My friend Laura Jacobs was watching old episodes of the Jack Benny show recently and was startled when soprano Roberta Peters turned up as one of Benny’s guests. Peters was young, beautiful, and sporting a 20-inch waist. What Laura realized she was feeling was the disconnect between the propaganda fed the public about how all opera singers pre-Fleming or Netrebko were gargantuan–and the manifest reality that we know that they really weren’t.
For Laura, it was a reality she had experienced first-hand, since several years ago she’d written a piece for Stagebill about Met Opera costumes. As part of her research she toured the Met’s costume archives, and saw for herself how some Met divas of yore, Lily Pons for one, were in fact tiny, bird –like creatures.