Phyllis Curtin facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Phyllis Curtin
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Phyllis Curtin in 2010
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Phyllis Smith
December 3, 1921 |
| Died | June 5, 2016 (aged 94) |
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| Spouse(s) | Philip Curtin |
Phyllis Curtin (born Phyllis Smith; December 3, 1921 – June 5, 2016) was an American soprano singer. A soprano is a female singer with the highest vocal range. She was also a respected teacher. Phyllis Curtin had a busy career in opera and concerts from the early 1950s to the 1980s.
She was famous for creating roles in operas by Carlisle Floyd. These included the main character in Susannah and Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights. She loved performing song recitals, which are concerts where a singer performs songs, usually with a piano. She stopped singing in 1984. In 1991, she became the Dean Emerita of the College of Fine Arts at Boston University.
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Early Life and Music Training
Phyllis Smith was born in Clarksburg, West Virginia. She studied singing with Olga Averino at Wellesley College. There, she earned a degree in Political Science. She continued her music studies at the New England Conservatory. She learned vocal performance from Boris Goldovsky.
In 1946, she made her first professional opera appearance. This was with Goldovsky's opera company, the New England Opera Theater. She played Tatyana in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. She later took the last name Curtin from her first husband.
Performing in New York and Beyond
Over the next seven years, Phyllis Curtin performed many roles with the New England Opera Theater. One of her roles was Countess Almaviva in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro in 1947. In 1950, she sang at the first Peabody Mason Concerts in Boston.
In 1953, she joined the main soprano singers at the New York City Opera (NYCO). Joseph Rosenstock invited her to join. Her first performance with the company was on October 22, 1953. She played three different characters in the U.S. premiere of Einem's The Trial.
She stayed with the NYCO until 1960. During this time, she sang many important roles. These included Alice Ford in Verdi's Falstaff and Antonia in Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann. She also played the main roles in Verdi's La traviata and Richard Strauss's Salome.
Phyllis Curtin sang two roles at the NYCO that she had first performed in their world premieres. These were Susannah in Susannah (first performed in 1955) and Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights (first performed in 1958).
She also performed in American premieres of other operas. In 1953, she was Thérèse in Poulenc's Les mamelles de Tirésias at Brandeis University. Two years later, she played the main role in Milhaud's Médée at the same university.
In 1956, she toured the U.S. with the NBC Opera Company. She sang as Countess Almaviva. She also performed at the Brussels World's Fair in 1958. She sang with the Philadelphia Lyric Opera Company and made her debut in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1959. During the 1950s, she appeared at many music festivals and with major orchestras.
Later Singing Career
After the 1959–60 season, Phyllis Curtin left her full-time position at the NYCO. However, she continued to perform there as a guest singer until 1964, and again in 1975 and 1976. In 1960, she sang Fiordiligi for the NBC Television Opera Theatre.
From 1960 to 1961, she performed several roles at the Vienna State Opera in Austria. These included the main role in Puccini's Madama Butterfly and Salome. In 1961, she made her first appearances at opera houses in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Trieste. She debuted at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1965 and the Seattle Opera in 1969. That same year, she sang Donna Anna in Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Glyndebourne Festival in England.
In 1962, Curtin performed at the famous La Scala opera house in Milan, Italy. She sang in Cosí fan tutte. In 1966, she appeared in the world premiere of Milhaud's La mère coupable in Geneva, Switzerland. She also sang Mimì in Puccini's La Bohème in Philadelphia in 1968. Other guest appearances included performances at the Scottish Opera and again at La Scala.
Phyllis Curtin made her Metropolitan Opera (Met) debut on November 4, 1961. She sang Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte. She often returned as a guest artist at the Met. Her roles there included Alice Ford, Countess Almaviva, Donna Anna, and Salome. Her last performance at the Met was on July 6, 1973. She sang the main role in Puccini's Tosca.
Teaching and Mentoring
Phyllis Curtin was also a dedicated teacher. She taught at Yale University. She was an Artistic Advisor at the Opera Institute at the Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Music. She also served as a Dean for the Schools for the Arts.
For over 50 years, she was an Artist-in-Residence at the Tanglewood Music Center. She taught voice there. Some of her students became very famous opera and song stars. These include Cheryl Studer, Simon Estes, and Dawn Upshaw.
From 1979 to 1983, she was the master of Yale's Branford College. She was the first woman to hold this position at the college. From 1983 to 1991, Curtin was the dean of Boston University’s College of Fine Arts. She also started its Opera Institute in 1987. As a professor Emerita, she continued to teach masterclasses at Boston University's Opera Institute every semester.
Personal Life
Phyllis Curtin married Philip Curtin, a history professor, in 1946. In 1954, Life Magazine featured her in an article. They described her performance in Strauss's Salome. She later married Gene Cook, a photographer for Life Magazine, in 1956. He passed away in 1986. They had one child, a daughter named Claudia Madeleine, born in 1961.
Phyllis Curtin passed away at her home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on June 5, 2016. She was 94 years old.
Recordings and Tributes
In 1995, VAI released a CD of her 1962 performance of Susannah. Other companies have also released CDs featuring her singing. In 1988, Kultur released a video of a 1968 TV program called "Opera: Two to Six."
You can see her in parts of Faust and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg on video. VAI later released DVDs with her performances from The Bell Telephone Hour. In 2007, VAI released a DVD of her singing the soprano part in Britten's War Requiem. This was from the work's first performance in America in 1963.
Phyllis Curtin received many honors throughout her life:
- In 1976, President Gerald Ford invited her to sing at a White House dinner. This dinner honored the West German Chancellor.
- She served on the National Council for the Arts. In 1994, she was named a U.S. Ambassador for the Arts. This was a new honor for former council members.
- She received awards from Wellesley College and Boston University. She also earned several honorary degrees in music and humanities.
- The Paley Center for Media showed a 1956 NBC-TV production of Così fan tutte in 2008. Curtin sang Fiordiligi in this show. After the screening, she had a conversation with a music critic.
- In 2017, a portrait of Phyllis Curtin was unveiled at a dining hall in Branford College at Yale. Before this, the hall only had portraits of men.
