Beverly Sills

[D. Allan]

NPR.org, July 2, 2007 · One of this country's great operatic voices has fallen silent: Soprano Beverly Sills, with her soaring, silvery voice and irrepressible personality, died of cancer this evening. She was 78.

She was born Belle Miriam Silverman in New York, and Beverly Sills, as she would eventually rename herself, had her first taste of stardom at age 3, when she was named Brooklyn's "Miss Beautiful Baby 1932." At age 4, she was a regular on the Rainbow House radio show, and at 7 she sang in a film.

As a child performer, Sills was billed as "Bubbles," a nickname that matched her effervescent personality — and one that stuck with her from the very beginning.

"I was born with a big spit-bubble in my mouth, and the doctor had to break it," she once said. "So the doctor said, 'I guess we're going to have to call this one 'Bubbles.'"

Sills was always a go-getter. She was voted most likely to succeed in high school, and in her early years she sang on cruise ships and did one-nighters on the Borscht Belt circuit in the Catskills.

Although she made her operatic debut in 1947, in Philadelphia, her career finally got off the ground when a reluctant impresario at the City Opera of New York finally signed her in 1955. She wasn't getting a lot of attention in those early years, but that's when Sills' voice was in its prime, according to Washington Post critic Tim Page.

"The voice itself had quite a bit of luster," Page says. But "what made it special ... was the freedom that she had; she could just go anywhere with the voice. She also brought real dramatic intelligence to her roles. "

The singer used that dramatic sense and her sparkling personality to great effect in 1959, when she took on the title role in a brand-new opera, Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe, based on the true story of a Colorado silver magnate, the young bride he falls for, and the scandals and tragedies they survive.

Baby Doe was a success for Sills, but stardom was still a long way off. She was working hard, essentially as the City Opera's house soprano, always dreaming of singing at the larger Metropolitan Opera. She found her breakthrough role in 1966, when she talked her way into singing Cleopatra in Handel's Julius Caesar at the City Opera.

"I always had a theory that people became a superstar because they could do one thing better than anybody else in the world," she said. "I think there was an aria in Julius Caesar called 'Se Pieta,' and I used to think I sung that aria better than anybody."

Sills' performance turned her into a sensation, almost overnight. A New Yorker magazine critic at the time said, "If I were recommending the wonders of New York to a tourist, I would place Beverly Sills at the top of the list."

But Sills might have pushed herself a little too hard. She finally got her invite to sing at the Met in 1975, but by then her voice was already showing signs of wear and tear. In 1980, at age 51, she retired from singing. She said it was the perfect time to go out — on top.

"There is a kind of desperation, I think, at staying at something too long," she said. "And I was never a desperate woman. I wanted people to say 'It's too early,' rather than 'When is that woman ever gonna quit?' "