Gloria Lane (Gussie
Siet)
Last night I enjoyed watching the DVD "Quartet". I
enjoy opera.
I mentioned to my "friend" that I grew up with a famous
opera singer.
She thought I was kidding, so I ‘googled’ Gloria Lane. Read
some interesting things on the web about her life, and career.
I was shocked to read the name of her first born; a son who she
named "Robert"
As a kid, I knew she like many of the girls in the neighborhood
had a thing for my big brother Robert, who after serving four years in
the Navy was hit by a car and was killed within weeks of his discharge in 1946.
I ‘googled‘ her most recent married name and found a daughter in
Studio City Calf.
I called this morning, and damm if Gloria didn't answer the phone.
She was delighted I called, and did in fact say she named her son
after my brother.
In addition, she remembered our family, and many of those of our
wonderful neighbors.
I regaled her with my story of standing in the vacant lot next to
Sokalners Hides and Skins listening to her go through the scales while standing
on her back porch of her house on Bloomsbury St., and how it was
because of her that I so enjoy classical music and opera.
She was so happy I called to remind her of our days in
"Jewtown", She asked for a number of old friends, most of whom
who are long gone.
But the closeness of good neighbors still remains after 70 years
Best wishes
Mickey Kuzma
GLORIA LANE
Although she has not
sung publicly – except for teaching, for benefits, and for fun – in the last
thirty years, and was never heard, even in her prime, at the Metropolitan
Opera, the rich mezzo-soprano of Gloria Lane (b. Trenton, NJ, 6 June 1925)
has been widely appreciated as one of the greatest voices of the twentieth
century.
Most of her best years
were spent in Europe, where she triumphed in over 500 performances of Carmen in the 1950s and ’60s, as well as in roles
as challenging as Ariadne (in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne
auf Naxos), Katerina (in Shostakovich’s Katerina Ismailova), and Baba the Turk (in
Britten’s The Rake’s Progress).
In her native country,
she sang with the New York City Opera, and on Broadway she originated the roles
of the Secretary in Menotti’s The Consul and
of Desideria in the same composer’s The Saint of Bleecker Street.
Many an enduring opera legend has been generated by her exceptionally quick wit
and practical good sense under fire.
Gussie Siet’s
(pronounced “sigh-et”) earliest exposure to music was hearing her father sing
in a Trenton synagogue (he had sung as a boy soprano in his native Russia) and
listening with him to Saturday Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. Differing sources
describe him as a harness-maker, a junk dealer, and an avowed Communist, and
although as she says, “he worked his ass off,” the family was very poor.
Although she had no
training, she knew she was good at singing. "I started singing when I was
about five and trooping with my sisters around the house, and my father said to
my mother, 'This one's got a voice.'" She won a ten-dollar prize as a kid,
singing at the YMHA, and at sixteen she had a regular – though unpaid – weekly
radio gig (hosted, remarkably, by Ernie Kovacs) on Trenton’s WTTM. Walking home
from the station one day she met Arthur Levin, a fellow student at Trenton
Central High School, and they became sweethearts.
By chance she saw a
notice in the Philadelphia Inquirer about
its annual Voice of Tomorrow Contest. Without a word to anyone and giving her
boss’s office as a return address, she sent in her application. “I knew I was a
mezzo as I did the low parts in the operettas I did in high school. I learned
“My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice” from Samson and Delilah by
Saint-Saëns, by listening to a recording I had of Marian Anderson.”
She won the prize. The
lady at the piano asked her, “'Who do you study with?' I said, 'No one.'"
The prize enabled her to study with that very accompanist, Elizabeth
Westmoreland of the Curtis Institute of Music, and soon thereafter to audition
for Gian Carlo Menotti, who was writing a new opera called The Consul. Following Westmoreland’s advice, Gussie
Levin changed her name to Gloria Lane.
