Miss Yerrett Joins the Ball Game

The first time that Jackie Robinson, the pioneer Negro baseball player in the major leagues, was ejected from a game by an umpire, one of his teammates on the Brooklyn Dodgers reportedly explained: “It had nothing to do with race. Robinson was simply establishing his rights as a ball player.”

Much the same attitude seemed to prevail at the Metropolitan Opera House early this season when Shirley Verrett, making her debut as Carmen, had an argument with the tenor. For a soprano — even a mezzo-soprano — to quarrel with a tenor is considered standard operatic procedure. So if the argument proved anything at all, it was that Negro singers are here to stay in opera, temperament and all.

It was, evidently, a pretty good tiff while it lasted. Miss Verrett is a singer with her own ideas of stage interpretation, and she decided to add an improvement to the Metropolitan’s current Carmen, which could certainly stand a few. At the final dress rehearsal before her Saturday night debut, she discovered she disliked a stage direction which called on her to remain on the ground after Don Jose has thrown her down in their Act III quarrel. So after a moment or two she arose, and when Jon Vickers turned to sing something to her, she wasn’t there. Vickers promptly stopped and told her: “If you start improvising now, I’ll start improvising Saturday.” Talking about it afterward, Miss Verrett said: “I could have answered back, but I thought, ‘Shirley, be a lady. Keep quiet. After all, it’s his scene.’ Then later Mr. Bing came backstage and asked me, since it was in the original staging of the production, if I could please stay on the floor. So I stayed on the floor.”

Shirley Verrett is conscious of being a leading member of the second wave of Negro singers at the Met, the generation that is there to stay. The first wave extended from Marian Anderson, who came there well after her prime as a kind of symbolic figure, to Leontyne Price, who arrived in her full glory and really established the Negro as a prima donna. Anderson opened the door, Price removed the hinges; it will never be shut, again. “We don’t have to walk on tippy-toe anymore” is the way Miss Verrett puts it. In recent years, for example, she has been accompanied at her solo recitals by Warren Wilson, a highly skilled young Negro pianist. “For a long time,” she says, “people wouldn’t accept two Negroes on the recital stage. Now they do.”

Verrett, a beautiful woman in her early thirties, has taken her time about going to the Met. In 1961, when she graduated from Juilliard, she was offered a contract by Rudolf Bing, but the roles proposed for her, while not unimportant, were less than top-level. She wanted Carmen, and tuned up for the Met by singing it all over the world.

To cap the story, of course, the Metropolitan appearance should have been a triumphal debut, with a tremendous ovation, critical raves, and creation of an instant celebrity. Actually, it didn’t quite happen like that. The Verrett Carmen was a success, but a modest one. The notices were favorable but not ecstatic. The audience applauded, but not hysterically. The general feeling seemed to be that her Carmen had been intelligent but restrained, apparently constricted by the awkward Met production.

Talking about it afterward in the apartment on New York’s Riverside Drive in which she lives with her artist-husband Lou LoMonaco, Miss Verrett herself seemed satisfied but not complacent. “On the whole I thought it went well,” she said. “There were very intelligent criticisms in the reviews;. I’m glad they emphasized my potential in the role. In that kind of production it would have been easy to have fallen completely flat.”

Even the Met management is tacitly acknowledging the failings of the controversial Jean-Louis Barrault production by withdrawing it from the repertory next season after only two years. The staging is cluttered and congested, with a semicircular bullring that remains in place throughout the opera, even in scenes where no bullring is called for. “I know if I ever sing in it again certain changes will have to be made,” says Miss Verrett. Besides spending part of Act III flat on the floor, she objects to being made to dance atop a small table which affords little room for movement, and to lie on her back atop the same table during Don Jose’s Flower Song. At least in this scene she managed to make a slight change: the original direction called on her to spread her legs apart as he sang to her.

