Sills at the Met: The Long Road Up

"It would have been nice if it had happened a while ago, but I am delighted we are doing it now." General Manager Schuyler Chapin spoke last week on behalf of the Metropolitan Opera and, indirectly, for thousands of equally delighted American opera fans. What is happening at long last is the arrival at the Met of Beverly Sills, the homegrown soprano who is the finest singer-actress in opera today. Sills' debut next week will be in a work never before heard there, The Siege of Corinth, a grandiose tragedy by a composer best known for his comedies, Gioacchino Rossini.

At 45, an age when many divas begin to fade, Sills is singing as well as or better than ever. Met patrons should be prepared to hear a great natural voice in one of the memorable debuts in the 91-year history of the house.

Certainly the Met is behaving that way. The performance will be a $60-top benefit for the Met Opera Guild. Siege is the hottest ticket in town. All five performances are sold out, and the Met has had to turn down some 7,000 additional orders.

Sweet Laments. The astonishing thing about all the hoopla is that Sills has been singing virtually in the Met's shadow all her life. As a seven-year-old named Belle Silverman in Brooklyn, she learned to imitate all her mother's records of the legendary diva Amelita Galli-Curci, and by nine she was singing arias like Caro nome and The Bell Song in a Manhattan radio studio on the Major Bowes Capitol Family Hour.

For 20 years she has been a member of the Met's energetic rival, the New York City Opera. At the start, her career was decent but unspectacular, notable mostly for her sweet laments in Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe. She achieved her major reputation with a blinding display of Baroque wizardry 8% years ago in Handel's Julius Caesar. Subsequent years brought triumphs in Massenet's Manon; Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and trilogy of queens, Roberto Devereux, Maria Stuarda, Anna Bolena; and more recently, Bellini's / Puritani. Vocal fireworks are Sills' glory. She has a light, lyric coloratura so clear and swift that it seems phosphorescent. Though she is the best Manon around, her trademark has become the revival of obscure operas of the 19th century bel canto era.

Thus with Siege of Corinth. It is one of Rossini's grandest operas, set in 15th century Corinth. The Turks, led by their Sultan Maometto (Justino Diaz), are hammering at the gates. Sills plays Pamira, the daughter of Cleomene (Harry Theyard), the governor of Corinth. Beverly, who talks as fast as she trills, narrates the plot in a style redolent of both Anna Russell and Rhoda Morgenstern: "It's very similar to Aida. The only difference being that my lover is a girl. Well, I mean to say, the part is played by a girl. Actually, the one that I really love is not a tenor. It happens to be the bass, Maometto the terrible Turk. Neo-cle, who is from my country, he's a Greek and is a brave warrior that my father wants me to marry. She -- uh, he -- uh, it is played by Shirley Verrett. So it is no wonder that I prefer Maometto, who is played by Gus Diaz, with a gold lame costume and shoes that curl up at the toes. It makes a big difference.

"I get to run away and live in a tent with Maometto, which is pretty good stuff for opera. Then Neocle shows up in chains -- sound familiar? -- and says, 'Listen, honey, you gotta go back to your father and your country; they're doing terrible things to all the virgins.' "

Siege will provide Sills with a generous supply of ornate bel canto pyrotechnics, notably Pamira's Act II "Si, ferite"(Yes, strike me). Says Sills: "This role is longer than Norma, I hope to tell you. I wish I were getting paid by the note." She gets paid by the performance, of course: $1,000 at the New York City

Opera (their top fee), $4,000 at the Met (also the top), $10,000 or so for concerts and other opera dates. Her income from these appearances and recordings is about $400,000 a year. That makes her one of the two or three highest-paid sopranos in classical music -- only one indication of the way she has come to dominate her field. Says Tito Capobianco, the artistic director-elect of the San Diego Opera: "She is Beverly Sills with or without the Met."

Her popular image is that of a happy-go-lucky, slightly kooky redhead. She is in fact indomitably and infectiously humorous. But that is part of a complex cerebral nature. Because she is always thoroughly prepared and as knowledgeable about any particular opera as they, her colleagues tend to compliment her in the light of their own specialty. "She thinks of the composite work like a conductor," says Thomas Schippers, who will conduct Siege. "Her mind works like a director's mind," says Sarah Caldwell, who has directed Sills for years at the Opera Company of Boston.

Lucky One. The essential Sills is found in a tough, highly articulate, professionally savvy, hard-working woman who knows how to keep her career going. After being hospitalized last fall for removal of a malignant growth in the pelvic area, she showed up a month later for work at the San Francisco Opera against her doctor's wishes. Her reasoning was that if she skipped her West Coast engagements, then took her scheduled vacation, she would be out of view for about three months. "That's too long. I just didn't want anybody to think I was dead." In fact, says Sills, "I'm one of the lucky ones, I'm considered a complete cure."

Met rehearsals for Siege (see color-pages), an opera she has already performed, are better panned than the hectic schedules that Sills is used to at the New York City Opera. But that company will remain her home base indefinitely ("They'll have to drag me feet first out of there"). She is also loyal to Sarah Caldwell, Kurt Herbert Adler in San Francisco and others who have meant much to her and her career. Her second opera for the Met next year (she will open the season in Siege) will be La Traviata. Sills has persuaded Schuyler Chapin to let the talented Caldwell conduct. No woman has ever conducted a performance at the Met. Says Sills delightedly: "That's a tremendous barrier to break down. And my friend Sarah and I did it."

If Sills is cutting back at all now, it is to spend as much time as possible with her husband Peter Greenough, 58, a wealthy Bostonian, one of whose ancestors sailed to America on the Mayflower, and their daughter Meredith (Muffy), 15. Muffy is a bright, pretty child who was born deaf but now reads lips expertly enough to attend an ordinary private girls' school in Manhattan. Home is an apartment on New York's West Side, but as often as possible they retreat to their house on Martha's Vineyard.

As a child, Beverly was not allowed to read nursery rhymes or fairy tales. Her parents considered them beneath her considerable intellectual gifts (her IQ is 155). Novels of any description were another matter. To this day an addicted reader, Beverly herself is still not sure whether the life she has been leading is a fairy tale or a novel. It has elements of both. It also has elements of the fatalism that is a firm part of Sills' thinking about life: "What's going to happen to us is all written down in a great big book. I firmly believe that, and it's kind of exciting to think that somewhere up there, someone looked down and said, 'That one over there is going to be a singer with high notes.' I sort of like that idea."

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