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By Robert Wilder Blue

Phyllis Curtin

During a singing career that lasted nearly four decades, the legendary American soprano Phyllis Curtin enjoyed successes in a wide variety of opera roles (Fiordiligi, Violetta, Salome) in the world’s greatest opera houses (Vienna State Opera, La Scala, Metropolitan Opera). She was a consummate artist who embraced concert and recital repertory as well, championing especially new music and the works of American composers. Her New York City Opera career included four American roles, including three world premieres. Upon retiring from singing she became a renowned and sought-after teacher, notably at Yale and Boston Universities and at the Tanglewood Festival where her distinguished association has lasted from her student days until the present. USOPERAWEB spoke with Ms. Curtin last summer at Tanglewood.

Growing up in the South

“I was born and raised in Clarksburg, West Virginia. It was a small town of about 25,000 people. As for my musical background, my mother had a lovely voice and she sang some and my daddy was a stalwart church tenor for years. I began to play the violin when I was seven and studied for ten years. When I was around twelve my mother and some of her friends became involved with Community Concerts. We had three very remarkable concerts a year which were my first exposures to what I would call big-time music. I heard Ernestine Schumann-Heink and I still remember Richard Crooks singing Pergolesi’s ‘Nina,’ which grabbed me to no end. There was a music club that gave monthly concerts and there were people in town who performed – a wonderful cellist and a men’s chorus. Sometimes they rehearsed in our house and I used to sit at the head of stairs and listen, which hooked me on men’s choruses for the rest of my life.

“I don’t remember when singing came about really. I got to sing a lot with the school glee club because I could sightread well – all that violin training made me a good sightreader. If there was a school play and they needed somebody to sing a few lines, I seemed to get asked to do that. But nobody was dropping dead over this little girl singing nor did I have a burning desire to sing. It was only when I was a junior at Wellesley that I decided to pursue singing. I was majoring political science at Wellesley. I was very interested in international relationships and international law and international behavior – no doubt it was growing up during the Second World War that did that. It’s still a passion of mine – I love history and I care about politics. I got kind of involved with a group of people who were instrumental in thinking up what would later become the United Nations – it was called the United Nations Association. Anyway, I went to the dean to ask if I could take singing lessons and she told me I couldn’t because I was already carrying extra subjects. So one day I simply walked into the music department and met a remarkable woman who taught singing named Olga Averino. Her father was a Russian violist and they had come to the U.S. after the Russian Revolution. She was a born iconoclast. I asked her if I could take singing lessons and she arranged it. She was the most interesting woman I ever knew. She gave me a vision of the arts that was very exciting. I was kind of a theatrical girl and I had danced and what I found was that singing combined everything that I liked: music, poetry and drama.

“After I graduated – this was during WWII when girls could get jobs they couldn’t normally get and wouldn’t get for another twenty years – I decided to stay in Boston and work and keep studying. I knew a flock of young composers at Harvard and I sang a lot of new music. There again, the greatest thing I brought to it was my ability to read. I’m sure I did more first and last performances of new works than you could count. But it got me very interested in doing new music.

“I really became interested in opera when I took Boris Godolvsky’s opera class at the New England Conservatory. I auditioned for and went to Tanglewood in the opera program which Boris Godovsky ran. That summer [1946], Peter Grimes was being given its U.S. premiere and a lot of us in the opera program got to be in it. That was my first opera. Mildred Miller and I played the two nieces. Boris started his New England Opera Theater and I did a variety of things with them: Mavra, Idomeneo, Albert Herring and The Marriage of Figaro. Sarah Caldwell was a student there also at the time. A few years later when I auditioned for the New York City Opera, I was asked if I knew any standard operas and I didn’t except for Figaro. But, that’s how I started. One thing led to another, mostly because I was so fascinated by what I was doing, and I just kept adjusting my life to keep learning and that led to singing jobs.”

An important meeting

Phyllis Curtin and Norman Treigle in rehearsal for Susannah. New Orleans Opera, 1962. Photo by Eugene Cook.