She did an audition
for Radio City Music Hall and was enthusiastically received; they planned to
have her sing the Witch in Hansel and Gretel,
flying in a harness from one side of the stage to the other as she sang her
aria – until they discovered she was pregnant. Instead, they contracted her to
sing four shows a day for their Easter Pageant, doing “June Is Bustin’ Out All
Over” with the dancers.
At her audition with
Menotti, she was “pregnant, quite unhappy, thinking about getting a divorce,
and Menotti said I was maybe too 'phlegmatic' to play the leading part. ‘But,’
he said 'there is a part in The Consul that
was going to be a speaking part, but you do it and I'll write music for it.'”
He sent her the first music to study while waiting for her son Robert to be
born. After his birth, she managed to get herself a scholarship for summer
study at Tanglewood where, under director and impresario Boris Goldovsky, she
did her first scenes from Bizet’s Carmen.
The Consul, with Lane in the
role of the Secretary and starring Patricia Neway as Magda Sorel, premiered on
March 1, 1950, in Philadelphia and moved to Broadway two weeks later for a run
of 269 performances. In spite of its being an opera and very noir – not the
usual Broadway fare –, it was a great success. Conductor Lehman Engel won a
Tony Award®, Laurence Olivier insisted that it play in London the
next year, and Gloria Lane won the Clarence Derwent Award as the Most Promising
Female performer of the year – even though she was a member of AGMA and not
Actor’s Equity, the sponsor of the Award. She also took two Donaldson Awards,
for Best Supporting Actress and Best Debut in a Musical.
In London she was
lionized by the likes of Peter Finch and Michael Redgrave: "It was just
wild for me, this little girl from Trenton who had no idea what was happening.
There I was, sitting in Laurence Olivier's dressing room while he's putting on
his makeup and talking to me. It was fantastic, some kind of dream." From
London, The Consul proceeded to Paris, “and I was given
one of the greatest thrills of my life: Poulenc came backstage to speak to me
and predicted I would become a soprano, which turned out to be right, many
years later.”
Back in New York,
Gloria Lane sang her first traditional operatic roles, Carmen and Amneris
in Aïda, with the New York City Opera at the City Center
on 55th Street. Before this, she had never attended a full performance of
either opera – but she had done her homework. By 1953 her Carmen was already
the talk of the operatic world. “I did a lot of research on Gypsies,” she
recollects: “It's a matriarchal society. I took it very seriously… I have never
played [Carmen] like a vamp. I played her like a person who was aware of her
sexuality but was never overtly sexual." In San Francisco, where the City
Opera performed on tour, a critic described her characterization as "very
animal, very unscrupulous, but fascinating; her feline grace made her the most
believable Carmen that our stage has ever seen." In the concise words of
her colleague Beverly Sills, she was "one of the best Carmens I ever saw.”
Gian Carlo Menotti in
the meanwhile was composing a new opera, The Saint of Bleecker Street,
with Gloria Lane in mind. Her character, Desideria, is the protagonist’s
mistress, a sensual and passionate woman who stands in stark contrast to the
“Saint,” his sister. When the opera opened at the Broadway Theatre in New York
in December 1954, the part of her lover Michele was sung by tenor David Poleri,
who had sung Don José to Lane’s Carmen many times and who, as in the Bizet
opera, would stab her to death on stage at each performance. ''I've been dying
[this way] for a couple of years," said she at the time, "I wonder if
there's any future in it." (Poleri was notorious for his “temperament” –
another instance of which will be cited at the end of this article – as Lane
complains, "He used to hit me so hard, I still have a sore back.")
Certainly there was a
future – fifty years, in fact – in the relationship she struck up with the
opera’s associate conductor and vocal coach, Samuel Krachmalnick. Although she
would characterize it as “stormy,” the couple clearly shared a down-to-earth
attitude toward their milieu. Krachmalnick had taken up conducting himself
after concluding, as a French horn player in the Washington National Symphony
with ample opportunity to scrutinize guest conductors, that "if these
jokers can do it, it's got to be easy." Lane and Krachmalnick were married
in New York on the day The Saint of Bleecker Street closed,
April 2, 1955, and immediately went with the production to La Scala in Milan.
