Shirley Verrett, pronounced with the accent on the final syllable, stood among the leading American opera and recital artists of her era and belonged to the distinguished cohort of African-American vocalists who achieved worldwide recognition during the 1950s and 1960s. She pursued vocal studies in Los Angeles under Anna Fitziu and Hall Johnson. Victory on the nationwide CBS broadcast Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts in 1955 prompted her enrollment at the Juilliard School. Even before completing her training she undertook engagements of notable stature, among them a performance of Falla’s El amor brujo under Leopold Stokowski and her first operatic appearance as Lucretia in Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia. Billed as Shirley Carter, she took the role of Irina in Kurt Weill’s Lost in the Stars at the New York City Opera in 1958. The following year she made her European bow as a participant in Nicolas Nabokov’s Rasputin’s End at Cologne.
Her rich, dark timbre initially established her as a mezzo-soprano, and she undertook such parts as Eboli, Dalila, Amneris, Azucena, Gluck’s Orpheus, and Carmen. It soon emerged that her voice more accurately belonged to the dramatic soprano category, distinguished by an unusually wide compass. Across a span exceeding two octaves she maintained exceptional uniformity of tone. Verrett was also a compelling stage actress who fused gesture, phrase, and text with rare insight. Early in her career she became identified with a fiery interpretation of Bizet’s Carmen, first presented at the Spoleto Festival in 1962; that portrayal served for her introductions at the Bolshoi in 1963, La Scala in 1964, the Metropolitan Opera in 1968, and Covent Garden in 1973, although New York audiences had already witnessed her in the part at City Opera in 1964. Over more than two decades she sang regularly at the Metropolitan and appeared with comparable frequency at La Scala, Covent Garden, the Bolshoi, the Paris Opéra, the San Francisco Opera, the Vienna Staatsoper, and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, as well as at numerous additional leading houses, often in season-opening productions.
On 23 October 1973 she made operatic history at the Metropolitan’s first presentation of Berlioz’s five-act Les Troyens: when Christa Ludwig fell ill, Verrett assumed both heroines, Cassandra and Dido. The work remained central to her repertory; in 1990 she was invited to perform in it for the inaugural season of the new Bastille Opéra in Paris, an occasion that also marked the bicentennial of the French Revolution. She collaborated with virtually every major conductor of her time—A Abbado, Leinsdorf, Colin Davis, Krips, Karajan, Giulini, Prêtre, Ozawa, Haitink, Maazel, Levine, Schippers, Solti, Kubelik, and Ormandy—on both operatic and concert platforms. As a recitalist she championed the German lied from Schubert through Mahler, French mélodies, and contemporary scores by Ned Rorem, Darius Milhaud, and Falla.
She was a frequent guest on the PBS series Live from Lincoln Center. In 1996 she joined the faculty of the University of Michigan as the James Earl Jones Distinguished University Professor of Music and each summer also taught at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena. Among her many honors were honorary doctorates from Holy Cross College and Northeastern University, the Marian Anderson, Naumburg, and Sullivan Awards, and fellowships from the Ford, Martha Baird Rockefeller, and John Hay Whitney Foundations. The French government named her Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 1970 and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in 1984. She concluded her teaching career in spring 2010 and died later that year of heart failure. Her extensive discography encompasses opera, art songs, and spirituals.