Carlisle Floyd has been an important colleague and a good friend for almost fifty years. (Clarksburg, W.V. is less than a day’s drive from Mr. Floyd’s birthplace, Latta, South Carolina.) One could almost call Ms. Curtin a muse of sorts owing to her involvement in the creation of four of Floyd’s works. They met in the summer of 1954. “I was at Aspen. I don’t know how Carlisle heard about me; he probably heard that I did a lot of new music. Anyway, he found me and asked me to read through a new score of his which, of course, was Susannah. I remember I was rather tired when he asked me; but I told him I’d love to, although I had done so much new music that summer I didn’t know if I had any sense of discrimination about anything. I suggested he come and play it for me. He did and we read through it and I just fell in love with it. I didn’t grow up in the hill country of West Virginia for nothing! Mack Harrell was the baritone-in-residence that summer and I called him and told him there was something he had to hear. Carlisle and I went through it again for Mack and he loved it as much as I did. As I recall, Carlisle was very excited by that and called the dean at Florida State University where he was teaching who told him that if he could get us to sing it, they would do the first performance. It happened by a wonderful wild chance that Mack and I had the same two weeks in February free and that’s how we did the premiere in Tallahassee in 1955.

“Mack and I sang it for a variety of people when we returned to New York trying to get somebody to do it. I won’t mention who it was but one very important person said he wouldn’t think of doing it if there wasn’t a ‘boy-meets-girl’ story in it. Finally, it was Erich Leinsdorf who became interested in it. He happened to be a neighbor of Mack Harrell in Larchmont and we sang it through for him in his living room and he decided to do it for his one season at New York City Opera. Unfortunately, Mack was not available at the time City Opera could fit it into their schedule, so that’s when Norman Treigle came into the picture. Even though both Mack and Norman were Southerners, they were very different and at first I just couldn’t see Norman in the role. But by opening night, however, I was completely convinced.”

Susannah tells a timeless story of innocence killed by hypocrisy and misplaced moral judgment and includes a scene in which a preacher rapes a young girl in the community. Did the first audiences find the opera shocking? “The people who seemed most disturbed or who found it too real perhaps were always preachers, which was very interesting. (Carlisle’s daddy was a preacher, you know.) I remember in Cincinnati there was quite a to-do about how shocking this was. Heavens, Tosca is a shocking opera too, but it’s in a foreign language. There is something so singularly peculiar about Americans in this respect. There is so much illicit romance in opera but it’s always in another language, which somehow lessens the impact. I’ve been telling this story for years: it was after the second performance of Susannah at City Opera and I went out the stage door and I got in a cab to go home. The cabby asked me, ‘What was the opera tonight?’ I told him it was a brand-new American opera. He stopped the cab, turned around and said, ‘An American opera, what language can you sing it in?’ In a funny way, that’s the crux of the matter. American audiences still are not used to hearing and understanding what’s going on in opera. Now with surtitles they can read what’s going on but that’s still not the same.

“The sad thing is how long Susannah was looked down on as a ‘folk opera.’ Well, it’s no more a folk opera than Cavalleria Rusticana, but people have thought it was an opera about hillbillies. It’s about people who are just like anyone else with their feelings and problems and prejudices and it happens to be set in that place. But the big opera houses are always so slow to catch up to what’s going on. I was so thrilled when it was finally done at the Met [in 1999]. It really ought to be done there; after all it’s one of the most performed operas of all time.”

Carlisle Floyd’s masterful libretto and direct musical language capture the dreams of a young woman living in a small community who wants to see more of the world but knows where her roots lie. Susannah’s two set pieces, “Ain’t It a Pretty Night?” and “The Trees on the Mountains” offer glimpses of her yearning for more in life and her deep sorrow over being misunderstood and misjudged. “I don’t think of them as arias; they are beautiful, living moments that are so extraordinary. One of the dearest things that ever happened was while we were doing it at Cincinnati Zoo Opera one summer. The stage there was outdoors and when I began ‘Ain’t It a Pretty Night,’ a bird that must have had a nest in the proscenium arch woke up and showered us with the most beautiful roulades you could imagine.

“The way that “The Trees on the Mountains” occurs in the opera is so wonderful. When Norman Treigle died they asked me to sing “Ain’t it a Pretty Night” for the memorial service at City Opera. Of course at this point I wasn’t singing Susannah any longer – I had decided a while before I was far too old to look right. I told them I would like to sing “The Trees on the Mountains” instead because it leads to the pivotal scene between Susannah and Olin Blitch. He hears her singing it as he approaches her house and when she is finished he appears in her sight and says, ‘That’s a right sad song Susannah. It don’t look as if it would do you much good.’ She says, ‘I sing it to myself when I’m sad and lonely. My mama taught it to me a long time ago.’ So I sang it that night for Norman and I don’t suppose I had ever sung it as well in my whole life up to that point. I just barely made it off the stage before I totally fell apart. But that had been for Norman, who had heard it so many times before when we performed it together.

