Music: Sills Calling It Quits in 1980

But take heart, opera fans, she’ll still be running the show

It sometimes seems that the highest —and hardest—step in a diva’s career is the one into retirement. Too many sopranos linger after their fortes have turned into shrieks. Determined to avoid that fate, Soprano Beverly Sills announced last week that she would retire in the fall of 1980. These days, even dropping out seems to require the same three-year advance planning as everything else in opera. But Sills is not retiring to write a book (she has done that already) or go on the talk shows (she has her own now). Instead, she will take up a difficult and possibly perilous new role in 1980—co-director of the New York City Opera, the company where she made her reputation and proved that a native-born singer could conquer American opera without the Metropolitan. Sharing the directorship will be the organization’s current leader and Sills’ mentor, Julius Rudel.

Sills’ last regular appearances will be in a series of performances of Die Fledermaus at the San Diego Opera in October 1980. Her co-star will be Joan Sutherland, and the two divas will alternate in the roles of Adele and Rosalinda. That should be a sizzling ticket. So should the fund-raising gala Sills hopes to star in later at the New York City Opera—exactly 25 years after her debut there as Rosalinda. Said Sills: “In 1980, I will be 51. I have no operas left that I want to sing. I have sung in every opera house I wanted to sing in, and by the time the next year or so is over, I will have recorded everything I ever dreamed of. My voice has served me very well, and I would like to be able to put it to bed, so that it can go quietly and with pride.”

At its peak, the Sills coloratura was a rich, incredibly supple flute. The high notes do not come as effortlessly as they once did, but the voice is still basically secure, and Sills should have no trouble finishing her last seasons in high style. Her first big test comes this very week with Massenet’s Thaïs at the Metropolitan Opera. It is a high lyric role (“Manon with no clothes on,” says Sills), and its range is brutal: from below middle C to high D. The show is a loan of the same production Sills scored a success in last season at the San Francisco Opera. Next December she will appear in her last new Met production, Donizetti’s Don Pasquale. Two composers are writing operas for her, which are due to be introduced in the spring of 1979. They are Gian Carlo Menotti’s Juana la Loca, about the mad daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, for the San Diego Opera, and Dominick Argento’s Miss Havisham’s Fire, based on Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, for the New York City Opera.

In the Argento work, Sills will play Miss Havisham, the fanatic recluse who was jilted on her wedding day and has spent the rest of her life seeking vengeance against men. It is not the sort of role prima donnas are usually interested in, but then Sills has always been as devoted to the untried as to the usual box office favorites. Her first decade at the New York City Opera was decent but unspectacular, notable primarily for her limpid singing in Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe. In 1966 she became a star literally overnight with a display of phosphorescent vocal fireworks in Handel’s rarely performed Julius Caesar. After the regal Cleopatra came the flirt Manon, the mad Lucia of Lammermoor and the sexy Shemakha in Le Coq d’Or. By the time Sills had finished with Donizetti’s trilogy of queens (Roberto Devereux, Maria Stuarda, Anna Bolena), there was no longer any doubt that she was opera’s finest singing actress since Maria Callas. With her brilliant 1975 debut in Rossini’s The Siege of Corinth she instantly became one of the Met’s hottest box-office draws.

Why follow all that up by assuming responsibility for a company that has serious financial and artistic problems? The New York City Opera expects to meet its $9 million budget this year, but it has no endowment or other reserves to speak of, and its life is necessarily difficult. The company’s day-to-day performing standard is erratic. Despite some innovative programming, it spends too much time trying to outdo the Met in the standard repertory—with far less money at its disposal. For years, much of the company’s glamor has come from Sills herself.

The City Opera hopes that some of her magic will rub off on her colleagues. One thing is certain: well-organized, crisply competent, she will make a formidable administrator. A little known aspect of Sills’ career has been her effectiveness behind the scenes as a lobbyist for the arts. From 1970 to 1976 she was a member of the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the new chairman of the National Opera Institute, which supports such ventures as shared productions and grants to young singers. About her job at City Opera, she confesses: “I was always interfering anyhow, so I think they decided to make it official.”