Goodbye, dear Beverly Sills (Mom’s only competition)

Published as a Dailykos diary, 02 July 2007

Beverly Sills, opera maven, died yesterday at age 78. I loved her voice, her stage presence — and I loved telling people that my mother could have given Beverly a run for her money.

**

I was lucky to have grown up in a home where music, particularly classical music, was valued. Starting at age 7, I took piano lessons and became proficient enough that at age 12, I was asked to be the accompanist for Junior Sunday School and Primary in my Mormon congregation.

While I was learning to play the piano, my mother was taking voice lessons. A naturally-gifted singer who had been a soloist as a teenager in her (Lutheran) church choir, she had largely put her gift on the shelf following her marriage and her and my father's conversion to Mormonism when I was a baby. (My mother always said that there were two things she missed about being a Lutheran: the wine and good church music.)

When I was in kindergarten — by now having moved from Long Island to a Chicago suburb — the local Mormon stake (a group of congregations) put on a production of "Promised Valley," a musical about the Mormon pioneer trek to Utah, to drum up publicity in support of local proselytizing efforts. Having acceded to pressure to audition, my mother was cast as the female lead, "Celia." I have only a few sparse memories of the one and only performance, which garnered positive reviews (for mom in particular) in the local paper. More important, however, was that it reawakened my mother's desire to sing.

Moving to Los Angeles not too long after, my mother ended up joining the Southern California Mormon Choir ("SCMC") — L.A.'s 110-voice answer to the Tabernacle Choir (and for the longest time, the only other choir that had Salt Lake's permission to use "Mormon" in its name). Mom started taking voice lessons from choir director Frederick Davis, and it was not long before she began to sing incidental solos (i.e., solos that are part of a choral number). Several years later, when I was finally old enough (age 16), I joined the choir, too, and sang with it off and on (when not in college or on a mission) for 10 years.

About once a year, we would perform a complete work with orchestra (in addition to our annual Messiah performance). But most SCMC concerts featured a variety of songs and were presented in two parts: the first was dedicated to classical and sacred choral repertoire such as the Coronation Scene from Mussourgsky's "Boris Goudonov," extracts from the Brahms Requiem, Mendelssohn's "Elijah," and so on. We were in formal dress: men in white dinner jackets, women in long white dresses. The second part, following intermission, was dedicated to lighter music — medleys from "Kismet," "Brigadoon," patriotic and folk music. We'd changed into square-dance outfits during intermission, and it was always fun to hear the audience's "Ohh!" of delighted surprise when the curtain went back up (or, more often, when we filed back in and up into the church choir loft).

I don't remember when she became a featured soloist and began performing operatic arias at choir concerts, but mom's solos and her duets with another of the choir's coloratura soloists were always amazingly popular with audiences. Mom's greatest triumph was performing The Mad Scene from Donezetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" before a packed house in Huntington Beach. I will forever kick myself that I don't have an audio recording, or much better yet, a video: it was an amazing performance both vocally and dramatically. After mom nailed the very high final note, there was a stunned, breathless silence before the audience exploded in cheers and applause.

I had long thought my mom could compete with Beverly Sills: like Beverly, my mother was a coloratura soprano, and she sang some of Beverly's repetoire (besides the aforementioned Lucia). Having come relatively late to serious singing--she was in her mid-30s when she started voice lessons — mom made up for it by hard work, singing and practicing constantly, often to the accompaniment of the droning vacuum. We, her unappreciative children, would yell for her to keep it down so we could watch endless reruns of "Gilligan's Island."

The only thing keeping my mom from being another Beverly Sills was opportunity. Even so, the SCMC provided her with a marvelous outlet for her talent, and induced me to practice the piano all the more so that I could on occasion accompany my mother. (Never in an official concert, but sometimes in recitals and "drum up publicity for an upcoming concert" church services. Just as well — one of the favorite solos for concerts was  the Jewel Song from Gounod's "Faust," and if ever there were a piece hated, hated, hated! by piano accompanists, that is it. But I digress.)

Mom loved Beverly Sills. She admired Joan Sutherland and Maria Callas and all the operatic sisterhood (as it were), but she loved Beverly Sills — and who didn't? Beverly — I can't quite bring myself to call her by her nickname, "Bubbles" — was a radiantly gifted personality on stage and off. I don't think my mother ever consciously compared herself to Beverly, but I know she used her as a benchmark of sorts.

Mom and I got to see Beverly in recital at the LA Music Center's Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in the mid-1970s. We spent the first half of the recital up in peanut heaven, but noticed some empty seats below. We spent the second half in the front row, center, of Founder's Circle, literally staring down Beverly's throat. It was glorious, even if toward the end we could hear Beverly's voice getting tired.

When I graduated from BYU, Frederick Davis, from whom I had been taking voice lessons for some time (doing bit solos, never featured solos, alas), gave me an LP set of Beverly Sills singing "La Traviata."

Beverly's obituaries — from the AP and NY Times, at least — talk about her helping to make opera more accessible to the masses. On a much smaller scale, so did my mom, and to a limited degree, she still does, by occasionally performing at local venues, and (of course) singing and playing the organ in her local Mormon congregation. Unlike Beverly, who retired from singing at age 51, mom is, at 76, still singing. She's no longer a high soprano, but she's still got a very respectable, largely quaver-free voice.

I salute Beverly. What a powerhouse for music. I don't think my mom knows that Beverly has died; I will call her later in the day (there's an 8-hour time difference between France, where I am, and Utah, but here it's 5 a.m., and I need to get back to bed). I doubt mom will cry for Beverly's passing, but she, like I, will doubtless put on a DVD and listen once more to those brilliant, soaring notes from a brilliant and soaring singer.

Goodbye, dear Beverly. Agnostic as I am, I hope nonetheless to hear you amidst the choirs on high. Save a spot for my mother — and for me — in the soprano section, please.

**

My mom has one "real" recording...

There's an SCMC LP from the mid/late 1970s that has my mom singing the Italian Street Song from "Naughty Marietta." I tried hard to persuade my dad to underwrite an album of my mom while she was at the height of her vocal powers; it still upsets me to think about it.

She did a cassette album with her duet partner in the mid/late 1980s, but the songs were more contemporary in nature and didn't really show off what she could do. I have bits & snatches of rehearsals & such. I know that some fellow used to regularly record SCMC concerts (reel-to-reel, high-quality equipment), and I even think he recorded mom's memorable Mad Scene, but I have not been able to track down these tapes, darn it all.

Very cool that you are a singer & voice teacher. (My mom also taught voice & at least one of her students turned operatic pro.) I ended up taking several lessons from Carol Ann Allred (her husband Brady is now the U of U choral director & occasional conductor for the tabs). I hate to say it, but I learned more from Carol in the few months I studied with her than I did in the five years (off and on) that I studied with the SCMC conductor.

I miss singing, but there's some interest in this tiny (but very lively and friendly) French village in getting something going musically, so who knows.