Beverly Sills was an important singer, and a great singer. That latter statement will start an argument—but opera talk always inspires argument. Sills was also one of the most interesting people of our times—inarguably. And when she passed away in July, the world lost something unique. We’re all unique, I know. But some, you might agree, are uniquer than others.

Nationality is always butting into music, and I usually think it should butt out. But it remains true that Sills was probably the most famous American opera singer ever. Sure, you could count Callas, and she indeed lived in New York for the first thirteen years of her life. But the world thinks of her as Greek, Continental, and international. Geraldine Farrar, Rosa Ponselle, Lawrence Tibbett, Leontyne Price, Marilyn Horne—these and others were famous. But Sills probably out-famed them all. And I have always believed that she was penalized for this very fame, this very celebrity. Penalized by whom? By critics, cognoscenti, and other determiners of reputation. People have been rather snarky about Beverly Sills, for reasons we may guess at.

First, she was, in fact, an American, and a lot of people like their opera singers European and mysterious. And she was not only an American, she was a flame-haired Brooklyn Jew, prone to earthiness. Second, the fame bred some skepticism. How can you be known and loved by the unwashed masses and still be a serious artist, let alone a great one? Sills was on the covers of Time and Newsweek; she was not only a guest on Johnny Carson, she guest-hosted for him. You could see her on all the talk shows: Merv, Mike (Douglas), Dick (Cavett), Dinah. She sang with the Muppets, she yukked it up with Danny Kaye. She was always visiting the White House, under Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan. For many Americans, she was the face, and the voice, of opera.

And this provoked plenty of envy, along with skepticism. But Sills deserved her fame (which was late in coming), because she was worthy—extraordinary—in every way.

The story of her life has been told many times, and I will tell it in compressed fashion. To hear it told in marvelous detail, consult her second autobiography, Beverly, published in 1987. It is one of the great autobiographies in music, and it is one of the most engrossing American tales you will ever encounter.

She was born Belle Silverman in 1929—about five months before the stock-market crash. She emerged from the womb with a bubble in her mouth, and the attending physician immediately nicknamed her “Bubbles.” The name stuck. Years later, one of Sills’s tenors, Luciano Pavarotti, would call her “Bubble-ina.” Her mother oversaw her many activities, and she is often called a classic “stage mother.” But that does not quite do Mrs. Silverman justice. She knew her daughter was gifted and exceptional, and she wanted her to have the best of everything: to learn languages, to see art, and so on. As Sills wrote in that autobiography, “Mama wasn’t living her life through me, nor was she out schlepping me around to auditions. I think she just wanted me to become a worldly, educated woman.” Few mothers have had their desires so completely satisfied.

Sills was a phenomenally bright child—off-the-charts IQ—and a natural performer. In 1932, she won Brooklyn’s Miss Beautiful Baby contest, under the name “Cutie Pie Silverman.” (Her father called her “Cutie Pie.”) She sang “The Wedding of Jack and Jill.” Not long after, she became a star of radio, a fixture on several programs. She would banter and sing and generally charm the pants off everybody. Along the way, a producer named Wally Wanger gave her the name “Beverly Sills.” He thought that “Belle Silverman” was just plain unfitting. Apparently, the girl did what was radio’s first singing commercial. It was for Rinso laundry soap, and the ditty went, “Rinso white, Rinso white, happy little washday song.”

How did Belle, or Beverly, start singing in the first place? Mrs. Silverman loved the opera, and she particularly loved coloratura sopranos: Her favorites were Amelita Galli-Curci and Lily Pons. And Mrs. Silverman’s daughter memorized all their records. She simply imitated them, note for note, syllable for syllable. There is documentary evidence of this, too. If you go to YouTube—that repository of treasures—you can find a clip of Sills singing Arditi’s song “Il bacio.” She is seven years old. The funny thing is, she sings rather like Beverly Sills: She breathes the way she would as a full-grown woman, and she sort of holds her head the same way. Amazing.

