Baritone Robert Merrill, himself one of opera’s bona fide survivors, has this to say about the remarkable vocal longevity of his colleague and former wife, soprano Roberta Peters:
“Roberta has sung well for more than four decades because she’s a professional. She had good training from the beginning. She’s technically secure and she has stayed within her repertory; she knows what she can do. That’s what creates longevity.”
True enough, although it may not be sufficient to explain why Peters, an incredibly youthful-looking and -sounding 63, goes on and on when more than a few opera singers younger than she have fallen by the proverbial wayside.
Certainly a persistent dedication to craft and a determination to keep at her best vocal and physical health also have helped make Peters the hardy perennial among her generation of American-born, American-trained singers.
Making her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1950-without rehearsal-Peters at 20 was one of the youngest singers ever to join the Met roster. And when she celebrated her 35-year Met career in 1985 she stood alone in the winner’s circle: No other soprano on the roster could match her long-running achievement.
Although Peters sings with the Met no longer, she is keeping plenty busy, averaging 30 performances a season in concerts and opera. As a matter of fact, she will return to Chicago Friday for her first local concert in 15 years, singing a program of opera and operetta arias to open the 59th Grant Park Music Festival at the Petrillo Music Shell, with Yoel Levi conducting.
And the celebrated singer clearly is enjoying the challenge of adding new roles, sticking to a sensible balance between her onstage and offstage lives and, above all, staying fresh.
“Even my husband doesn’t know where I get my inner energy,” laughs Peters, happily married to Bert Fields, an investment broker, for the past 38 years, and mother to two grown sons. She and her husband live in Scarsdale, N.Y., and will soon become grandparents.
Yet Peters continues to sing all over the world and has enough time left over to serve on the boards of the Metropolitan Opera Guild and Carnegie Hall. Last year former President Bush named her to the council of the National Endowment for the Arts.
“It’s a responsibility for us to maintain our voices and bodies as long as we can. I love to sing and I enjoy my work. My husband says to me, `You’re crazy,’ but I don’t know how else to live. I need that for my own self-preservation.”
Peters continues to devote several weeks each year to studying with her longtime vocal coach, George Trovillo. “I work an hour or two every single day with him, mostly on the repertory I’m performing that season,” she explains. “It keeps my nose to the grindstone, concentrating and practicing. It’s like the old joke: `How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice.’ It’s really true!
“That’s what I tell young singers when I give master classes. Too many of them get bad advice from their teachers; they don’t understand the intensive study and devotion that must go into singing. They think that all they have to do to get into the Met or Chicago Lyric is to know a couple of arias. They are not even interested in listening to old recordings of singers to learn style.”
Peters listened. When Roberta (nee Peterman), then a grade-school dropout of 13, came under the tutelage of William Herman, he insisted she get a thorough grounding in the great traditions of the vocal art. So, along with receiving voice, language and acting lessons, she listened to 78-rpm recordings from Herman’s library-Frieda Hempel, Luisa Tetrazzini, Marcella Sembrich.
The great Italian diva Amelita Galli-Curci became her idol. Peters would later model her approach after Galli-Curci’s, adhering to a lighter, purer style at a time when nearly every coloratura soprano imitated the more dramatic bel canto of Maria Callas. Singing relatively lightly while maintaining a lovely lyric quality doubtless contributed to Peters’ long and full career.
From age 13 until her Met debut seven years later, she rode the subway from her parents’ home in the Bronx to Manhattan, six mornings a week, to study with Herman. Theirs was hardly the standard student-teacher relationship. In her young life he became part Svengali, part surrogate father. Herman laid out a demanding regimen, instilling in the teenager a highly developed sense of duty.
Peters recalls many times leaving her teacher’s studio in tears. But she grew-vocally, technically and musically-under Herman’s masterminding. She was able to act out every role in Rossini’s “Barber of Seville” to recorded music; she became fluent in Italian, French and German; at 14 she started reading Dante. In 1946 she was offered $1,000 a week to appear in Kurt Weill’s “Street Scene” on Broadway. Herman and her family declined the contract; Roberta was interested only in opera.
Tenor Jan Peerce, a friend of her grandfather’s, helped her land an audition with impresario Sol Hurok, who immediately signed her up. Word spread about the talented kid from the Bronx, and by the time she auditioned for Met general manager Rudolf Bing, early in 1950, she knew 20 operas by heart.
“It was the first audition I had done for anyone and I was so scared,” Peters recalls. “I sang the Queen of the Night’s big aria, from Mozart’s `The Magic Flute,’ as Bing sat out in the darkened theater. When it was over he asked if I would sing it again. Then he asked me to do it again. Well, I sang it four times, not knowing that he had silently brought in conductors Fritz Reiner, Fausto Cleva and Fritz Stiedry to hear me.”
Peters won her Met contract, but she made her house debut, as Zerlina in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” two months ahead of schedule, after the announced soprano, Nadine Conner, canceled. She went on without rehearsal, on only six hours’ notice. Reiner was in the pit and obviously liked what he heard, for he would invite Peters to appear with his Chicago Symphony Orchestra early in his first season (1953-54) as music director, and again in 1958.
How was the much-feared, much-foibled Reiner to work with?
“Well, you were either a Reinerkind or you weren’t,” Peters replies. “He liked me very much, so he was nice to me. You always called him Maestro or Dr. Reiner, never Fritz. And you never got too close to him, which was just fine with me.”
Three years after her Met debut, Peters married Merrill. He was near the peak of his career while she was only beginning her ascent. It did not take either of them long to realize the marriage had been a mistake. After three months they divorced, amicably.
“Luckily, we both got out of it very nicely. Both of us married again and are extremely happy; Bob has been a grandfather for a couple of years. Do you know that until very recently we were asked to sing together? We did two or three concerts a year-and that glorious voice! I think I fell in love with that rich, effortless, natural baritone.”
The Met remained Peters’ principal operatic base in the U.S., although she sang with success in London and Salzburg during the ’60s and ’70s and in Berlin made a celebrated recording of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” under Karl Bohm. By her 25th anniversary with the Met, in 1975, she had sung more than 300 performances of 20 roles in 19 operas. The core of her repertory remains the bel canto heroines: Rosina in “Barber,” Norina in Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale,” Despina in Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutte.” In more recent years, however, she has ventured cautiously into lyric soprano territory, with Verdi’s “La Traviata” and Puccini’s “La Boheme.”
Last season the renowned German mezzo-soprano Christa Ludwig presented what she called her “farewell” recital tour. Does Peters plan something similar as a retirement gesture?
“My dear,” she replies, carefully avoiding any mention of the R-word, “I haven’t even thought about it yet, I really haven’t. It may come, you know. How long can you really go on? I’m enjoying singing so far, (so) we’ll see, we’ll see.”
Peters pauses a second and smiles. “As long as people still want to come, I’m available!”
