Music: Durable Lily

The soprano who can trill for a quarter of a century on the coloratura’s high and skittish vocal trapeze is a notable rarity; this musical generation has Lily Pons. At an age (about 48) when most coloraturas seek the terra firma of German Lieder (where they can be expected to last indefinitely), Trouper Lily pours out her Caro Nome, her Bell Song from Lakme and other acrobatic items of coloratura literature, and gives more than a dozen opera performances and two dozen concerts a year.

Outside Denver last week, looking little more than half her age, tiny (5 ft.1 in.) Lily Pons opened the summer season at big (cap. 10,000) Red Rocks Amphitheater, and proved once more that her appeal is almost universal. Although concert time was 8:15, the bowl was nearly filled by 6. For two hours the crowd munched picnic sandwiches and waited. When Lily finally sang, her listeners gave her explosive applause for every number.

For Lily, busy at a well-paid (about $4,000) job, it was also a chance to win what a trouper enjoys most: the cheers of an outsize audience. As is her custom before a performance, she went to bed at 6 the night before, spent the day in seclusion, took a sip of sugar water to ease the queasy feeling she still gets before going onstage. She sang carefully, in a tailored rather than flamboyant style, but the notes were true.

There was a period a few years back when Lily slid into a vocal slough and had more than usual trouble with pitch, but she is back in good stride now. After one more summer concert (she has already sung in Manhattan’s Lewisohn Stadium and Philadelphia’s Robin Hood Dell), Lily will take a vacation in France with her husband, Conductor Andre Kostelanetz. Then she returns to the U.S. to sing with the San Francisco and Metropolitan Operas, make records (she has sold over 2,000,000 in the past ten years), sing on the radio and in concert. Says Lily: “I will go on singing as long as I can. If I retired now, the public would be very angry.”