“The last Susannah I did was in Orlando (I forget the year – it was in the ‘60s) – I think it was probably Norman’s last one also. I felt as though I was singing it better and more easily all the time, but it didn’t feel right all of a sudden, because I wanted a younger woman to sing it. But goodness, it was a beautiful part of my life and living in that opera was just a wonderful experience. The music is so unbelievably real and reflective of the community in which Susannah lives.”

Wuthering Heights

After Susannah, Floyd turned to Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights for his next work, his lone opera that is not based on an American story. Ms. Curtin was influential in convincing Floyd to write Wuthering Heights. “This story is fascinating. I had always done the Mozart concert arias – all those ones he wrote for Josephina Duscek – and I was doing a Town Hall recital after Susannah and that gave me the idea to ask Carlisle to write me a concert aria. And he found that little section from the novel and made a beautiful concert aria out of it. After the recital, there were questions about the rest of the opera. Well, I told everyone that there was no ‘rest of the opera,’ that it was my piece! But then there were people after Carlisle to write the opera.

“I’m a great proponent of that opera and I have always felt it hasn’t had its due yet. Maybe it will one day. I think it’s a brilliant reduction of that novel. In so many ways it is wildly romantic and I mean that in the best sense of that word. For instance, Carlisle’s use of the waltz when Heathcliff appears at the party towards the end is one of the most delicious moments in all of opera. It is so fraught with passion and to have used a waltz – particularly in that period when the waltz was a dangerous thing – was such an inspired choice.

“I fell in love with the story very early. Indeed, I had a literally inclined beau when I was about 18 who always called me Cathy. I even had a ring with that engraved on the inside! I adored that story. I have that wonderful video of the Merle Oberon and Lawrence Olivier film and recently I put it on and watched a little bit of the beginning; but it moved me too much to continue so I didn’t finish it.”

In 1972, Floyd wrote the dramatic monolog, The Flower and the Hawk, for Ms. Curtin. How did it come to pass? “Eleanor of Aquitaine has long been a passion of mine; I was always fascinated by her life. In reading about her, one feels the liveliness of her mind. When she was young, she went to her uncle’s court in Constantinople where she was delighted to find the music and art and the other glorious cultural things that were much more advanced than what, at that time, she had known in a very primitive France. The whole movement of troubadour music and art in France came from her love for that sort of thing. And there is the remarkable story of her divorce from her first husband LouisVII of France so that she could marry Henry of Anjou, who became King Henry II of England. She maneuvered diplomatically throughout her very long life – she was born in 1122 and died in 1204. Generations of people died while she was still alive. She was a fascinating woman to me, intellectually and in every other way.

“As it happened, a few years after I was out of Wellesley, Amy Kelly, who had been head of house in my dormitory, published a remarkable book with Harvard University Press. I’ve read it several times. I gave the book to Carlisle because I wanted him to read about Eleanor. And Carlisle wrote the piece for me. The flower and the hawk was, of course, her heraldic device. My daughter and I were in the Metropolitan Museum once at an exhibition and passed some replicas of Eleanor’s and Henry’s funereal statuaries, lying on the top of a tomb. She was about five and she read the sign and turned to her friend and said, ‘Oh look, there’s mommy’s friend.’ I adored doing that piece. I’m too prejudiced to give you a proper critique of it but I had a marvelous time doing it.”

The American Songbook

Ms. Curtin has been a devoted proponent of American song literature since the beginning of her career. At a time when it was looked down on and thought inferior to the standard 19th century European song literature, she always included American songs on her programs. Now, as a teacher, she passes that legacy on to her students. She told us about her passion for this music. “There is an enormous repertory of American song out there and it is so rich. Good lord, Ned Rorem is our Schubert; he’s written hundreds of songs and you can find masterworks among them. And there’s Lee Hoiby and so many more. William Bolcom is creating some fascinating things. But there again, the whole vocal literature is so vast you could make a career on nothing but masterpieces and probably not exhaust the repertory. So it’s been hard to get young singers interested in singing American songs because there is so much beautiful Schumann, Schubert, Fauré and so forth. Even now when you look at recital programs of well established singers you hardly see music composed after Strauss on their programs. Years ago when I was still singing, after nearly twenty years of performing I finally submitted an all-American program to Columbia [Management] for a particular concert series I had been scheduled to do. I thought that if Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau could come to the U.S. and sing all night in German (which he certainly did in Germany all the time), then I as an American singer could sing an evening of American songs. My manager was horrified. I had put together a gorgeous program in terms of its emotional content and I felt it was very interesting musically. Well, he told me he couldn’t submit that to the presenter. But I begged him and so he agreed to send it out. Sure enough, in a couple of days he called with triumph in his voice to tell me that the impresario had called to say he didn’t want a radical program like that, he wanted a regular recital program. I thought it was so sad that in America a regular recital program was one in three or four languages that most of the audience couldn’t understand. There’s something about the fact that American music isn’t really ‘serious’ music, like Hugo Wolf for example. From that moment on and until the end of my singing career, I always sang the second half of my programs all in English.”

