But her father put an end to her child-star career when she was 12 so that she could concentrate on her education at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and the Professional Children’s School in Manhattan. She devoted herself to her voice lessons with Estelle Liebling, which had begun when Ms. Sills was just 9. Liebling had coached Galli-Curci and was Ms. Sills’s only vocal teacher.
When Ms. Sills graduated from the professional school in 1945, at 16, she began 10 years of grinding work, including long stints with touring opera companies, performing Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and, later, leading roles like Violetta in Verdi’s “Traviata.” Recounting these tours for a Newsweek interview in 1969, Ms. Sills said, “I had my first high heels, my first updo hair style, my first strapless dress, and I didn’t know what to hold up first.”
A Triumphant Debut
In 1955, after seven previous unsuccessful auditions over a three-year period, Ms. Sills was accepted into the New York City Opera. Her debut as Rosalinde in “Die Fledermaus” was enthusiastically received by critics.
On tour with the City Opera in Cleveland in 1955, Ms. Sills met Peter B. Greenough, a Boston Brahmin descendant of John Alden, whose family holdings included The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. With a degree from Harvard and a master’s degree from the Columbia School of Journalism, Mr. Greenough was then an associate editor at The Plain Dealer. When he met Ms. Sills, he was going through a difficult divorce. Eight weeks after it was made final, he married Ms. Sills in a small civil ceremony at Liebling’s New York studio.
Suddenly Ms. Sills found herself the stepmother to three daughters and the mistress of a 23-room house in Cleveland. She hated the city, as she acknowledged in “Beverly: An Autobiography,” her blunt 1987 memoir: “Peter was ostracized by Cleveland’s rinky-dink version of high society because he had the nerve to fight for custody of his children.”
During this period Ms. Sills regularly commuted to New York to perform with the City Opera, which was experiencing hard times. The problems came to a head in 1956 when the conductor Joseph Rosenstock, the company’s general director, resigned. Ms. Sills was one of a core group of singers who met with board members to find a way to save it. This led to the appointment of the pragmatic, take-charge conductor Julius Rudel, who spearheaded a revival, as general director in 1957.
In 1959 Ms. Sills gave birth to a daughter, Meredith Holden Greenough. Two years later she gave birth to the couple’s second child, a son, Peter Bulkeley Greenough Jr. At the time Meredith, called Muffy, was 22 months old but unable to speak. Tests revealed that she had a profound loss of hearing.
With support, their daughter thrived over time. But the boy’s problems were severe, and he was eventually placed in an institution.
The diagnoses of her children’s disabilities had come within a six-week period. For months thereafter, Ms. Sills turned down all singing engagements to be at home. Mr. Rudel, convinced that going back to work would help her cope, sent lighthearted letters addressed to “Dear Bubbala,” suggesting absurd roles for her to sing, like Boris Godunov, and sharing opera gossip. He then tried to insist that Ms. Sills had a contract to fulfill. When she reported for work, she felt like a totally different artist.
“I was always a good singer,” she said in the Newsweek interview, “but I was a combination of everyone else’s ideas: the director, the conductor, the tenor. After I came back, I talked back. I stopped caring what anyone else thought.” But she managed to rid herself of bitterness.
Beverly Sills sings the role of Norina in Donizetti's "Don Pasquale, " at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, 1980. More Photos >
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Beverly Sills at Lincoln Center, 1976. More Photos >
“I felt if I could survive my grief, I could survive anything,” she said. “Onstage I was uninhibited, and I began to have a good time.”
Her Breakthrough Role
The Newhouse newspaper chain bought The Plain Dealer in 1967 for $58 million, a substantial portion of which went to Mr. Greenough. The family, extremely wealthy, lived in Milton, outside Boston. He was a financial columnist at The Boston Globe from 1961 to 1969.
There Ms. Sills formed a close working relationship with the conductor and stage director Sarah Caldwell, who then ran the Opera Company of Boston, and stretched herself in operas like Rameau’s “Hippolyte et Aricie.” At the City Opera, Ms. Sills scored a notable success singing the three heroines in Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann.” But her breakthrough came in the fall of 1966, when she helped to inaugurate the City Opera’s residency at its new Lincoln Center home, the New York State Theater, singing Cleopatra in Handel’s “Giulio Cesare,” the first production of a Handel opera by a major New York company in living memory. In snagging that role for herself, Ms. Sills demonstrated a fierce determination born of long frustration.
