I attended my first opera performance.
Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” at the Metropolitan, sitting in the Dress Circle, listening to Leontyne Price, Carlo Bergonzi, Cesare Siepi, Kostas Paskalis, Fernando Coreno, led by Michelangelo Veltri. It was an altogether intoxicating performance.
It came about because my parents decided they had had enough of my brother and I making falsetto ridicule of operatic expression. My parents were actually not big opera buffs at the time and most of their classical records were symphonic.(Although they did own Beecham’s 1956 Boheme, and they did watch the Bell Telephone Hour.) But nevertheless they were offended on opera’s behalf.
Even before the performance, Price btw meant something special to us because my aunt had studied piano at Juilliard when Price was a graduate student there.
I went with my mother and with downstairs neighbor Ernestine Stewart, whose family was the first of color admitted to our little co op in Jackson Heights, Queens. Ernestine attended in high school a young singer’s training program at the Met, but after getting married she became a social worker and worked for NYC, if I recall correctly.
I mentioned this in a piece for City Arts in 2009 but since I couldn’t find the program I wasn’t sure whether it was Bergonzi or Franco Corelli who had sung Don Alvaaro opposite Price. They alternated in the role that season. So I put one, then thought better of it and replaced it with the other. Both names wound up in the piece–vagaries of copy editing. But whatever.
My father took my brother to a Rigoletto with Gail Robinson, Richard Tucker, and Robert Merrill.
Needless to say I was hooked.Soon we would be taking my parents to performances, insisting that they must also hear Birgit Nilsson, Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti, et. al.
When you begin with that level of performance, you find it very difficult to accept anything less.