“Don’t call me in the morning,” laughed soprano Roberta Peters on the phone from her home in New York. I had visions of a dark, shrouded house—everyone silent and fearful of interrupting a diva’s sleep.
“Mornings are no good. I play tennis in the morning.”
Maybe it’s the tennis, or the rock-solid technique with its basis in physical training, that has kept Roberta Peters before the public for over 50 years. Miss Peters was past her 70th birthday (her birth date is proudly listed in Who’s Who, and if you looked this good you wouldn’t lie about your age, either) when she gave a recital at Alice Tully Hall on November 17th, 2000. The date was significant. It was fifty years to the night, almost to the moment, from her unscheduled debut at the Metropolitan Opera, a late replacement for Nadine Conner as Zerlina in Don Giovanni. “Few artists survive being thrown onto the stage of the Met with no warning,” wrote Sir Rudolph Bing, Peters’s boss for over 20 years. “But Miss Peters became a star.” A pithier comment on that performance came a number of years ago, over dinner, from soprano Eleanor Steber. “This little girl walked onto the stage like she owned the place. And three hours later, she did.”
Fifty years later, Peters’s voice at Tully Hall hadn’t changed much. The top notes and the coloratura facility that made her name were still there. She fought a severe cold that threatened to, but didn’t, sidetrack Schubert’s “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen.” Nerves? Despair? Forget it. After intermission, having changed her dress, the lady announced, “I will continue,” and sang Strauss and Rachmaninoff with a clear voice in full bloom.
If Peters’s November 1950 Met debut came as a surprise to her, her success that night is easy to explain. She was ready. A protégé of voice teacher William Herman since she was thirteen, Peters by age 20 had 20 complete operas in her repertoire and was conversant in Italian, French and German. Her early studies were encouraged by tenor Jan Peerce—a Met star and a favorite of Toscanini’s. Peerce writes:
“In 1942, I was singing at Grossinger’s in the Catskills one weekend when the maitre d’ told me he had a grandchild with ‘a real voice on her.’ I said very casually that I’d like to hear her sometime. A few days later a girl called Roberta Peterman came down from the Bronx with her mother to see me at my accompanist’s studio on West 72nd Street. To my amazement, she was only about 13. To my further astonishment, her grandfather had been absolutely right.”
Peters’s full time training began with William Herman. “I got to Bill Herman through Patrice Munsel,” Peters recalled. “Patrice had just made her debut at the Met, and she was only 17 years old. She had been a big success and was singing everywhere. I wanted a career like hers, even as a youngster. My goal was always to sing opera. Mr. Hermann had what you’d call today a holistic approach to vocal training. He was a fitness nut. He was a very physical teacher. I would put my palms on the piano and lean, with my feet about three feet away. Leaning, what the Italians call appoggio. I would sing in that position. Then I’d sing bending down, so the blood rushed to the head. It relaxed the whole throat area. I used to go all the time to Joe Pilates’s gym on 56th Street and 8th Avenue. He had all kinds of little contraptions. There was even a little windmill. You’d take a straw and very slowly exhale to see how long you could keep the windmill going. It helps for breath control, for the long phrases! Later on, after my debut, Life magazine had me photographed with a man standing on my diaphragm. I had good muscles!”
Roberta Peters sang over 600 performances at the Metropolitan between 1950 and 1985. She gave over 2,000 concerts. She turned down an early offer for a Broadway show (“I was offered a part in Weill’s Street Scene at $1,000 a week when I was a teenager, but again, I wanted opera”), but in her later career she starred in revivals of The King and I and The Sound of Music. And with nearly 70 appearances, Peters holds the record as Ed Sullivan’s most popular TV guest.
“I know as a youngster I did have the true color, the leggiero soprano, and I had an easy top. Working the rest of the voice took a lot of work, but once I got it I was fine. I tell young singers today, “Keep practicing!”
Did young Roberta have role models? “Lily Pons was a huge star. I liked her, but I didn’t want to sing like her. By the time I got to the Met, Lily spent most of her time doing concerts. But she was always a huge draw. Josephine Antoine sang at the Met for a while, but with Lily away they needed a Rosina, a Gilda, a Lucia.
