Correspondence

I was very pleased to read in the summer 2001 issue of The Opera Quarterly your reviewers' fair-minded assessments of Beverly Sills's recordings of several Bellini operas. True, her never large voice could sometimes go shrill and tremulous, but she always brought care and beauty to her interpretations. I can hardly believe that it is over twenty years since Sills stopped singing, but I am delighted to see her most important recordings being reissued (the Donizetti Queens, etc.). With the exception of John Steane, the British critics never seemed to warm to her or to her artistry. I am encouraged to see that the reviews of her reissued recordings seem to have awakened a new appreciation for her singing. If her recordings continue to be reissued, a new profile of her in your journal would be very interesting and go a long way toward undoing the damage to her reputation that Peter Davis's American Opera Singer inflicted.

Rev. Stephen Woodland
Inglewood, California

 

No one writes about singers with more thorough scholarship and greater devotion than Bruce Burroughs. It is inconceivable he is having difficulty in finding a publisher for his book on Zinka Milanov [see OQ, vol. 17, no. 4 (autumn 2001), p. 607]. In sixty-two years of operagoing and listening, Milanov and Flagstad were the most sumptuous and majestic soprano voices of my lifetime. Zinka stands with Ponselle, Destinn, and Rethberg at the pinnacle of achievement in Metropolitan Opera history. Her forty-nine Met broadcasts can be added to her commercial recordings to attest to this. Every year there are published biographies of singers who cannot hold a candle to Milanov. Those of us who remember and adore her glory should unite to right this wrong.

John M. Gehl
New Orleans, Louisiana

 

It was with great interest that I read Bruce Burroughs's article on Zinka Milanov in your autumn 2001 issue. I was a big fan of Mme Milanov's during all those years from the 1950s until her retirement. Milanov's was the first big voice I remember being attracted to when I first began listening to the Met's Saturday broadcasts around the age of twelve. Over those years I thoroughly enjoyed all of her performances, especially Aida and the two Leonoras. Her Forza Leonora is still the finest I've ever heard and the one by which I've tended to measure all those I've heard on the broadcasts and in the theater. All have come up woefully short of her perfection. Her effortless, soaring voice and that incredible pianissimo were breathtakingly beautiful! Her "Vergine degli angeli" and Rusalka Silver Moon aria are the loveliest I've ever heard. And who can forget that voice from the audience who used to yell "Brava, Milanov!" every time she sang? Zinka was larger than life, and her pronouncements on the various Met interviews and radio intermission features after she retired were always delightful and oh, so very truthful.

Today's sopranos pale in comparison to those great ladies Milanov and Tebaldi, whom we were so fortunate to hear so often during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. And, now that I have also heard all her recordings, I would add Rosa Ponselle's name to my short list of the greatest sopranos of the twentieth century.

Marilyn Cereghino
San Francisco, California

 

I have the painful obligation to fess up to an error in the performance chronology that accompanied my article "Zinka Milanov at Forty-Five" (vol. 17, no. 4). It is actually one mistake that got repeated, alas, five times. On page 643, in the cast listings of Aida performances on the Metropolitan Opera's 1952 spring tour, the entry for Apr. 28 should read "Same as Apr. 14 except Scott (King)" rather than ". . . Scott (Ramfis)." The same goes for the performances of May 3, 9, 22, 26, and 30. In all six of these tour Aidas Norman Scott, whose first outing opposite Milanov in the Met's new production of the opera was as Ramfis (performance of Feb. 2...