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By Robert Wilder Blue

Betty Allen

Betty Allen is well known today for having served as President of the Harlem School of the Arts (HSA) in New York, a position she took over from its founder, Dorothy Maynor, in 1969. She has been a member of the voice faculties of the Manhattan School of Music, the Curtis Institute of Music and the North Carolina School of the Arts and is currently a voice teacher and president emeritus at HSA; she serves on the boards of many cultural and performing arts institutions as well as on the New York City Advisory Committee for Cultural Affairs. In 1989, Ms. Allen traveled to St. Petersburg to teach a master class for voice students at Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory and in so doing was the first American to teach at the Conservatory. Her journey initiated a music cultural exchange program between HSA and the Conservatory. But before all of that Ms. Allen had a long and distinguished singing career and enjoyed rich artistic relationships with the prominent composers and conductors of her day.

Betty Allen was born in Campbell, Ohio, into a working class family. Her mother died when she was twelve and her father was unable to keep her so she lived in foster homes until she graduated from high school. She attended Wilberforce University (where one of her classmates was Leontyne Price and the Hartford Conservatory. She spent a fateful summer at the Tanglewood Festival in 1952 where she met Leonard Bernstein and Virgil Thomson; Mr. Bernstein invited her to perform his Jeremiah Symphony and Mr. Thomson cast her in the role of Saint Teresa II in his opera Four Saints in Three Acts. “I had very good relationships with Leonard Bernstein and Virgil Thomson. They were both very helpful to me in my career; they hired me and wrote letters of recommendation and talked to people about me. It was very helpful to me as somebody who didn’t have a big name or a European career to have these people saying good things about me and be willing to hire me. I sang with the New York Philharmonic every year under Leonard Bernstein.”

Opera, however, did not figure prominently in Ms. Allen’s career. “I wasn’t interested at all in being an opera singer. Quite frankly, opera singing is not the be-all and end-all for a mezzo-soprano. You’re not the prima donna, you don’t get the big roles and you don’t get hired on your name value alone. There are only a few roles where you are the star, like Carmen and Dalila. Generally, you’re the second lady and even though some of those are very good roles, it doesn’t mean people are coming to see you. I started out just wanting to sing beautiful music. There were people I admired – my idols – and I wanted to sing like they did. I didn’t want to go off to Europe to wait for people to hire me and go traipsing from city to city, opera house to opera house, to be interviewed and auditioned with no real future in mind. When I got a job I was happy, but it was because I was hired for myself particularly, usually because they wanted to use me for something special. Opera came to me; I didn’t go looking for it. I was much more interested in singing recitals and oratorio; I really wasn’t terribly concerned with getting on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. I have gathered that I have a strong personality and people with strong personalities work on stage whether in opera or concert or recital. That’s something that goes out to the audience and that the audience sees and accepts it and receives. You are very lucky if you have that kind of personality and character.

Betty Allen as Monisha in Scott Joplin's Treemonisha. Houston Grand Opera, 1975.

“It really was more interesting to me to sing the concert and recital literature, to bring it to life, to make the words live and make people understand them. I like words and language. I had a teacher [Sarah Peck Moore] who was a great hawk about diction. She inferred that if you didn’t have good diction you couldn’t really sing. She said that the words were what carried your voice forward. I think she was quite right; good diction is a great asset for a singer. She began with the Italian and German but she also concentrated on English.

“My role models were Marian Anderson and Jennie Tourel, neither of whom sang a lot of opera. Miss Anderson had a marvelous voice, of course, and I thought what she did in recitals was just wonderful. I didn’t know that I could equal it, but that was what I wanted to do. Jennie Tourel was very charismatic and she had a very interesting voice. I admired her and what she did so much. She sang so many different kinds of things in different languages, which interested me enormously too.

“My favorite composers were Schubert, Brahms, Wolf and Mahler. One of the first classical pieces I ever heard was Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) by Mahler. I took the trolley downtown in Youngstown, Ohio to the music store I went in and told the clerk I wanted to buy it. He asked me if I knew it and I told him no, but that I had heard it and wanted to sing it. He asked me if I spoke German and I told him I did. It turned out he didn’t have it but he had the [Mahler’s] Songs of the Wayfarer and so I bought that instead. It was the first piece of music I ever bought and I still own that copy. During my career, I did it many times on recital with piano and with orchestra.

