Phyllis Curtin
Soprano who championed contemporary music and sang in the US premiere of Peter Grimes
PHYLLIS CURTIN, who has died aged 94, was an American soprano who sang in the US premieres of Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes (1946) and War Requiem (1963), the former conducted by Leonard Bernstein; both took place at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where she had been a student and would later become a popular teacher.
She was a great champion of contemporary music, declaring that it was “immoral to make a living off the music of dead composers”. “If you care about music,” she declared, “you’ve got to get it off the paper for composers of your own time.” In 1956 she created the title role in
Susannah, an opera by Carlisle Floyd that became one of the most frequently performed home-grown operas in the US. She also created the role of Catherine Earnshaw in Floyd’s
Wuthering Heights with Santa Fe Opera, sang Thérèse in the US premiere of Poulenc’s Les mamelles de
Tirésias in 1953 and took part in the world premiere of Milhaud’s La mère
coupable in Geneva in 1966. Phyllis Curtin made her London debut in 1963 singing Strauss’s Four
Last Songs with the Hallé Orchestra conducted by John Barbirolli at the Festival Hall, with one critic noting her “effortless stream of steady, clean and gleaming tone”.
She also sang Marguerite in Faust and Ellen Orford in Peter Grimes for Scottish Opera in the mid-1960s, and was heard at Glyndebourne in 1969 singing Donna Anna opposite Ruggero Raimondi’s title role in Don Giovanni, though the critics felt the part did not suit her voice.
Phyllis Curtin was relaxed about opera, often preferring to appear in recital. “The song literature was fundamental, basic and passionate for me, and I didn’t want to give up song recitals for anything in the world,” she said.
It was probably just as well. Although she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, in 1961 as Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte and stepped in at short notice to replace Virginia Zeani as Violetta in La
Traviata in 1966, Rudolf Bing, general director of the Met, was reluctant to book her for any long runs of major roles. “He always told me ‘Well, my dear, you’re not Italian’, or German or Austrian or whatever,” she said.
She was born Phyllis Jane Smith on December 3 1921 in Clarksburg, West Virginia. She sang with the local Lutheran church choir where her mother was the organist, played violin from the age of seven and was selected as May Queen at her high school. She studied Political Science at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, however, and had to persuade her supervisors to allow her to continue singing lessons amid fears that she was overstretching herself.
She worked for an electrical engineer in Boston, “a job of which I knew absolutely nothing”, but local musicians found her helpful. “My singular talent was that I could read music fast. So, as a result, I was very useful to young composers who were always doing things at the last minute,” she told an interviewer in 2002. The attraction of new music was in part, she said, that “people weren’t telling you how Madame So-and-So always did it”.
Nevertheless, she enjoyed a wide repertoire, making her debut as Lisa in
The Queen of Spades with New England Opera in Boston in 1946. In 1953 she sang with New York City Opera in Gottfried von Einem’s The Trial, based on Kafka, recalling that “when we finished our first performance about a third of the audience had left, and of the rest, half were hissing and booing and the rest were very enthusiastic”.
While working on the War Requiem at Tanglewood she started teaching “by accident” to help keep a group of under-used singing students occupied. After retiring from the stage in 1984 she taught at Yale School of Music and Boston University.
In 1976 President Gerald Ford invited Phyllis Curtin to the White House, where she sang for Helmut Schmidt, the West German Chancellor. However, she felt that her liberal views counted against her. “I had all kinds of black marks against me,” she told one interviewer. “I was on the board of the World Peace Foundation.”
She married Philip Curtin, a history professor, in 1946. In April 1954 Life magazine devoted three pages to pictures of her, describing her “longlimbed, lush-voiced and intense” account of the Dance of the Seven Veils in Strauss’s Salome. Soon afterwards her marriage was dissolved and in 1956 she married Gene Cook, a photographer with Life. He died in 1986 and she is survived by their daughter. Phyllis Curtin, born December 3 1921, died June 4 2016