television performer. In a 1974 "Tonight" show skit, he and she sang a duet, "Indian Love Call," a spoof on Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, the attractive stars of operetta who were paired in several syrupy but hugely popular 1930's movie musicals. Carson appeared in a Royal Mountie costume; Ms. Sills wore an extravagant prima donna gown and warbled high notes.

Clearly, Carson assumed that his television audience would know who Eddy and MacDonald were. You couldn't make such an assumption today.

Just as Ms. Sills used late-night television to popularize her art, Carson also wanted her to lend sophistication to his show.

"Johnny would call me up with ideas," she recalled. "He once said, 'Can't you do something with Doc Severinsen, who is such a wonderful trumpet player?' I said, 'Sure.' "

So she and Mr. Severinsen collaborated in a performance of the Handel aria "Let the Bright Seraphim," which has a fancy solo trumpet part.

Ms. Sills's success on talk shows led to television specials, like "Sills and Burnett at the Met," taped live in March 1976 and broadcast on Thanksgiving Day that year. In one skit, Ms. Sills was costumed as Catherine the Great in an ornate robe with a 10-foot ermine train. Ms. Burnett was Catherine's official train-schlepper, Ms. Sills recalled. Every time Ns. Sills sang, goblets, mirrors and chandeliers on the set shattered.

But when Ms. Sills sang something seriously, like an aria from Donizetti's "Linda di Chamounix," and the television audience saw Ms. Burnett listening in awe, it made this opera stuff seem worth checking out.

For two years in the late 70's, Ms. Sills even had her own Emmy-winning talk show, "Lifestyles With Beverly Sills," which ran every Sunday morning on NBC before "Meet the Press." Can anyone imagine Renée Fleming, arguably the most radiant and well-known opera star today, being given a talk show by a major network?

In popularizing classical music, Ms. Sills had only one peer: Leonard Bernstein. But Bernstein was a teacher at heart, who saw television as potentially the greatest teaching tool ever devised. Educating audiences about music - breaking down the structure of a sonata, explaining the components of harmony, making connections between classical and popular genres - was his game. Bernstein did not appear on talk shows and kept his private life guarded.

Ms. Sills, on the other hand, opened herself up to persuade people to take a chance on an opera or a concert. The teaching would happen by itself if she could just get people to experience the real thing.

Classical music has since produced other media sensations, notably the Three Tenors. But Ms. Sills, who served as host of the first American television broadcast of the first Three Tenors concert from Rome, doubts the impact of that phenomenon on the field at large.

"I think the three boys have no pretensions about altering the face of opera," she said. "They have no illusions about people storming into the opera house because of their concerts. But it did knock down a few walls."

There are still a few potential successors to the Sills phenomenon, like Deborah Voigt, who, besides being the finest dramatic soprano of our time, is a real character. She sings Broadway show songs with style and taste. A down-to-earth American, she is articulate about her art, outgoing and friendly, and would have no problem discussing her struggles to lose weight. (Her recent dismissal from a Royal Opera House production of Strauss's "Ariadne auf Naxos" would have been perfect "Oprah" fodder.) She stole the show singing carols and a comic song as guest artist in a holiday concert by the New York City Gay Men's Chorus last year at Carnegie Hall.

Renée Fleming is charming and smart in interviews but probably too demure for such a role. And it's unlikely that she or any other popular opera star of today would take direct responsibility for the art form by running a company both artistically and administratively the way Ms. Sills did. As general director of the City Opera, Ms. Sills the populist made enticing the public her top priority. City Opera became a "feeder company," she said.

"We would take the future superstars, polish them, give them a good setting and send them off to the grand opera houses," she explained. "This is why I tried to be a totally American company. The City Opera had to be a place for the presentation of young artists and the preservation of the art form."

Ms. Sills also programmed adventurous fare and contemporary works, more than most other companies at that time, especially the Met. Among the premieres she presented was Anthony Davis's provocative "X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X."

And in 1983, following the lead of the Canadian Opera in Toronto, the City Opera became the first American company to introduce "slide-projected translations," as Will Crutchfield called this curious new technology in a New York Times article at the time.

"Did I ever get roasted for that one," Ms. Sills said. Tradition-bound critics called her a philistine. Asked whether the Met would ever employ supertitles, James Levine vowed, "over my dead body," only to reverse course when the public embraced the system, as Ms. Sills had predicted it would.

Lately, Ms. Sills has had much time to consider the state of American culture, "serious" and popular, in which she once played a big part. She has been spending hours a day at home in a wheelchair as she recuperates from an injury to her knee.

"I already have two artificial knees," she said. "I'm like the robot woman."

From her windows on the sunny day of this interview, she gazed wistfully at "The Gates" in Central Park and at the throngs of people strolling through the walkways, basking in an exhilarating work of public art.