“My experiences singing Bach and American music were also very meaningful to me. Of course, I was brought up singing Bach, Handel and Purcell. I did not enjoy singing [Handel’s] Messiah though. As a mezzo-soprano it’s not a piece you are really happiest with; you’re in the bottom of your voice all the time and not really using the upper range. It’s probably more suitable for a countertenor. I love that music though.

“It was interesting to me to sing new music. Virgil wrote several pieces for me after I had sung Four Saints in Three Acts for him. I worked with Ned Rorem a great deal and David Diamond and some with Aaron Copland also, although he was often annoyed with me because of my connection with Virgil. Once I saw him in an airport in Munich and he said, ‘Are you still singing those songs of Virgil’s?’ I told him I was but added, ‘I sing your music too, Mr. Copland.’ It was very funny that he thought I was ignoring him and his music.”

Ms. Allen sang a subsequent revival of Four Saints in Three Acts with the Metropolitan Opera’s short-lived chamber opera company, the Mini-Met, in 1973. We asked her to tell us about working with Thomson. “I loved Four Saints. When that original cast did it, they could say the words without any sort of phony diction or pretension or accent and that was what Virgil liked. He thought it was quite remarkable. I think it’s not only the way they pronounced the words, but the way they believed what you were saying. If I am saying something to you and I believe it, that is what you hear. I think it is the manner in which the words are delivered. It’s also a lack of self-consciousness. Sometimes when we get grand, we tend to overdo it with a really phony stage accent. That isn’t necessary. You only need to be clear.

“The first time I looked at the score I laughed. I didn’t think it was silly but I thought it was very funny. As one worked one it, you could never forget it. It got in your head and you couldn’t put it down. You could really play with the words. It was not like learning nonsense. [Librettist] Gertrude Stein loved words; she enjoyed the sounds of them. She was playing with the sound of the language and making it live and sparkle and be interesting and even funny at times. I remember saying one line that always brought a huge laugh. Saint Teresa sings, ‘Having had it, having happily had it, having had it with a spoon.’ And everyone just roared. I had no idea why they laughed, but apparently it was very funny. I told them it wasn’t what I was saying, it was their dirty minds! I think that was what she provoked. The words would set your imagination going. You could really imagine things in your own head. There was a revival in the mid-‘80s here in New York and I spoke to the cast about the diction. They found it interesting that I was so concerned with the words and how people spoke them.

“You really have to be into it and believe that piece to enjoy it. You can’t be stand-offish and say, ‘oh, isn’t that cute?’ People who have seen Four Saints usually have loved if they could embrace it and not try to analyze it. The piece was always great fun to us when we sang it, and I think that is what should be remembered about it. The words and the melodies seem childlike but they are not at all. They are not banal, nor are they easy. When you get into it, it works.

“Virgil always had a choreographer direct the piece. When we did it for the Met, Alvin Ailey staged it. Alvin was sometimes very troubled by it and he would say to Virgil, ‘I don’t understand this piece at all.’ I told him it was like a big Sunday School picnic. He thought I was crazy. But I told him if he couldn’t see it that way, then he really didn’t understand it. Well, he had never done anything like it, but I had been in church plays and pageants before where things were very serious and grand and people enjoyed being that way. When he finally caught on to that feeling, he understood it.”

Ms. Allen’s professional life has spanned the period from Marian Anderson’s landmark appearances at the Lincoln Memorial and the Metropolitan Opera, through the civil rights movement and into the 21st century. During these five decades, black artists have gone from singing to segregated audiences and not being allowed entry into hotels to opening nights at the Met. We wondered what her observations were on the music business today. “More black singers are getting hired and that is different than when I was starting out. And now singers are singing more diverse roles, rather than just the stereotypical ‘black’ roles. But it is easier for a black woman; black men still haven’t gotten all the way through the door. It’s less simple for a black man and I don’t quite know why, except that historically the black male has always been a threat. His sexuality, his body, his attributes that people think of are what make him a threat if he is in a leading role, particularly if he is paired with a white woman. A black woman is not a threat. She has been conquered by the white before. There is still a resistance to putting a black man in a starring role. Simon Estes has had a lot to say about that. If you talk to the tenors, George Shirley or Vinson Cole, for example, I’m sure you’ll hear that there is a difference. They are not always thought of first. Vinson has had a good career, largely because Herbert van Karajan blessed him, so to speak.