What do you make of the almost predicable condescension on the part of the press to music that is melodic or so-called neoromantic? One common criticism of a current American song composer, for instance, is that his music “flatters” the voice. “It is the constant conflict that has been going on during my life in music between let’s call them the avant-garde or experimental composers and the mainstream or the little-bit-behind-the-mainstream composers. When music is easy and available there’s something suspect about it. On the other hand, when music isn’t readily accessible we are not able to listen to it yet. When I was learning really difficult music, I would take it two bars at a time and I would sing those two bars over and over until I could sing them as easily as any children’s song. And I learned the music so thoroughly that way I could sing it even if someone were playing The Star Spangled Banner in my ear.

“As far as the critics go, I think they have to allow themselves to forget what they consider great songwriting or great operas. A few years ago I remember going to hear the Boston Symphony play Henze’s Seventh Symphony, which was quite a difficult piece to hear. I listened hard to it. Then the following summer they played it at Tanglewood and I heard it again and this time I thought it was marvelous. But it took that second hearing. It takes allowing yourself to let go of your expectations and of what you are familiar with to hear a newer statement. I remember Virgil Thomson saying to my late husband in a conversation we were having about some new music we had heard, ‘My dear, nothing you hear after the age of forty is ever going to seem as beautiful as what you heard before.’ I think there is something interesting about that. Our bodies respond to music, not just our intellect or our emotions. Brahms feels different than Mozart in the body. Then you get Elektra and that can be alarming. It takes awhile to hear new things. Sometimes I like to wonder what will be in the standard repertory 150 years from now. Personally, I can’t stand to listen to Telemann any longer. Come off it! It’s in our woodwork and you’ve heard it so much you can make it up yourself! I realize my ears have changed a lot and there’s a lot of music that bores the daylights out of me that I used to do very well. But it’s no longer in my life and the world is different now; it doesn’t sound the same to me any more.

“I remember something John Fitzpatrick from Yale told me about Charles Ives. He was at a concert at Carnegie Hall and there was a new piece by Carl Ruggles being played and whoever was sitting next to him was very impatient. Apparently Ives turned to him and said, ‘God damn it. Sit up and listen like a man!’ Not a bad injunction, you know. Sometimes we have to do that.”

The Master Teacher

Voice teaching seems to be a controversial subject these days with young singers complaining of more teachers who ruin their voices than help them develop. We asked Ms. Curtin about her teaching. “My first teacher gave me a complete vision to grow on. My second and only other teacher was a remarkable old man named Joseph Regneas, which is Saenger spelled backwards. Joseph Regneas’ name was originally Bearnstein. He was a fine singer; he was always very proud of the fact that he was the first American to sing the role of Hans Sachs [in Die Meistersinger]. Around the turn of the last century there was a very famous teacher in New York named Oscar Saenger. Well, Joseph Bearnstein became Oscar Saenger’s assistant and after Saenger died he changed his name to Regneas. He was a master teacher who gave me a technique to develop on and it was so basic that after he died I kept my mind on my notes and got better and better at doing what he taught. I think my own teaching gets better all the time because I am always finding more. I never found anything, no matter what the demands were or how far out it was, that I couldn’t do with that wonderfully sound, uncluttered technique.”

Are American singers better trained? “I remember I was singing in Vienna and one night the conductors changed and it was someone I had never seen before and after the performance we were leaving the house together and he said, ‘It makes me very angry that American singers are better trained than anybody else these days.’ That was twenty-five years ago. I find that a lot of our singers certainly are better trained. I was first a student at Tanglewood in 1946 and we all thought we were hot shots as far as being good musicians. But, my goodness, today’s crop by-and-large is much better trained. They really have had a stronger background in music than previous generations. Two of my students now are first-rate pianists also, but they’ve chosen to be singers.”