“I was so lucky in my training. I didn’t start out with the coloratura facility. Mr. Herman must have heard it in my voice. Later I studied the records of Tetrazzini and Maria Barrientos. I studied hard Garcia’s Vocal Methods. Later on, to develop the agility, I worked with the Klose clarinet books. Herman was a bug on agility. I sang Mozart piano sonatas with a pianist. At every lesson he drilled the messa di voice. If you can produce a very small note, do a crescendo and then decrescendo, then your vocal cords are working. Again, you have to keep practicing. You have to work the cords. When I would descend a scale, I would think ‘up’ as I was going down, because if you think down, then you dig, and you’re pushing.”
The young Roberta’s progress was so significant with William Herman that she was taken out of public school at age 13, and her life centered on music. “My parents weren’t musical at all. They had probably never heard an opera; neither had I until I began studying.” Eventually her vocal studies expanded to private lessons in languages and dramatics. “I was sent to a wonderful Italian lady for dramatic coaching, Madame Stabile. She had been a Met chorister in Caruso’s time, and she had heard all of his contemporaries: Geraldine Farrar, Rosa Ponselle, and Tita Ruffo. On her piano were photographs of all the great singers she had known. There I was, a young girl, drinking all this in—this entire milieu.
“Lucia di Lammermoor was the first opera I studied. I learned all the roles. Mme Stabile insisted on that. And I always spoke Italian with her. After we had gone over every word and phrase of Lucia, Mme Stabile would play records of the music by the great singers. I would mime the action while the records played. ‘She’s Scottish, this Lucy of Lammermoor,’ Mme Stabile would tell me. ‘The attitude of such a woman to her lover would be very different from that of an Italian woman.’ I had to take her word for it, since I was only 14 at the time and had never been out on a date!”
Her years of study perfected a coloratura voice with striking facility and a top G reached with pinpoint accuracy. Peters’s recordings, and her over 50 Met broadcasts, reveal no pitch problems and no sag in the middle register. Indeed, she is heard to fine advantage in the November 1958 Met broadcast of Lucia di Lammermoor. The low-lying “alfin son tua” in the mad scene projects clearly and easily, and her top E-flats are effortless. The same description applies to a 1971 in house recording of the same role.
“As my studies progressed, Mr. Herman and Jan Peerce decided I was ready to try for a career. My parents were working people and were always very loving and supportive. But it was time for me to go out there and see what I could do professionally. I was signed by Hurok concerts, and I stayed with Mr. Hurok for many years. Eventually I was asked to sing for Max Rudolf, who was Mr. Bing’s de facto Music Director at the Metropolitan. This was early in 1950 (when Miss Peters was 19). Mr. Rudolf liked my voice, and an audition was arranged for Rudolf Bing. He was in his first year at the Met. He had me sing the second Queen of the Night aria—all those high Fs! Four or five times as he moved through the house. A few days later Hurok got a letter inviting me to join the company. I stayed 35 consecutive seasons.”
Even after Miss Peters had been invited to join the Met company, there was no plan for a debut. “Bing wanted me to observe, to attend rehearsals and performances, and to study. There was some mention of a debut as the Queen of the Night in January, 1951—a whole year away! And while I had sung for years in my teacher’s studio, I had never sung in an opera, never really sung on any stage. But there I was at the Met. By the following November I had been doing what Mr. Bing advised, studying, observing and working in the Katherine Long courses at the Met. Sort of a young artist’s training program. Doing scenes. I went out one day for a doctor appointment and then did some shopping. The Met had tracked me down. I was to go to Mr. Bing’s office immediately. I thought maybe they wanted me to sing Queen of the Night the following week. But no. They needed a Zerlina that very night, five hours away! I knew the opera—it was one of my 20—and I was ready. I had the briefest meeting with the conductor Fritz Reiner. He was notorious for his very tiny beat, but he said ‘Don’t vorry, dollink. Ven I point, you zink!’ And that’s what I did!”
