Beacon to the World by Joseph W Polisi

Author:Joseph W Polisi [Polisi, Joseph W]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300249965
Publisher: YaleUP
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

This Is a Dream Come True

IN THE HISTORY OF LINCOLN CENTER, composer William Schuman had been the only artist to serve in a position of administrative leadership. This changed dramatically in January 1994 when it was announced that Beverly Sills would succeed George Weissman as the Center’s chair, effective June 13. In addition to being a world-class performer, Sills was the first woman to chair Lincoln Center’s board and the first chief trustee who had previously not been a board member. Sills, of course, had shattered many glass ceilings throughout her illustrious career, and this new responsibility reflected her ambition and capabilities.

Born Belle Silverman on May 25, 1929, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, she was nicknamed “Bubbles” because she had purportedly been born with bubbles in her mouth. The sobriquet remained throughout her life. She began radio work at the tender age of four and by seven was on the widely heard radio show Major Bowes Capital Family Hour, where she not only tap-danced but also sang opera arias. She attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, where Martin E. Segal had also been a student, and the Professional Children’s School. She studied with her only voice teacher, Estelle Liebling.

Sills joined the New York City Opera in 1955 and successfully debuted as Rosalinde in Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. Soon thereafter she met and eventually married Peter B. Greenough, an independently wealthy associate editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In 1959, Sills gave birth to a daughter, Meredith (Muffy), and two years later to a son, Peter (Bucky). Muffy was born deaf and Bucky was eventually diagnosed with severe autism that required his institutionalization.

The medical diagnoses of her two children came within six weeks of each other. Sills would later muse, “When you’ve already lived the worst day of your life, very little fazes you. . . . You put everything in proportion.”1 Instead of feeling overwhelmed by her children’s medical conditions, she transformed her approach to being an artist and moved forward. “I felt if I could survive my grief, I could survive anything. . . . Onstage I was uninhibited, and I began to have a good time,” Sills later said.2

Her breakthrough success in 1966 as Cleopatra in Handel’s Giulio Cesare at the New York City Opera launched a career that brought her to the great opera houses of the world and eventually to the Metropolitan Opera in 1975, three years after Rudolf Bing retired as general manager. In 1978, at the height of her popularity, she announced that she would retire from the stage in 1980 at the age of fifty-one. However, Julius Rudel decided to leave the New York City Opera as general director in 1979, which fast-forwarded Sills’s timetable: she assumed the post that same year and never sang in a staged opera again.

In her ten years leading the New York City Opera, she reduced ticket prices, was closely involved in the renovation of the New York State Theater, initiated the use of

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