Yet singers today are often accused of being without distinction or individuality. “This is not meant to be a big statement of what I think is fact; they are just some opinions that have not really come together into one big idea. But one of the things I find distressing is the constant concentration on voice. We don’t talk about the singer except in terms of the voice itself. Beautiful voices are marvelous and there are a lot of them, but it’s what they say that matters. This also comes from recordings and people listening to the sound but not to what is being said. Then, back to American song, there is the fact that our singers are spending most of their time in languages they don’t really live with, whereas European artists, someone like Nicolai Gedda for example, grow up knowing two or three languages. But, largely I put it down to the fact that so much teaching concentrates only on voice and you get young singers who have no connection with text, which is the only reason we have songs. In Mary Jane Philips-Matz’s book on Verdi, time and again we see that Verdi talks about serving the poet first – paying attention to the words – and drama and the music will follow. A well trained instrument ought to be 95% at the command of the singer’s imagination, spirit, intellect and understanding. Then you get a real person singing.

“The other thing that drives me crazy is coaches. This profession has grown in the last thirty years in the most extraordinary way. Every singer now feels he or she has to go to a coach for everything they sing. Pianists or violinists or clarinetists don’t do that. But everyone is telling the singer what he ought to do and it got to the point when I was on audition panels that I could pick out the coaches by listening to the singers. Now that’s ridiculous. I heard a singer recently do ‘Non piu mesta’ and at one point in a long melisma she took a breath after the low ‘A’ before going to the high ‘A.’ Afterward I asked her why she did it because it was making it difficult to do the melisma. She responded, ‘well the coach told me to do that.’ Well, I get so tired of ‘the coach told me to do that.’ So many times the coaches have never sung a note in their lives (although they may be wonderful at basic musicianship). So I think that’s another reason each singer doesn’t develop as his or her own artist, which is what I am interested in. Throughout my singing career I listened to so many different musicians and learned so much from them, from how Lynn Harrell played a Bach cello sonata, for example. Finally, though, you must have your own instincts and intelligence and artistry to use. No two voices are alike. You learn an enormous amount from others but what you should be learning is how to learn, not how to copy. There are a few mavericks out there now, though.

“When I look back on it, I was not blessed with a beautiful voice like Tebaldi or somebody like that. But I was so interested in the music and in the art and what there is to do with it. I think I was very lucky that way. My goal was not to be at the Metropolitan Opera to be a star; I was just having a grand time making music of all kinds. Singing is a life study. Everything that has run through me, the poetry, the drama, the music – what a view of life! That was always more interesting to me than whether I got to sing on this stage or in that opera house and I think perhaps it keeps you singing longer and more richly. But that’s just me!”

We asked Ms. Curtin about Salome, which was one of her signature roles, and one that is usually associated with dramatic sopranos. “It was a standard of mine in Vienna. The first person who asked me to sing Salome was Joseph Rosenstock at New York City Opera. He was a very difficult, irascible man, but he was crazy about the opera. Before I ever looked at the opera I had read the Oscar Wilde play and had always adored it. After doing it at City Opera, I did some productions with Dino Yannopolis and his concept was to play her as young and willful. After all, Salome is a young woman – she’s in her teens and a virgin. She shouldn’t sound like Herodias. My teacher was horrified, of course. He had me learn it all vocalizing on my finest ‘ah.’ He wanted all the technical problems to be solved so that I would be on secure footing with all the emotional and dramatic stress. It got to the point with that piece where I could sing it as easily as anything I did. That recording of the final scene that’s out now was from a performance in Sydney, Australia.”

Ritorna vincitor?

Do you ever see or hear something that makes you want to be back on the stage? “Everything I see or hear makes me want to be on the stage again. My wonderful Joseph Regneas once said to me, ‘My dear, every singer must die twice.’ How true that is! I heard the wonderful Shostakovich From Jewish Folk Poetry on a program recently for tenor, soprano and mezzo-soprano and it grabbed me in such a way I thought I’d die. Any time someone sings Fauré I am swept away. I really have never gotten over wanting to be up there, but you hope God gives you the grace to know when you ought not to be there. I realized that when I was sixty that I didn’t want people to say, ‘Well, you should have heard her ten years ago.’ Every now and then I hear something I did on a CD and I think, ‘My god, how did I do that?’”