Benjamin Matthews and Betty Allen with chorus in Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts. Mini-Met (1973). Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera Archives.

“I can remember many years ago going to see Canada Lee in white face. He was playing with Tallulah Bankhead. It was a great gimmick at the time, making up that way to play opposite her, but it was very strange. They made a big to-do about it. In a way, the opera world hampered black singers from singing, but no one could stop you from singing recitals or concerts. In opera you were being bound by looks and by tradition and they could use that excuse not to hire you. It would be the ideal if people would be cast the way they should be, which is without regard to color or size. After all, it’s about the voice. But people still make a great effort to keep others in certain places, in certain roles. I think everyone wants to be considered for their voices, not for their appearance. ‘Listen to me and react to me and my talent and to my technique and my ability; don’t just look at me and pigeon-hole me.’ Unfortunately, we’re still not ready to do that yet.

“In my classes we talk about this a great deal. There are singers who should be hired to do certain things, but either they are hired only to cover roles or they don’t get hired at all. That’s too bad, because some of them have marvelous voices. Many of the students are quite bitter and I like to have them talk about it, not just sit back and say, ‘they are doing this to me because I am black.’ We try to figure out how to conquer these problems. You have to be hired because you are doing it well. We try to find out all the weak spots and work them out and give them a lot of support, so that no one can say, ‘oh, that girl can’t do that role.’ There are lots of young people who want to think they are not hired because they are black, but it’s often because their language is not good or because they don’t have the right stylistic approach, and yes, sometimes because of looks. But, that doesn’t mean it’s because they’re black. I try to tell them to be the best-prepared person there so that they cannot be denied anything.

“I was always told that I had to be better than anybody else. We’ve always been told that, starting when we are children. We have to work harder to be equal. But I don’t think it hurts us to work that hard. Now if you do that work and still are not chosen, you have a right to be angry. But you can’t control any of this. If they are not engaged by you and your personality, they are not going to hire you. The original thing really is that you have to be accepted on your own, as you are.

“In my own life, I never thought they didn’t want me because I was black. I just thought they didn’t want me because I was too big or some other reason. I guess I’m sort of an earth-mother figure and I would get tired of playing that sort of thing. But, I didn’t think it was a matter of color. It was fortunate for me as a mezzo-soprano I was never offered Bess or Aïda. I remember David Gockley asked me to sing Maria in Porgy and Bess and I laughed at him. He told me he’d open the role up and I told him, ‘don’t be ridiculous.’ It’s wasn’t an attractive part to me at all – she spends all her time just hanging around the stage with a butcher knife, cussing. It certainly wasn’t an interesting role to sing. I tell my singers not to audition for Porgy and Bess. You immediately get stuck in that and don’t get out of it. The trouble is that some people want to take the easy way out. There is lots of work singing Porgy. But, I don’t think it necessarily leads to something else. If you have a good manager who will do the bargaining for you, then it can. I’m on the board of the New York City Opera, where they did Porgy last season. I know there are a lot of younger singers who are hoping it will lead to other roles with the company. I think the company is trying, but there just won’t be that many opportunities.

“I think you still have to keep talking to the people who make the decisions – the company managers, the board of directors and, in some cases, public opinion. The singers are not the ones who say, ‘I want to be in your company.’ The singer has to be invited. It’s the people who run the institutions who are still so afraid of affecting someone the wrong way or losing some money from a wealthy person. Those are the ones who don’t want to take risks. But, if they don’t have the guts to do that then we’re still not very far. Once someone does though and makes a success, everyone else follows and they all pat themselves on the back. But you have to take a certain leap of faith.

“It’s really about the music, the story and whether you can bring that across. You have to respect and trust the piece and if you don’t, it doesn’t matter who you hire, whether you have them naked up there on stage, it’s not going to work.”