Made in the U.S.A.

The U.S. produces plenty of good voices, but it frequently falls short when it comes to exercising them: the likes of Leontyne Price and Anna Moffo had to go to European houses to learn how to sing with professional skill. A major exception to that failing is Soprano Phyllis Curtin, who made an immensely successful Metropolitan Opera debut this season in Cosi fan Tutte. Soprano Curtin was also a smash in Europe before she came to the Met, but her European success merely topped off a career patiently built in America. Last week, as she followed a superbly rousing performance of Strauss's Salome at the Vienna Staatsoper with another performance of Cosi in Vienna, that career looked increasingly like one of the most handsomely crafted in opera.

No Bikini. At 39, Curtin has the rare good fortune to be as talented an actress as she is a singer. Her Violetta in Traviata is rendingly pathetic, her Cathy in Carlisle Floyd's Wuthering Heights surgingly passionate, her Mistress Ford in Otto Nicolai's Merry Wives of Windsor broadly comic. Essentially a dramatic singer, she has power, purity and flexibility. At the Staatsoper, her voice was lush and intense. Although she had abandoned the bikini to which she customarily peels in Salome's Dance of the Veils (she had a daughter only three months ago, does not yet feel "back in bikini form"), she still gave the staid Staatsoper audience a grinding, squirming portrayal of disheveled depravity that it would not soon forget. "After all," explained she after eight curtain calls, "the belly dance is Oriental and very old; Herod wasn't interested in the minuet."

Soprano Curtin began singing seriously only in her junior year in college. As a child back in Clarksburg, W. Va.. she studied violin, majored in political science at Wellesley, during the war got a job as an electrical engineer with the War Production Board ("I didn't know a wall plug from a telephone pole"). Married to a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin (she has since married Editor-Photographer Eugene Cook), she accompanied her husband on archaeological expeditions to Peru and Ecuador. But she kept on taking voice lessons once a week, gave several recitals in Manhattan. Result: she was picked up by the New York City Opera, and soon became one of its reigning divas.

No Musty Museum. Her repertory there was as unorthodox as her career--heavy on modern works, notably Floyd's Wuthering Heights and Susannah, both of which she introduced. Although she knew that "no one pays much attention to the artist" in modern works, she continued to sing them because she believed that "no opera house should be a musty museum." Her conviction paid off: in a reversal of form, which usually finds U.S. directors hunting for stars in Europe, the Vienna Staatsoper heard her, shortly after gave her a contract. That merely proves, says Soprano Curtin, that singers with Made-in-U.S.A. voices "are perfectly exportable."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.