Mr. Rudel had conceived the production asa vehicle for the bass-baritone Norman Treigle, who was to sing the title role. For Cleopatra he had selected the soprano Phyllis Curtin, who joined the City Opera two years before Ms. Sills but who had been singing with the Metropolitan Opera since 1963.
Ms. Sills felt that Cleopatra was ideally suited to her and that the role might lift her to star status. Moreover, she felt she had earned the role because of her loyalty as a company member. After unproductive talks with Mr. Rudel, Ms. Sills told him that she would resign from the City Opera if he did not give her the role, and that her husband would secure Carnegie Hall for a recital in which she would sing five of Cleopatra’s arias. “You’re going to look sick,” she told him. Mr. Rudel relented.
Ms. Sills was correct about the effect that singing Cleopatra would have on her career. In a move that Handel purists today would consider sacrilege, Mr. Rudel and the stage director, Tito Capobianco, cut the lengthy opera to a workable three hours. The international press was in town to cover the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House, which was presenting the premiere of Samuel Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra.” Many critics also checked out the other Cleopatra opera across the plaza at Lincoln Center.
Ms. Sills won the greatest reviews of her career. Critics praised her adroit handling of the music’s florid fioritura, her perfect trills, her exquisite pianissimo singing and her rich sound. Beyond the vocal acrobatics, she made Cleopatra a queenly, charismatic and complex character. The production employed vocal transpositions and other alterations that would be frowned on today, in the aftermath of the early-music movement, which has enhanced understanding of Handelian style and Baroque performance practice. Still, at the time, the production and Ms. Sills’s portrayal were revelations. Suddenly she was an opera superstar.
In 1968 she had another enormous success in the title role of Massenet’s “Manon.” When the production was revived the next year, the New Yorker critic Winthrop Sergeant wrote: “If I were recommending the wonders of New York City to a tourist, I should place Beverly Sills as Manon at the top of the list — way ahead of such things as the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building.”
In April of 1969 Ms. Sills made her La Scala debut, prompting a Newsweek cover story about America’s favorite diva and her European triumph. The opera was Rossini’s “Siege of Corinth,” which had not been performed at La Scala since 1853. A leading Italian critic, Franco Abbiati of Milan’s Corriere della Serra, commented: “In many ways she reminds me Callas — good presence, good face and, above all, a beautiful voice. She’s an angel of the lyric phrase, with great sweetness, delicacy and technical bravura.”
An Overdue Milestone
Her acclaimed debut at London’s Covent Garden came with Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” in December 1973. But the one company notably missing from her international schedule was the Metropolitan Opera. Rudolf Bing, who ran the Met during Ms. Sills’s prime years at the City Opera, later conceded that he had never managed to walk across the Lincoln Center plaza and hear her City Opera triumphs. He had invited her several times to sing with the Met, Bing later said. But either the invitations conflicted with Ms. Sills’s other bookings or the offered repertory did not interest her.
In 1975, three years after Bing retired, Ms. Sills finally made her Met debut in the opera of her La Scala success, “The Siege of Corinth.” In interviews she tried to play down the significance of this overdue milestone. The next season she repeated her role in “The Siege of Corinth” for the Met’s prestigious opening night. In the spring of 1976 she sang Violetta in “La Traviata” at the Met, having gotten the company to agree to invite her longtime colleague Ms. Caldwell to conduct, making her the first woman to take the Met’s podium.
But now that this kind of clout and acclaim had come to her, she started experiencing vocal unevenness. Ms. Sills continued to sing with a communicative presence and charisma that reached audiences. But in 1978 she announced that she would retire in 1980, when she would be 51. “I’ll put my voice to bed and go quietly and with pride,” she said in an interview with The New York Times. . It was announced at the same time that she would become co-director of the City Opera.
Joseph Volpe, the Metropolitan Opera's former general manager, left, and Beverly Sills at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, 2006. More Photos >
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Beverly Sills sings the role of Manon in a performance of the Jules Massenet opera "Manon" at the New York City Opera, 1969. More Photos >
The plan was for her to ease into the general director’s post, sharing it with Mr. Rudel. But in 1979 he officially left the City Opera, and Ms. Sills assumed the post. She inherited a company burdened with debt and unsure of its direction.