She started formal lessons at age eight. In those days, Americans tended to go abroad, to get trained in singing and opera. Not Sills—she stayed put, one of the first. She went to Estelle Liebling, a teacher on West 55th Street in Manhattan. “Miss Liebling”—as Sills would always call her—had coached none other than Galli-Curci. And Sills would stay with her till the end: until Miss Liebling died at ninety, when Sills was forty-one.

Once, when Sills was rich and famous, she sang a Faust that Miss Liebling wasn’t especially happy with. As Sills recounts in her autobiography, the teacher called the student at seven o’clock the next morning “to say that my trills in the Jewel Song had been slow and sloppy, and that she expected me at her studio at ten.” Miss Liebling was right. “We worked for forty-five minutes, and when I left, my trills were no longer slow or sloppy.” By the way, another Liebling student was Meryl Streep, a generation younger than Sills. According to legend, she heard Beverly in Miss Liebling’s studio one day and decided on the spot she’d better try to become an actress.

It took Sills a long, long time to become rich and famous. She went on the road, touring Gilbert & Sullivan for J.J. Schubert, taking any gig she could. She sang in an after-hours club called the Hour Glass. (It must have referred to figures.) On her first night, one of the members proffered some money, and the proud young woman said, “I don’t sing for tips.” The maître d’ told her not to be stupid, and, from then on, she wasn’t. She auditioned for New York City Opera—which would become her home company—many times before being accepted. And she had some success, once she was accepted: particularly with The Ballad of Baby Doe, Douglas Moore’s opera about heartbreak in the American West.

But she would not really hit it big until 1966. In that year, the Metropolitan Opera moved to Lincoln Center—brand-new—and so did City Opera. The world press gathered to see Antony and Cleopatra, which inaugurated the new Met. The opera was by Samuel Barber and starred Leontyne Price. While they were around, the press figured they would see what was on at City Opera, across the Lincoln Center plaza. What was on was Handel’s Julius Caesar, starring Norman Treigle (a great bass-baritone, cruelly unheralded) and Beverly Sills. The world went ape for Sills—and she was “discovered” at age thirty-seven. She had been singing pretty much full-time for over twenty years.

In the course of her career, she sang about seventy roles, with two focuses: bel canto—Donizetti, Rossini, Bellini—and the French repertory. She was a famous Manon, Thaïs, Marguerite, Louise … (She also sang a million Traviatas.) The composer Ned Rorem once cracked that Sills was a smart singer in dumb repertory. She was certainly a smart singer, and the repertory wasn’t so dumb. Along with Joan Sutherland and Montserrat Caballé, Sills was the leading coloratura soprano in the world. A fan in New York had a button made up: “Beverly Sills is a good high.”

She took the hardest, most challenging roles, not wanting to pace herself, necessarily, not going for longevity: She went for operatic guts and glory. She admired Callas, for that kind of spirit (and other things, to be sure). Sills’s greatest accomplishment, she always said, was Queen Elizabeth I, in Donizetti’s opera Roberto Devereux. Indeed, she put that role on the map. All the same, few have tried it since. She achieved a trifecta, portraying all three Donizetti queens: in Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda, and Devereux. Sills was a total and well-nigh singular operatic performer.

You may wonder where the Metropolitan Opera is in all this. Well, the answer lies with Rudolf Bing, the Met’s general manager. I’m a defender of Bing’s, thinking him a valuable GM: but he made a very serious error in keeping Sills off the Met’s stage. His reasons belong to the field of psychology. People bugged him to hire Sills, so that he famously exclaimed, “Can’t I spend five minutes of my life without hearing that woman’s name?” That woman finally made her Met debut in 1975, three years after Bing’s retirement. Sills was forty-six—five years from the end (of singing).

