Eleanor Steber

Steber ranked among America's leading sopranos throughout the 1940s and 1950s, possessing both a sweet timbre and a powerful fullness together with remarkable flexibility across repertory. Her recital programs functioned like vocal pentathlons, encompassing an unusually broad spectrum of styles and technical requirements, and her feat of performing Desdemona in Verdi's Otello at a Metropolitan matinee followed the same evening by Fiordiligi in Mozart's Così fan tutte remains legendary. She gained particular renown for originating the title character in Samuel Barber's Vanessa, stepping in for Sena Jurinac, and for commissioning his Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Beyond the opera house and the recital platform she appeared regularly on the television broadcasts of The Voice of Firestone. Yet her career continued after her vocal resources had declined, leaving many later performances and recordings seriously compromised by technical shortcomings.

An accomplished amateur singer herself, her mother actively promoted Steber's vocal training and participation in school and community productions. Steber enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music with the intention of concentrating on piano, but her voice instructor, William Whitney, convinced her to devote herself to singing. Her first operatic appearance came in 1936 when she sang in a WPA mounting of Wagner's The Flying Dutchman, a strenuous assignment for a singer of twenty-one. Victory in the 1940 Metropolitan Auditions of the Air led to her company debut later that season as Sophie in Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier. The combination of an effortless upper register and a richly supported lower voice suited her ideally to Mozart heroines, among them the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro, Pamina in The Magic Flute, and Konstanze in Die Entführung aus dem Serail with its formidable coloratura. With further maturity she undertook spinto parts in both the German and Italian literatures, including Tosca, Desdemona, Elsa in Lohengrin, and the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier. She also created the role of Marie in the Metropolitan's first staging of Alban Berg's Wozzeck in 1959. Relations with the company proved complicated for reasons on each side, prompting her to concentrate increasingly on recitals and orchestral concerts during the 1960s. Together with her husband she founded and operated the record label ST/AND, whose name combined their own, yet an attempt at larger-scale operations ended in failure. She appeared on Broadway, chiefly in secondary roles, and in 1973 gave one of the widely discussed bathhouse concerts in New York.