Bustling into an Upper West Side restaurant after battling her way through late afternoon crowds, Lucine Amara looked every inch the diva, from the gorgeous jewelry to her welcoming, regal smile and handshake. It was quickly clear that this was not only a world-renowned soprano, much beloved by Rudolf Bing from the time of Amara’s Metropolitan debut in 1950; but also a thoughtful, deeply intelligent woman with a delicious sense of humor.
Amara, through a series of circumstances that are now near-legend, has become almost indelibly identified with longevity and singers’ reactions to age. In 1976, in an unprecedented action, Amara filed a complaint against the Metropolitan Opera with the New York State Division of Human Rights, on the basis of alleged discrimination based on her age. Four years later, she won the suit, and although both Amara and the Metropolitan have agreed never to discuss the matter publicly, the repercussions of the decision are still being felt.
What she will say is this: “Every time I wanted to get a release from my Met contract to sing somewhere, Mr. Bing would say, ‘Everyone wants to sing at the Met, and you’re already here; why would you want to sing over there?’ ‘But,’ I said, ‘it’s a feather in your cap and mine if I sing internationally. It benefits everyone.’ No, he couldn’t see that.
“Fortunately for me, when I was a weekly artist, I got paid. But more often than not I had to cover several performances besides my own, and sometimes they had me scheduled to cover five or six performances (you’re not supposed to cover more than four performances a week). Fortunately the union said to the management, ‘You can’t do that; if you do, you have to pay extra money.’ Which was fine for me, I had extra money!” she added, laughing. “But by being a weekly artist I drew a very nice pension. Most artists who are per-performance artists have to get their own [pension]. Later on I didn’t want the whole season, I just wanted to keep singing, because I didn’t think that my voice had gone that bad, but the problem was that they were double-promising roles at the Met. So who gets pushed aside? The one that’s been there the longest.”
One of the more glaring examples of this double-booking tendency on the part of the Met happened in 1975. “I was covering for Martina Arroyo in Aïda. Martina called me at 11:00 one morning, and said, ‘Lucine, please don’t go out shopping; I’ve cancelled.’ She was always nice about that, calling early. And so I said all right, and I waited for the Met to call. Finally, at nearly noon, I called the rehearsal department and said, ‘Well, am I singing this tonight or what?’ They said, ‘We don’t know anything about this; Martina’s singing.’ I said, ‘No, she’s not. She called me and cancelled.’
“Well, they got Gilda Cruz-Romo in to sing it. That was because a board member was pushing for her, and I’m sure he said, ‘Whatever you can do to get her in there.’ This was what was going on. This is why my whole case came about.”
According to The New York Times, what also came about was an unfortunate statement, supposedly attributed to James Levine. “If Lucine Amara would go away, change the color of her hair, have a facelift, change her name, and come back within a month singing as she does now, she would be the hottest new soprano around.”
It was at least one of the final straws which led to Amara’s rejection in 1976 of the Met’s offers for the following season, and ultimately to the afore-mentioned lawsuit. “Money isn’t everything,” Amara said very simply. “I wanted to sing, and I wasn’t being allowed to do that.”
In 1980, Amara signed a new Met contract, and the rift between the venerable opera house and the soprano who had been a stalwart and phenomenally- gifted house singer for 30 years was mended. But Amara was busy during her time away, and in the years following her renewed association with the Met, she reaped new benefits from her new comparative freedom. She sang in South America, and was able to perform roles in other houses, which she had until then only done at the Met.
Lucine Amara retired in 1991, at the age of 64. But that was not the end of her singing career, by a long shot. “I retired from the Met because my pension would have gone down. With only three and four weeks of performances, I wouldn’t have gotten much; they base your pension on the last three to four years of performances. I didn’t want to end up with nothing! So I said to heck with it, I’ll retire and keep on singing!”
Being able to sing well at age 73 is no accident. “People can’t believe I’m still singing as well as I do,” she said bluntly. “When they hear me, they think that my voice sounds as if I’m between 30 and 45 years old.”
What accounts for that? “Great vocal technique from the beginning,” she stated. “I didn’t abuse my voice. When I went through menopause,” she added, “I had a problem. My vibrato slowed down. Many singers have had to stop singing because they didn’t know what was happening. For me, the bottom and middle got so full, and I wanted to carry that same color up to the top, but I couldn’t do it. I had had only one teacher in my life and didn’t want to change, but I had heard Bobbi teaching voice in the house. [Ed: Bobbi Tillander (d.1994) Amara’s manager and friend]. We were in Canada for Il Tabarro, and even though I had the high C, it didn’t sound like it belonged to the rest of my voice. I asked Bobbi if it was time to, you know, give it up. She said, ‘No, you just have to rework the voice.’
“So we began working, and slowly, slowly, with her vocalises, slowly the voice began to respond, but I was very upset with that vibrato. But eventually it worked again. We worked every day, and I had to give up some roles, but nothing bothered the voice because I was constantly working it, exercising. One singer I knew had to stop singing at 45. She told me, ‘I’m not going to decline; I’m going to stop when I’m at my top.’ But if you’re still able to sing, why not continue?”
About covering roles, Amara was equally firm. “Be well prepared! One thing that helped me was being a good musician–able to learn quickly, study and be prepared. With God’s help, always, because I was thrown onstage, a few times when I really wasn’t prepared, or in the middle of the opera. But when you are secure in your voice, then you don’t have nerves. The only operas I had nerves with were Falstaff–which made me so nervous, because I thought, one screw-up and everyone gets screwed-up–and Manon Lescaut. That frightened me, because I had had no rehearsals. The first time I had to sing it, I had been rehearsing Falstaff all afternoon. If you don’t think that’s something, to rehearse that all day and then be called and told ‘You’re on!’ Dorothy Kirsten cancelled, and I went to eat, came back to the theater and promptly, almost literally, had a nervous breakdown. I said to the management, ‘Look, I’ll do the first act, but could you do me a favor? Could you call Dorothy and see if she’s feeling better, if she could come back and finish this up?’ And then I couldn’t remember one word of Manon Lescaut, because my mind was on Falstaff, so Bobbi said (to the management), ‘Look, she’s like a racehorse. Get someone in the dressing room to play the piano, and the moment she hears the music, she’ll be fine.’ The second act was nerve-wracking. You miss one cue and you throw everyone else off. In the last act, all of a sudden I went blank. I whispered in the tenor’s ear, ‘You wouldn’t by chance know what my next line is?’ He said, ‘I dunno, babe, but I think it’s “Qui.”’And that’s all I needed, that first word, because if I had waited for the prompter it would have been too late.”
It hasn’t been an easy road for Lucine Amara, even if she did have early successes and a long career with one of the pre-eminent opera houses in the world. “The word ‘amara’ means ‘bitter,’” she said reflectively. “And there were some who thought that was an odd choice. But then I told them, ‘No, io sono dolce amara.’ Bitter and sweet.” There’s no denying Amara has seen both, and come through with grace, grit and phenomenal resolve.
Miss Amara will be performing in New Haven, Connecticut, September 13; Washington, D.C., September 26-27; and an Armenian music festival in Providence, Rhode Island, October 10. Check our website http://www.classicalsinger.com/ for more information and sound clips
