- Rose Bampton
For a twenty-two-year-old singer from a small southern town, coming into the presence of Rose Bampton was walking into a world of glamour and romance like none I had ever experienced. I was assigned to her voice studio at the Manhattan [End Page 704] School of Music in 1973, but it was only when she opened the door to me at my first lesson that I realized that this was the same stunning face with the mesmerizing smile to which I had been drawn to sing my entire entrance audition.
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Rose Bampton came from the world of opera, where the prima donna existed in the truest sense of the word. It was a life about which I had only read. A gorgeous, statuesque woman, always impeccably and stylishly dressed, with flawless speech, she had a regal presence in which one could only feel special. When she entered a room, you noticed. To be with her made you want to be beautiful, to sing beautifully, and to explore your talent to its limits. To study with her was to learn about more than singing alone.
When I met Miss Bampton and her famous husband, the conductor Wilfrid Pelletier, their careers consisted of teaching and coaching many grateful and devoted students. Her career had begun at twenty with a debut performance at Chautauqua and extended until 1949 with performances that included seventeen seasons with the Metropolitan Opera, as well as appearances at Covent Garden, Chicago, the Colón (Buenos Aires), and San Francisco. Having begun [End Page 705] as a mezzo-soprano, she later moved into the soprano repertory. Roles for which she is remembered include Sieglinde, Kundry, Donna Anna, Amneris, and Aida.
My memories of Miss Bampton are of her as both a teacher and a loving woman who invested much of herself in her students. She was a consummate musician and quite a taskmaster in the studio, which made me aspire to levels of accomplishment I would not otherwise have thought possible. Anyone who worked in her studio would remember hearing, upon nervously approaching an audition, "My dear, your job is not to worry about the judges; your job is to do your homework and go sing!"
I recall lessons during which I would point out areas that had been troublesome in practice; upon singing them with her in the room, they seemed to work themselves out, invoking one of her "Fine, dear; now, what was the problem for you there?" comments. Lessons in her East Side apartment were especially fun. It was a world of its own, filled with treasures from her career and the maestro's—things such as signed photographs from colleagues like Kirsten Flagstad and Lotte Lehmann, with whom she spent time in the summers coaching lieder and whose handwritten comments filled her lieder albums.
On a personal level, in spite of her almost puritan work ethic and unrelenting determination, Rose Bampton was extremely tender and caring. She endeared herself to her students, who were in many ways her children, of which she had none of her own. There cannot be a Bampton student from the 1970s and 1980s who does not remember with enormous fondness the Christmas parties at her house to which students, spouses, friends, and families were all invited. The rule was, "None of us eats until we finish decorating the tree!" (The tree, by the way, was nine to ten feet tall and reached to the ceiling. It took a bit of time!) When the schedule didn't allow us to come and decorate the tree, the party was moved to after Christmas, when we undressed the tree before eating. The meal itself was most often an Italian gourmet repast, prepared by a cook who had worked for many years for Arturo Toscanini, one of Miss Bampton's and Maestro Pelletier's longtime friends. Even mealtimes were linked to the exciting world in which they had lived as artists. It gave one the sense that you had somehow known personalities such as Toscanini or Lehmann a little yourself...