I first discovered Jean Madeira as a little boy. My brother and I were opera fanatics and eagerly waited to buy new opera recordings as our small budget would allow. Basically we’d badger our father who would give us enough money to eventually purchase a new recording—something Dad didn’t understand as he was a jazz man and a great saxophonist. So how did my brother and I end up liking opera?
As children, we were lucky to have an opera company about 30 minutes away. Tri-Cities Opera in Binghamton, N.Y., watered the seed that would prove a life-long passion for opera, singing, and performing. After seeing a local production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, we were off to the music store. Enter Jean Madeira. We spied her recording of Carmen high on the record shelves. Together, we came up with enough money to buy the set.
And now, some 40 years later, I am still as mesmerized as I was then by her voice—the rich, dark, and penetrating sheen; the deep and solid chest register. Who today can compare to the voice of Madeira? I set out to find a few artists who had worked or sung with her to gain their insights, their opinions, and (what I found was more impressive) their admiration for a world-renowned contralto who ironically was relegated first to the role of Mercédès to Risë Stevens’ Carmen on the Met stage.
Not surprisingly, Stevens virtually owned the role since she first sang it at the Met in 1945. In 1952 alone, Stevens had sung 29 Met performances of Carmen, both in house and on tour, according to the Metropolitan Opera online archives. Her last Met Carmen would be in April 1961, at a time when Madeira’s interpretation had already been lauded. As one critic put it after Madeira’s 1957 performance in Aix-en-Provence: “Admirable from the start, the voice was not that of a singer only, but of a personality. . . . We have for a long time waited without much hope for a Carmen; here she is. At Aix, at long last, I found again and recognized again Carmen . . . .”
“I think she was kind of overshadowed, I’m guessing, by Risë Stevens,” recalls Met baritone Sherrill Milnes. He sang with her early in his career and recalled Madeira’s interpretation of Carmen at a performance in Miami. “I do remember that her gestures, her hands, worked very well with the character of Carmen,” he said. “Her instincts were great as were her body movements, which are very important for that role,” he added. “Her pizzazz in the [role] of Carmen I thought was just fantastic.”
Moreover, acclaimed opera director Tito Capobianco concurs. “I am surprised how she was not more used and exposed by the Met,” he says. “I don’t know if it was her decision; she was a first-class singer. She was really a lady; a beautiful girl. She was always smiling,” he adds. “Not only physically, but a beautiful person; I never saw her get upset. She never said, ‘I know that . . . I want it this way . . . I have my own version.” Never, never! She always listened and would say, ‘Let me try . . . Can we change this? . . . Let’s try again . . . How does this look?’”
Madeira made her Met debut on Dec. 2, 1948, as the First Norn in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. The cast was stellar. Traubel sang Brünnhilde with Melchior as Siegfried. Madeira would stay on the Met roster for another 23 years. As her popularity grew, so did the Met assignments. Soon she was singing internationally—La Scala, Teatro Colón (Buenos Aires), Covent Garden, Vienna State Opera, Stockholm, Munich, San Carlo (Naples), and both Salzburg and Bayreuth.
Although her roles were varied, it was her Carmen and Delilah which brought Madeira the most acclaim—acclaim she wished to have on her native soil. The first time she actually sang Carmen “in house” at the Met was March 24, 1950. The intervening years were allotted to Risë Stevens. But finally, on March 17, 1956, Madeira’s second in-house Carmen garnered raves and secured her rightful claim to the role.
Madeira’s husband Francis, now 95 and residing in New England, spoke to me with emotion and great enthusiasm about his wife’s career. The two met at the Juilliard School when Jean was on a voice fellowship and he had a fellowship for conducting.
“We got married in 1947 and, from one viewpoint, I was exactly the right person for her,” he says. “Because, before we got engaged, when I was putting her on the train to go back to New York after she had said yes, I said, ‘By the way, this is not to interfere with your career,’ and she said, ‘Thank you very much.’ I never took it back. I knew what would have to be for the kind of life she should be leading,” he adds. “Anybody in another profession would have been fed up with it after awhile.”
And their musical plans began to spring forth when Jean was invited to the Met and later Vienna and her husband became the conductor of the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra. “We did a lot of recitals together,” says Francis. “We gave recitals in 36 different states. But it was Jean’s operatic roles—Delilah, Ulrica, Azucena, Prince Orlovsky, Klytämnestra—which were leading up to her most recognized: Carmen.
“Risë Stevens had a firm grip on [Carmen],” Madeira adds. “She had a contract at the Met that said no one else could sing Carmen in the Met without her permission. Not until Risë Stevens bowed out of the scenery, so to speak, could Jean sing it at the Met.”
Perhaps this is, in part, why the Met graciously provided an opportunity for Jean to go over to Europe in 1954 to sing for impresarios in hopes of widening her career. “She sang everywhere you can think of!” recalls Madeira. “Eventually came an offer from Karl Böhm from the Vienna Opera offering her a three-year contract.
As timing is often everything, Madeira literally became the “darling” of Vienna, joining the Vienna Opera in 1955. “Rudolf Bing wrote a letter to my father that said, ‘Mr. Madeira, maybe you don’t know, but your daughter-in-law is the toast of Vienna,” tells Madeira. “Shall I say my father was very proud?”
