Diva

In the Italian restaurants and bars of Manhattan's Fifties, the sound of minestrone was all but lost in the excited conversational buzz. The buzz was about a curvaceous blonde named Dorothy Kirsten. When she had appeared in a revival of Puccini's Manon Lescaut at the City Center Opera, the Italian operatic grapevine registered a medium-sized tremor. When she topped that with a striking performance of the far more exacting role of Violetta in Traviata, it began to sprout melodious expletives. The coloratura of her Sempre libera was passionate, accurate, brilliant. She was undoubtedly a rarity: a lyric soprano with dramatic oomph and coloratura glitter, the best Violetta heard in Manhattan since the late, great Claudia Muzio in 1934.

Twenty-seven-year-old Dorothy Kirsten is no newcomer to opera. She has spent several years trouping in big and small parts with the Chicago, Cincinnati and San Carlo opera companies. To radio listeners she is already familiar as a guest artist on the RCA, Coca-Cola, Firestone and other big-time programs. Her new success is the latest milestone in her promising career.

The career started in Montclair, NJ. where Dorothy, fired with theatrical ambitions, began dancing and singing lessons when she was scarcely out of grade school. A brother played the trumpet and two sisters were pianists. A great aunt, Catherine Hayes, had sung opera in London, Rome and Vienna. Her grandfather, James J. Beggs, had toured the world as conductor of Buffalo Bill's band, and had been one of the founders of New York's Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians. Dorothy's two sisters gave up their careers for marriage, and her trumpeter brother ended up as a professor of music in Lenoir, N.C. Her own big break came in 1939 when Soprano Grace Moore heard her, and sent her to Italy to study with famed Tenor Beniamino Gigli's teacher. Despite the war, Dorothy wanted to stay in Naples, but her worried family managed to get the U.S. consul to have her forcibly deported.

A slim, blue-eyed woman with high cheekbones that betray her Norwegian ancestry, she lives in a small apartment in Manhattan's musical Fifties. She is married to Edward Gates, a CBS production man, and is quite certain that marriage and a career mix perfectly. Says she, in her rather flat, methodical manner: "My husband has his own career and keeps himself very busy. Everyone needs someone he can trust, someone he can let his hair down to. Anyone who is self-sufficient must be a completely selfish person."

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