All the while, she was climbing the heights of celebrity—celebrity celebrity, not mere operatic or classical-music celebrity—appearing on all those television shows, landing her own TV special with Carol Burnett (Sills and Burnett at the Met). The country was insatiable for her. In time, she got her own TV talk show, Lifestyles with Beverly Sills, which was broadcast by NBC on Sundays, just before Meet the Press. It would win four Emmys. She indeed retired in 1980, at fifty-one. Years of singing and struggle had taken their toll, and Sills was ready. Her final event was a gala at City Opera; her final piece was a little Portuguese folk song, taught to her by Miss Liebling when she was ten. After the gala, she never sang another note: not in the shower, not walking down the street, under her breath, not ever. There was only one exception to this, she would tell me and others: President Reagan made a special request, on a certain occasion. Otherwise: silence. Sills wanted to sing her way—the right way—or not at all.

And, oh, could she sing! Have no doubt of this, dear reader. The voice was a wonder, and the technique was even more of a wonder. We don’t refer to singers as “virtuosos,” but if we did, we would call Sills one: a supervirtuoso. She could do anything, racing up and down a huge range of notes like a pianist. The voice was often called silvery, and it was, but Sills could change its color, or metal, if you will. She could adapt that voice to the syllable, note, or dramatic moment at hand. And she was a natural actress, whether in tragedy or in comedy. In comedy, she delighted you; in tragedy, she slew you, her involvement eerily complete.

Quick story, courtesy of a friend of mine—and a friend of Sills’s: One night at City Opera, when Roberto Devereux was on, Sills (as Elizabeth) struck Essex really hard, sending him reeling. A woman in the audience turned to her husband and asked, “Is she Jewish?” (Sills, when she heard this story, loved it.)

She once said, “If they ask what all the fuss was about, play them the recordings.” And the recordings will, indeed, indicate what all the fuss was about (although there is no substitute for live, certainly for a performer like Sills). The public may consult several anthologies: The Very Best of Beverly Sills (EMI), for example, or The Art of Beverly Sills (Deutsche Grammophon). For complete operas, we have Manon (DG), Julius Caesar (RCA Victor), Lucia di Lammermoor (Westminster), and La Traviata (EMI), among others. Donizetti’s Three Queens are available on DG. And I might mention an item off the beaten track: In 2000, the Philadelphia Orchestra came out with a twelve-CD set, to mark its centennial. On Disc 9, you will find Sills with Eugene Ormandy in Mozart’s Exsultate, jubilate. You will be treated to a very keen musicianship, in this most testing of composers.

Of her “personal” life, much has been made, and rightly so. She had more than her quota of sorrow. She and her husband had a daughter, called Muffy, born deaf. Everyone said how horrible—how “ironic” —it was that Sills had a child who could not hear her sing. She would say, “My voice is the last thing I worry about her hearing!” Later, Muffy would be afflicted by multiple sclerosis, confining her to a wheelchair. The other child, a son called Bucky, was born severely mentally disabled. He had to be institutionalized at age six. Through it all, Sills carried on with grace and courage—indeed, setting an example.

How about her career post-singing? She once told me she had recently had lunch with Renata Tebaldi, the great Italian soprano (since deceased). “So, how are you?” Sills had said. “How do you spend your days?” Tebaldi replied, “I listen to my records and cry.” Sills was not like that. The morning after her farewell gala, she reported to work as general director of City Opera. The company was bankrupt, but she turned it around, persevering as general director for ten years. In the bargain, she introduced supertitles—a pivotal moment in opera. It made opera far more accessible, comprehensible, and popular. After City Opera, she became chairman of Lincoln Center, and then chairman of the Metropolitan Opera. She finally retired in 2005—having worked like a demon for a full twenty-five years after her last note.

At every stage, she was a prodigious fundraiser, a world-historic fundraiser. I once heard someone in anthropology say of Louis Leakey, “That man could get money from a rock.” So could Beverly Sills. She raised money for causes both medical and musical. She raised $100 million for the March of Dimes, and hundreds of millions more for other institutions.