Miss Verrett is the possessor of a mezzo voice that is unusually light in weight and flexible in character. Far from being a femalebaritone type of Carmen, she brings a brightness and lightness to the role that help make her more of a seductress and less of a virago. Hers is a thinking man’s Carmen, although that raises the question of whether Carmen isn’t the type of part that needs more feeling than thought.

For sheer musical intelligence and intellectual curiosity, Miss Verrett is one of the most remarkable singers around. Her versatility enables her to sing lieder and oratorios as well as opera; in fact, she has no intention of limiting her career to the operatic stage. “I began by singing recitals, and I’m going to keep on,” she says. “They are good discipline. I like standing on a stage all alone; it’s a challenge. I get tired of singing the same thing over and over again. That’s why I could never sing in a Broadway show. Getting new things to do recharges me; I’m always looking for some-, thing else.”

Miss Verrett started singing when she was five and a half years old in a Seventh-Day Adventist Church in New Orleans, where her father was a building contractor. Her family moved to Los Angeles when she was still a child, and she went to school there. At Ventura Junior College she studied business administration. “My father always wanted me to sing,” she explains, “but he didn’t see why I couldn’t be a great singer and a C.P.A. at the same time.” In the 1950s she got a realtor’s license and opened up a real estate office in Los Angeles. She didn’t sell many houses, but she did learn how a contract should be written, a usefid bit of knowledge which is not taught in conservatories.

All along, she kept singing, first in junior college, and later taking full-fledged voice lessons on the outside. Eventually she worked up to the eminence of a television appearance on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts singing an aria from Samson et Dalila; after that it was on to New York and Juilliard. By the time of her graduation in 1961, she had already made a Town Hall debut, sung with the New York City Opera, appeared at the Antioch College Festival, and collected substantial sums of money by winning a series of musical competitions. In 1960 when Leopold Stokowski returned to the Philadelphia Orchestra after an absence of nineteen years, he asked Miss Verrett to sing in de Falla’s El Amor Brujo. She did so successfully, but resolved not to sing it again. “It was too gypsy,” she says. “I didn’t want to get classified as a specialist in cante jondo.”

Not being classified as anything seems to be one of Miss Verrett’s objectives. She has sung music as varied as Rossini’s Le Comte Ory, Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder, Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody, Weill’s Lost in the Stars, Verdi’s Aïda, Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, Beethoven’s Ninth, and Hugo Weisgall’s Athalia. Her RCA Victor records include opera, Spanish songs, and an album entitled “Singin’ in the Storm,” which is devoted to folk and protest songs. Her newest release, Verrett in Opera (LSC-3045), gives as good a demonstration as any of her capacities; it includes arias by Gluck, Donizetti, Berlioz, and Massenet, and everything is sung with her characteristic luminous quality.

This season Miss Verrett’s schedule is as active and varied as any she has had. When I talked to her she had stacked on her piano the scores of Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer, which she was preparing for the Turin Radio, Mendelssohn’s Elijah for a Philadelphia Orchestra performance and recording, Berlioz’s Les Troyens for a Rome broadcast, and Bellini’s Norma for a Dallas Civic Opera revival with Elena Suliotis in the title role and herself as Adalgisa. She spends three to five hours a day working, including an hour and a half of vocalizing; also, she said, she’s thinking of taking piano lessons on the side, although she already plays decently enough to accompany herself.

About Miss Verrett’s capacity to work or ability to achieve there never has been any doubt. But there are those who think that her versatility, as well as being an asset, is something of a liability; that it prevents her from exerting real dominance in any one branch of music. “She has to learn how to focus her career rather than just extending it” is the way one recording executive puts it.

Still, with her Met debut safely behind her, with plenty of operatic offers abroad, with her recital and recording schedule as busy as she could wish, with discerning conductors and audiences increasingly appreciative of her ability to master the new and the unfamiliar as well as the tried and tested, Shirley Verrett finds no difficulty in “getting new things to do.” She could, if she wished, play it safe, settle down, plunge deeper into opera, become the Carmen of the generation. That would be one way of making it big, and there are those who think she should try it. But then she wouldn’t be Shirley Verrett.