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!”