I went to interview her in 2003, and a fascinating hour ensued. Frankly, she was one of the most intelligent people I have ever been around—and one of the most articulate. She was a beautiful, beautiful talker. She talked in long, seamless, perfect paragraphs, with nary a gulp or an “um.” Remarkably, she always retained her Brooklyn accent. Many American singers speak in what I call “the opera voice”: internationalized, vaguely British, definitely artificial. Sills was a genuine article.

And Bill Buckley once made an astute observation (unsurprisingly). “Beverly Sills is the most unhurried person alive,” he said. And it was true. No matter what the inner churning, Sills gave an impression of serenity, of at-peace-ness. And she was very, very funny. Let me record just one, tiny instance: A few years ago, she saw a long-lost clip of her, singing in The Ballad of Baby Doe. Her response? “I couldn’t stop staring at my waist.” (In later years, particularly, Sills struggled with weight.)

When I went to see her, that day in 2003, the Met was staging a new production of La Juive. The anonymous philanthropist who paid for the production had done so in her honor—the first time that had ever happened. “When you’re my age,” she said, “and I’m seventy-four, there aren’t many firsts.” Somehow, we got on Birgit Nilsson—whom I never heard in the flesh. Sills said, “You wouldn’t have believed the sheer volume of that voice. It was so loud. It simply blew your ears back.” I am a bit of a Nilsson skeptic, so I said—about her interpretation of a particular role—“Was it musical?” Sills made a face: “It was cold.” She quickly brightened again: “But that sound! I can’t overemphasize how loud it was! You really had to be there, to absorb the impact of it.”

Further on, she spoke of the “loneliest moment” of her professional life—a moment that led to her “finest hour.” She was in Naples, at the Teatro San Carlo, singing Traviata. She had been warned that, with the Neapolitan public, she would be “up for grabs.” In Act I of the opera, there comes a time when the partygoers take their leave and Violetta is all alone onstage, about to sing her big scena. At this moment, our diva thought, “They don’t know who Beverly Sills is. They’re waiting. But I’m going to show them. I’m going to show them how to sing ‘Ah, fors’è lui.’” And she did. The ovations were tumultuous.

Believe it or not, Sills did not relate any of this boastfully. She did so matter-of-factly, explanatorily. I had asked her about celebrity, and she responded that no amount of celebrity, no amount of “hype” (as she put it), can save you from “the loneliest moments.” You have to stand and deliver. She spoke of her career as though it had happened to someone else, and that’s how she felt. “I see a photo, and I think, ‘Who is that girl?’ Skinny face.” (Here she sucked in her cheeks and patted them.)

Every now and then, I’d see her in a New York opera house or concert hall. I tell you, it was so pleasurable to talk to her, it was almost decadent. One night, the New York Philharmonic had played the Rosenkavalier Suite, and I said to her, “Didn’t it kill you not to hear the words? Didn’t you just want to bust out with, ‘In Gottes Namen!’?” She then allowed that she had always wanted to sing the Marschallin; it was the only such regret of her career. Once, she asked Bernstein for the role, but he said, “No—Sophie.” (She is the lighter, higher, and lesser soprano in Der Rosenkavalier.) And Sills spoke illuminatingly to me about Strauss singing in general.

I last saw her at a party at the beginning of this year. She was with her daughter, Muffy, and they both looked beautiful. We talked about the Silverman family, back in Brooklyn. And we also talked about Georg Solti, the late, willful conductor. “You’re looking at the girl who broke his hand!” Oh? Yes: He had summoned her to a studio on some pretense, and then proceeded to chase her around the piano. His purpose was not artistic. At an opportune moment, Sills slammed the piano lid on his hand. The maestro did not conduct that night.

That was one Sills story, but there were thousands, and she lived life about as fully as possible: wrung out of it every last drop. She had huge talent, huge drive, huge personality, huge bazooms (she would say—she would definitely say; I’m merely standing in for her). And she had that tremendous intelligence. She used all she was given for good. And when she left us on July 2, the response of her admirers was not so much mournful as, “Wow, what a gal! What a singer! How great to have lived in her time!”

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 26 Number 1, on page 49
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