Beverly Sills, one of the most popular American opera singers of the 1960s and 1970s, died on July 2 of cancer, New York’s Metropolitan Opera announced. She was 78.
”The soprano died in her home in Manhattan on July 2 after a brief battle with inoperable lung cancer,” the Met said in a statement, quoting her manager, Edgar Vincent.
Sills, born in New York of Ukrainian and Romanian Jewish immigrants, became a household name in her home country, graduating from a childhood career as a radio star to the New York City Opera.
From the mid-1960s, her coloratura soprano voice led her on to wider international exposure, and comparisons with Maria Callas, the most famous opera singer of the half-century.
She was born Belle Silverman on May 25 1929 in Brooklyn. Her father, an immigrant from Romania, had a precarious career as an insurance salesman, and the family frequently knew hardship.
Her mother, originally from the Russian (later Ukrainian) city of Odessa, pushed the young girl to take part in radio shows, which brought her early exposure to performing, including singing.
Revealed as a promising voice, she specialised in music at school, and was to begin her adult professional career at the end of World War II, working with travelling opera companies.
She was hired by the New York City Opera in 1955, and in the same year she met the man who would become her husband, Peter Greenough of Boston. The heir to a media company, he provided welcome financial stability.
Sills achieved all her early success in the United States, leading her to state that ”I proved that one can have a great career … in this country, without European approval”.
She also won over mainstream US audiences with her frequent appearances on television talk shows, and was coined ”America’s Queen of Opera” by Time magazine in 1971.
She only ventured to Europe in the mid-1960s, with well-received debuts in Vienna and Milan.
She recorded 18 full-length operas before retiring in 1980, when she proved a talent for management as general director of the New York City Opera and chairperson of the Met and the Lincoln Centre.
Among her most acclaimed roles were those of Lucia di Lammermoor in the work by Donizetti, Rosina in Rossini’s Barber of Seville and Manon in Massenet’s opera of the same name.
Her family had announced the week before her death that Sills was gravely ill with lung cancer, though she had never smoked.
Sills’s husband, Peter Greenough, died in September 2006, two months before what would have been the couple’s 50th wedding anniversary. They had two children together, and three from Greenough’s previous marriage. — Sapa-AFP