If it wasn’t exactly “go in an unknown, come out a star,” it was an auspicious debut. First the performance itself—again, Peters’s first on any stage—was a success. Then, Olin Downes wrote in the next day’s New York Times,
“There were certain features of special interest, one of them being the debut at the Metropolitan, and the first appearance it was said on any stage, of the 20-year-old Roberta Peters, who substituted on a day’s notice, and very creditably, for Nadine Conner as Zerlina. It was a very neat, well sung, intelligent performance. It was especially remarkable for its aptness of delineation of Zerlina, as she is pictured in Mozart’s libretto and score.”
Soon Peters added the Queen of the Night and Rosina to her onstage repertoire. She recorded both roles and kept them for many years. By 1985 she had sung over 600 performances, including the Met broadcast premiere of Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos and the Met premieres of Arabella and Menotti’s The Last Savage. Her most performed roles were Gilda (88 performances), Zerlina (61), Rosina (52), Oscar (42), Queen of the Night (32) and Lucia (29).
How does she single out a few of the most memorable performances? “Well, the debut of course. I sang the Queen of the Night with Bruno Walter, in his final Met performances.” This writer asked Peters about a 1961 Met broadcast of Le nozze di Figaro, with Cesare Siepi and Lucine Amara. The audience is immediately engaged—reacting to everything—long before titles. The reason? “That’s easy. I had a big crush on Cesare Siepi.”
Peters also sang Oscar in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera on the occasion of the great Marian Anderson’s debut. Anderson was the first African American singer to be engaged by the Met. “That was a great night. The applause went on for at least five minutes before she began to sing. It must have been unnerving to her, but the audience wouldn’t stop applauding.” As for Gilda, her most performed role, Peters remembers especially the 1966 debut of Alfredo Kraus. And for her Rigolettos she had great American baritones: Leonard Warren, Robert Merrill, Cornell MacNeil and Sherrill Milnes. And one intriguing partnership took place on The Ed Sullivan Show. “I was going to sing ‘Ombre Legere.’ I looked into the orchestra and there was Al Hirt, playing the trumpet! The biggest name in jazz!”
And what about Rudolf Bing? Peters stayed on the Met roster through his entire tenure. There were new productions, opening nights and lots of broadcasts. “Bing came to the hospital when my first child was born. He was photographed looking in at the baby,” laughs Peters, who agrees that cooing over a baby is not an image commonly associated with Rudolf Bing. In Sir Rudolf’s sad, final years, Roberta Peters was one of a very few people who regularly visited her old boss as he succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease.
Today, Roberta Peters gives masterclasses and sings the occasional concert, not because she has to, but because she CAN. “I stress again and again—singers must practice. They must keep their voices exercised. And you must know what suits you and stick to it. I almost never left my Fach. The coloratura, soprano leggiero roles. Later I did a few Bohemes and Traviatas away from the Met. I do regret not singing I puritani, although I did record the arias. My one favorite role I never sang was Salome. I loved that. When she sings ‘Ach, ich habe deine Mund gekusst,’ I always get chills.”
“I worked hard to keep my voice and my body fit. I’ve struggled with weight all my life. My mother was heavy, and my grandmother was heavy. We don’t keep cake in the house. Singers are always under a lot of tension, and that’s what makes you grab the food. So it’s always a struggle. But excess weight is so draining. Your energy level suffers. And today, certainly, wonderful singers can’t be marketed at their best if they are very heavy. Recently in Paris I heard an American soprano with a magnificent voice, but I’m sure she’d be hard to cast in opera. And along with physical fitness and a sense of your own Fach, singers must use their languages. You might not be fluent, but it’s so important to really know the languages in which you sing. Otherwise you will have difficulty making the character understood. The more you know, the more you will be able to do.”
Far from an overnight success story, Roberta Peters gave up high school for training in voice, music, drama and languages. When an opportunity came, she was ready. Remarkably, she had the gift of perseverance, with a fifty-year career encompassing opera, concerts, musicals, recordings and television, and two trips to Hollywood.
Today, it is family—Miss Peters married attorney Bertam Fields in 1955, and they have two sons—masterclasses, tennis and more. And someday, after all her years of diet and exercise, of discipline and willpower, maybe she’ll let me buy her a hot fudge sundae.