The later New York audiences didn’t seem as enthusiastic as those, however, in Vienna. “The New York public wasn’t as intrigued as the Viennese public was,” he remembers. “That’s something about which you can do nothing.”
Nonetheless, it was in the fall of 1955 when she sang her Carmen in Vienna. One cast member counted 45 curtain calls. So it’s no surprise that when she sang the role in 1956, almost a year later at the Met, the critics were ecstatic. Time magazine wrote that “she serpentines onstage in a dress of bare-shouldered abandon, and the rose in her hand glowed like the apple of Eden. Her big voice had a dark, anthracite sheen . . . .” The writer concluded that by the time the opera ended, Madeira had “achieved a long-sought objective—to arrive at the top of the operatic heap in her own country.”
Time also made reference to her 45 curtain calls in Vienna. “The less-demonstrative Met was not so generous last week when the curtain came down (on St. Patrick’s Day) on its new Carmen (only about 15 calls), but happy Jean Madeira was serenaded with applause and pelted with green carnations.”
Capobianco, who met Madeira in Buenos Aires, praises her vocalism which consistently drew raves from the press. “It was a type of voice that was caressing, like velvet. It was soft, sensual, not centurion,” says Capobianco. “She had no technical difficulties. It was the same sound from top to bottom with no differentiation.”
Madeira was a consummate actress as well, along with her ability to change the shading of the voice. “She was never concerned about the big sound, the volume of the voice,” continues Capobianco. “She was always looking for the innuendo, the piano, the mezzo forte.”
Madeira’s husband recalls a time when the Met asked Jean to do a secondary role in Britten’s Peter Grimes. “I do not know who was originally assigned the role of Mrs. Sedley, but she couldn’t do anything with it,” he recalls. “She couldn’t exude evil, so to speak, and that is something necessary in the role because it is the lynchpin to where the action hinges. Finally the Met said to Jean, ‘Look, we know you’ve done Auntie which is a major role and this isn’t, but we need you.’ They knew that her dramatic projection would [convey] the quality of evil. So she did it and did it very well.”
And Capobianco remembers Madeira’s approach to both her Carmen and Delilah. “The difference with Carmen is she was showing everything; in Samson et Delilah, she was insinuating everything,” he says. “She practically controlled Samson with a look and moved the minimum. We look at Carmen different than the Anglo-Saxons or other races because we’re a mix of Spanish, Latin, and Italian. We have a special flair for Carmen and [Jean] knew that. She was very smart to look for something new and she would say, ‘No, Tito. Show me. I want to see how you do it.’ Never did she say, ‘I used to do this before.’”
Still, Francis Madeira remembers a time when his wife was performing Carmen in Vienna with Herbert von Karajan. “She had to fight with him for the right to do it her way. He wouldn’t conduct for her afterwards. She was tired of doing it his way and she wanted to do it her way, so she did, but he didn’t like it,” he says. But Met conductor Max Rudolf loved her acting. “He told Jean, ‘You forget sometimes you’re doing too much even when you’re standing still!’”
“Her two roles,” adds Capobianco, “were Delilah and Carmen. You can make a career out of those two operas!”
Although mezzo Shirley Love made her Met debut 15 years after Madeira, she can recall both Jean’s amazing voice and friendliness. “We’d sit in the ‘B’ Box—the Artists Box—together at the Met,” she remembers. “We heard a lot of performances together, and I covered her as Mrs. Sedley in Peter Grimes. I never thought she was a mezzo. Most people thought she was a contralto.
“She had this wonderful, warm, and dark sound which was solid as a rock,” Love says. “If you listened to her Erda, it was an astounding sound—quite even, clear, and strong. It lies in an area that for mezzos is very difficult because it really is a contralto range, and I’m sure that was exactly what Wagner had in mind. She just had that dark, dark black sound that’s so wonderful for roles like Erda [and] Ulrica.
“Her Prince Orlovsky in Die Fledermaus was fantastic too because she was so beautiful, tall, and slim. She just made this person look so perfectly like this very aristocratic man. I never got over that because I thought, ‘Gee, I’d love to do Orlovsky but I’m too short,’” Love says with a laugh.
Not surprisingly, Francis Madeira concurs. “Very often contraltos have to sing mezzo roles whether they like it or not,” he says. “[Jean] had a mezzo extension on her voice so she could get up to a high B. She could also, believe it or not, sing down to a low E below middle C. If you’d ever played for her the way I did, you know the fact she was always a contralto.
“To take this one step further,” continues Madeira, “that’s why her voice was so good in Carmen because the low notes were really gutsy with good strength and warmth the way they should be. Sopranos should never do Carmen. They’ve got enough roles of their own.”
Tragically, Jean Madeira should have sung another 20 years but fell victim to cancer in 1972. “Her last performance at the Met was a Saturday performance in [Strauss’s] Elektra. I sat there in a box with my hands as cold as ice, fearful that she might faint,” her husband recalls. “She didn’t.”
So, how would this acclaimed conductor and pianist (he still plays piano) like the opera-going public to remember his former wife? “I couldn’t put it into words,” he says, his voice becoming emotional, “except to say with the greatest of pleasure—socially and musically.”
