Beverly Sills

Beverly Sills, born Belle Miriam Silverman on May 25, 1929, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, was an American operatic soprano whose peak years ran from the 1950s through the 1970s. Friends knew her early as “Bubbles” Silverman, a name that fit a child already at home before an audience. Her parents, Shirley Bahn and Morris Silverman, were Jewish immigrants from Odessa in the Russian Empire, present-day Ukraine, and Bucharest in Romania. She grew up in Brooklyn speaking Yiddish, Russian, Romanian, French, and English, and attended Erasmus Hall High School and Manhattan’s Professional Children’s School.

Sills began very young. At three she won a “Miss Beautiful Baby” contest by singing “The Wedding of Jack and Jill.” At four she was performing professionally on the Saturday morning radio program Rainbow House. She started singing lessons with Estelle Liebling at seven, appeared in the short film Uncle Sol Solves It a year later, and by then had adopted the stage name Beverly Sills. In 1939, at age 10, she won a week of CBS Radio’s Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour, then appeared often on Bowes’s Capitol Family Hour. Her 1945 professional stage debut came with a Gilbert and Sullivan touring company produced by Jacob J. Shubert, a tour she later credited with helping develop her comic timing.

Her operatic stage debut came on February 14, 1951, as Frasquita in Bizet’s Carmen with the Philadelphia Civic Grand Opera Company. She toured North America with the Charles Wagner Opera Company, sang with the San Francisco Opera in 1953, and first appeared with the New York City Opera in 1955 as Rosalinde in Die Fledermaus. Her reputation grew with the title role in the New York premiere of Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe in 1958. In 1966, the New York City Opera revived Handel’s then little-known Giulio Cesare, and Sills’s Cleopatra made her an international opera star.

Although Sills sang music from Handel and Mozart to Puccini, Massenet, and Verdi, she was especially associated with coloratura soprano roles and with Donizetti. Her signature roles included Lucia in Lucia di Lammermoor, Manon in Massenet’s Manon, Marie in La fille du régiment, the three heroines in Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann, Rosina in The Barber of Seville, Violetta in La traviata, and Elisabetta in Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux. Critics noted her agility, musicianship, rhythmic sharpness, sense of text, long legato line, fioriture, and thrilling high notes.

After retiring from singing in 1980, Sills became general manager of the New York City Opera. In 1994 she became chairwoman of Lincoln Center, and in 2002 chairwoman of the Metropolitan Opera, stepping down in 2005. She also used her public name for charity work in the prevention and treatment of birth defects, and was a member of the executive committee of Writers and Artists for Peace in the Middle East. Her often-quoted line, “There are no shortcuts to any place worth going,” fits the record of a performer shaped by early discipline, long training, stage craft, family responsibility, and a second public life in arts leadership.