Queenly Charisma

By William Bender

"As soon as I walk into the theater, I'm somebody else," says Soprano Beverly Sills. I'm Manon, or Lucia or whoever it happens to be. Even if, God forbid, I'm not getting the message to the audience, I'm getting the message."

Last week at the New York City Opera, Sills' somebody else was Mary Queen of Scots in Donizetti's Maria Stuarda--and everybody got the message. In a career distinguished by a quest for new music and new roles, Maria is one of her best finds yet. Sills shows a thoroughgoing grasp of both the personal inner core and the queenly outer charisma of her character. Emotionally it is as if Sills were living in 16th century Tudor England. Indeed, that may well be the case these days. She is in the midst of performing a trilogy by Donizetti that began last season when she sang Elizabeth I in Roberto Devereux, and will be rounded off next year when she sings Elizabeth's mother in Anna Bolena. The whole project, as City Opera Director Julius Rudel says, amounts to a sort of Elizabethan Ring.

Musically, Maria Stuarda is, alas, a considerable bore--much less inspired, say, than the same composer's Lucia di Lammermoor or Don Pasquale. The only reason to pluck it from obscurity now is to afford a singing actress like Sills the dual opportunity to make life look difficult and bel canto fioritura easy. That Sills can accomplish better than anyone in opera today.

The Elizabeth of Devereux is a study in willful, stony obduracy. By contrast, the role of Elizabeth's archrival and victim Maria is mercurial and passionate, offering Sills an ideal opportunity to display her gift for developing a character. In her first scene, Sills is a sweet-voiced lark of a girl enjoying the open sky and the fragrant fields. Moments later she is off on a rapturous, throaty love duet with the Earl of Leicester, making Donizetti's elaborately wrought roulades and cantilenas sound as natural as a lullaby.

Later comes a hair-curling (and historically inaccurate) episode in which, with spitting snarls, Maria denounces Elizabeth to her face ("obscene, unworthy prostitute . . . vile bastard"), and thereby seals her doom. At the end, Sills is the epitome of resolute self-control, pulling her disparate and volatile selves together, laying her head bravely on the block and rapping it three times to cue the executioner, as, by some accounts, Maria did. Going to one's death onstage is nothing new for any opera singer. But Sills somehow always manages to put new life into it. -William Bender

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