Information about Roberta Peters

Roberta Peters (born May 4, 1930) is an American opera singer, a specialist in the coloratura and lyric soprano repertoire.

She was born Roberta Peterman and was the only child of a Jewish shoe salesman and a hat maker. She grew up in The Bronx, New York, loving to sing and dreaming of becoming a star. Her parents made great financial sacrifices to prepare her for a career in music. Her grandfather, who was a headwaiter, knew the tenor Jan Peerce, who was a well-known tenor with the Metropolitan Opera. Her grandfather convinced the famous tenor to listen to his grand-daughter. She was only 13, but Peerce was very impressed and arranged for her to study with William Herman, who had coached many opera stars. Herman made sure she had French, German and Italian lessons and made her sing scales from a clarinet method. He made sure she did not perform prematurely but worked with her for six years, finally having her sing for Sol Hurok when she was 19. Hurok arranged for an audition with Rudolf Bing, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. Bing had her sing the Queen of Night's second aria from Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (with its four Fs above high C), seven times, listening from all parts of the hall to make sure she could fill the hall with sound. He scheduled her to sing the role in 1951.

But on November 17, 1950, she received a phone call from Rudolf Bing at 3:00 am, asking her if she could sing that night. Nadine Conner, cast as Zerlina in Mozart's Don Giovanni, had a mild case of food poisoning and could not perform. Ms. Peters, 20 years old and hired only a few weeks earlier on the basis of a single audition, had never sung with a full orchestra, never performed in a full opera production, never even performed on stage, professionally or otherwise, except for her audition. She was not an official understudy, but she knew the role and accepted. The rest, as they say, is history. Her parents were planning to go to the opera that night in the standing section. When they got home from work, Roberta surprised them with the announcement that they would be watching her perform, from box seats. She and her mother took a cab but ended up getting on the subway when the cab got stuck in traffic. Fritz Reiner, the conductor that night, was known for being hard to follow, but he made a point of coming to Roberta's dressing room to encourage her. Her performance was received with great enthusiasm, and her career took off.

Combining a wonderful voice with attractive good looks, Miss Peters became the darling of America and a great proponent of opera for the masses. In the early 1960s she appeared before an audience of over 13,000 guests under the conductor Alfredo Antonini for the popular Italian Night summer concert series at Lewisohn Stadium in City College^[1]. She gave more than 500 performances at the Met in 24 roles and appeared in a great number of Voice of Firestone radio broadcasts. She sang for every U.S. president from John F. Kennedy to Bill Clinton.

Miss Peters' Met repertoire included four operas by Mozart (Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte and two roles apiece in Le nozze di Figaro and Die Zauberflöte), one by Gluck (Orfeo ed Euridice), one by Beethoven (Fidelio), one by Rossini (Il barbiere di Siviglia), one by Bellini (La sonnambula), three by Donizetti (Lucia di Lammermoor, L'elisir d'amore and Don Pasquale), three by Verdi (Rigoletto, Un ballo in maschera and Falstaff), one by Wagner (Tannhäuser), one by Offenbach (Les contes d'Hoffmann), one by Johann Strauss, Jr. (Die Fledermaus), three by Richard Strauss (Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos and Arabella), one by Puccini (Gianni Schicchi) and one by Menotti (The Last Savage). She last appeared with the company in 1985, giving two performances as Gilda in Rigoletto, one in the house (with late-career debutant Aldo Protti in the title role) and another on tour in Boston.

With other companies, Miss Peters appeared in productions of Verdi's La traviata, Delibes' Lakmé, Gounod's Roméo et Juliette, Puccini's La bohème (directed by her dear friend Charles Nelson Reilly) and even Balfe's The Bohemian Girl (conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham at Covent Garden). Late in her career she added fare like Lehár's operetta Die lustige Witwe and Rodgers and Hammerstein's shows The King and I and The Sound of Music.

Her concert repertoire ranged from Mozart's concert aria "Popoli di Tessaglia!" (with its two Gs above high C) to Richard Strauss' Vier letzte Lieder, plus of course many other songs and arias, the latter drawn naturally from her stage roles but also from other operas like Mozart's Il re pastore and Thomas' Hamlet.

She was married to the late opera singer Robert Merrill for about a month in 1952. Despite the failure of that marriage, they remained friends and continued to sing together for years thereafter. Eventually she remarried; she has had two children with her current husband Bertram Fields.

At the age of 70 Miss Peters was still giving solo recitals -- 50 years after that first auspicious audition! She appeared for a record 65 times on The Ed Sullivan Show. She even has two feature film credits: 1953's Tonight We Sing (in which she has few lines but sings excerpts from La traviata, Faust and even Madama Butterfly most beautifully) and 1996's City Hall (playing the wife of Danny Aiello's character).

References