Her vision for revitalizing the City Opera included offering unusual repertory and making the company a haven for talented younger American artists. Under her, the repertory significantly diversified, with productions of rarities like Wagner’s early opera “Die Feen,” Verdi’s “Attila” and Thomas’s “Hamlet,” as well as new operas like Anthony Davis’s “X (The Life and Times of Malcolm X).”
To entice new audiences, she reduced ticket prices by 20 percent. A $5.3 million renovation of the New York State Theater in 1982 improved the look and efficiency of the building, though not its problematic acoustics. In 1983 the City Opera became the first American company to use supertitles. The company had a sense of mission and vitality. But the deficit grew to $3 million. Then a devastating warehouse fire destroyed 10,000 costumes for 74 productions.
Still, Ms. Sills was a prodigious fund-raiser and a tireless booster. When she retired from her post in early 1989, she had on balance a record of achievement. The budget had grown from $9 million to $26 million, and the $3 million deficit had become a $3 million surplus.
She then took her skills as a fund-raiser, consultant and spokeswoman to the entire Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts organization. In 1994 she was elected the chairwoman of the board, an unpaid but influential post. In 2002 she announced her retirement from arts administration.
But six months later she was persuaded to become the chairwoman of the Met. Her most significant act was to talk the board into hiring Peter Gelb as general manager, starting in 2006. During these years, she remained the host of choice for numerous arts programs on “Live from Lincoln Center” television broadcasts.
In retirement she continued a life of charitable work, notably as chairwoman of the board of trustees of the March of Dimes for several years, until 1994.
Ms. Sills’s two children, both of Manhattan, survive her, as do her stepchildren, Lindley Thomasett, of Bedford, N.Y.; Nancy Bliss, of Woodstock, N.Y.; and Diana Greenough, of Lancaster, Mass. Her husband, Mr. Greenough, died last year after a long illness.
In a conversation with a Times reporter in 2005, reflecting on her challenging life and triumphant career, Ms. Sills said, “Man plans and God laughs.” She added: “I have often said I’ve never considered myself a happy woman. How could I, with all that’s happened to me. But I’m a cheerful woman. Work kept me going.”
View related photosNEW YORK - Beverly Sills, the Brooklyn-born opera diva who was a global icon of can-do American culture with her dazzling voice, bubbly personality and management moxie in the arts world, died Monday of cancer, her manager said. She was 78.
It had been revealed just last month that Sills was gravely ill with inoperable lung cancer. Sills, who never smoked, died about 9 p.m. Monday at her Manhattan home with her family and doctor at her side, said her manager, Edgar Vincent.
Beyond the music world, Sills gained fans worldwide with a style that matched her childhood nickname, Bubbles. The relaxed, red-haired diva appeared frequently on “The Tonight Show,” “The Muppet Show” and in televised performances with her friend Carol Burnett.
Together, they did a show from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera called “Sills and Burnett at the Met,” singing rip-roaring duets with funny one-liners thrown in.
Long after the public stopped hearing her sing in 1980, Sills’ rich, infectious laughter filled the nation’s living rooms as she hosted live TV broadcasts. As recently as last season, she conducted backstage interviews for the Metropolitan Opera’s high-definition movie theater performances.
Sills first gained fame with a high-octane career that helped put Americans on the international map of opera stars.
From Belle to Bubbles to Beverly
Born Belle Miriam Silverman in Brooklyn, she quickly became Bubbles, an endearment coined by the doctor who delivered her, noting that she was born blowing a bubble of spit from her little mouth.
Fast-forward to 1947, when the same mouth produced vocal glory for her operatic stage debut in Philadelphia in a bit role in Bizet’s “Carmen.” Sills became a star with the New York City Opera, where she first performed in 1955 in Johann Strauss Jr.’s “Die Fledermaus.” She was acclaimed for performances in such operas as Douglas Moore’s “The Ballad of Baby Doe,” Massenet’s “Manon” and Handel’s “Giulio Cesare,” and the roles of three Tudor queens in works by Gaetano Donizetti.
Her 1958 appearances as Baby Doe would become among her best known, in a tale of a silver-mine millionaire who leaves his wife for Baby Doe and eventually dies penniless.
“I loved the role,” Sills wrote in her 1976 autobiography. “I read everything that had ever been written about her. ... I absorbed her so completely in those five weeks of studying the opera that I knew her inside and out. I was Baby Doe.”
Sills’ face once graced the covers of Time and Newsweek magazines as an American who had conquered the classical music world, even abroad — at the time a rarity.
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