(Nov. 7, 2010) - One of the greatest American opera singers of the 20th century, Shirley Verrett, passed away at her home in Ann Arbor, Michigan this past Friday. She was 79 years old, and had been ill for several months before suffering heart failure.
In many ways, Verrett was as much a benchmark artist for other singers as she was a fan favorite. Gifted with a richly expressive tone and a deep, actorly understanding of nuance and meaning in her roles, Verrett became justly celebrated for her interpretations of Bizet, Verdi, and Berlioz in particular among a far-ranging repertoire.
Nevertheless, she experienced tumult in her career, particularly after her rather controversial decision to move herself from the mezzo repertoire into parts written for the soprano voice.
Born in 1931 in New Orleans but raised mostly in Los Angeles to strict Seventh-Day Adventist parents who disapproved of opera, Verrett was part of the wave of African-American singers who had to struggle against deep-seated prejudice in their native country, but went on to garner international stardom.
After studying at The Juilliard School and winning a Metropolitan Opera National Council audition in 1961, not all that long after Marian Anderson became the first black vocalist to sing at the Metropolitan Opera in 1955. For Verrett, one particularly ugly incident occurred in 1959, when Leopold Stokowski invited Verrett to come to Houston to sing Schoenberg's Gurrelieder with the city's symphony, but the orchestra's board refused to allow an African-American artist to appear as soloist. (Shocked and angered, Stokowski asked Verrett to come instead to Philadelphia to perform Manuel de Falla's Amor Brujo, which they went on to record together.)
As with many of her black artistic compatriots, she found success in Europe, particularly in Paris and at La Scala--where her 1975 performance in Verdi's Macbeth under Claudio Abbado became instantaneously iconic.
She was still active as a performer into her sixties, singing Dido in Berlioz' Les Troyens at Paris' Bastille Opera in 1990. (She was long associated with this opera, most memorably so after one now-legendary opening night at the Met in 1960, where she sang both Cassandra and Dido in a single performance after Christa Ludwig fell sick.) She also appeared as Nettie Fowler in Rodgers & Hammerstein's Carousel in 1994 on Broadway; her autobiography, "I Never Walked Alone"--whose title references a song from Carousel--was published in 2003.
Verrett joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1996 and retired last year as the James Earl Jones Distinguished University Professor in Music. She is survived by her husband of nearly 50 years, Lou LoMonaco, a daughter, and granddaughter.
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by Anastasia Tsioulcas
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