“It was like our honeymoon … We were met at the plane by Menotti and Leonard
Bernstein, who knew my husband well."
From this point on,
both the Krachmalnicks shuttled frequently across the Atlantic. While Sam
Krachmalnick was on the conducting staff at New York City Opera, and earning a
1957 Tony® nomination as the conductor of Bernstein’s Candideon Broadway, she was taking Milan by storm as
“the American Carmen.” She aroused jealousy among her female rivals, and terror
among her tenor co-stars: "Singing with her," admitted Giuseppe Di
Stefano, "can be pretty tough on a hot-blooded Sicilian like me."
Even on Milan’s enormous stage, Gloria Lane's voice was “opulent, brilliant,
rich as piled velvet” (Time Magazine). After Carmen would
go proudly and defiantly to her death, the house would burst into round after
round of applause.
On two occasions she
returned to New York to sing under Leonard Bernstein on the historic “Omnibus”
television series: some parts of Handel’s Messiah at
Christmas 1955, and in March 1957, portions of J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. (While doing the Messiah, she writes, “I was pregnant with daughter
Magda. When I sang ‘Behold, a Virgin shall conceive, and bear a Son,’ the
orchestra broke up!!”)
But for the most part
during this period she was busy at Glyndebourne (The Rake’s Progress,
1958), Covent Garden (Carmen, 1960), the Vienna
Staatsoper, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, a bullring in Seville, and smaller houses
in France, Denmark and Italy, where she had occasion to sing Carmen in English, Italian, and German as well as
the original French. She came back to Philadelphia in 1963 to share the stage
with Jon Vickers, but immediately returned to La Scala to sing the Widow
Begbick in Mahagonny. Later European high
points were an Italian version of A View from the Bridge in
Yugoslavia, Carmen with Mario Del Monaco
in Sicily, appearing at La Scala as Edvige in William Tell, Marina
inBoris Godunov, and Miriam in Rossini’s Mosè, and
revisiting Amneris in Treviso.
In 1971 Gloria Lane
resurfaced at the New York City Opera as a dramatic soprano, with no real
change in strength, color, or beauty of tone. She was Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana that year, Ariadne and Lady
Macbeth (Verdi) at Glyndebourne the next; she sang Desdemona in Hawaii.
Her crowning
achievement of the decade was singing Katerina Ismailova in
Russian in Torino in May 1976. The opera is Shostakovich’s revision of
his Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1936), delivered in 1962
in response to the ban on the original by the Soviet regime, but resulting in
some undeniable improvements. Fortunately – for there are very few recordings
featuring Gloria Lane (the only other CDs available are a Leopold Stokowski
compilation that includes her 1963 BBC performance in Falla's El Amor Brujo, and a 1955 studio recording of Carousel on RCA, on which she sings “You’ll Never
Walk Alone”) – the Shostakovich performance was repeated in Rome for a live
radio broadcast and recording. Gloria Lane knew, and knows, no Russian, and sang
the entire text of the opera by ear. Still, many Russians came backstage to
congratulate her in Russian, convinced she was one of their own. "It's
something that I'm very proud of, because it was extremely difficult, musically
and vocally also."
Sam Krachmalnick’s
career was no less peripatetic than his wife’s, and the family found themselves
moving frequently – first to Milan, then to Zurich, where Sam conducted
regularly at the Stadttheater, back to Milan, then to Bucks County, PA, while
Sam toured the States with the Metropolitan Opera, Gloria flew back and forth
to La Scala, and the children went to school. They moved to Seattle when Sam
was offered a job at the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1971, and again
to California in 1976, where Sam took an academic position as director of the
UCLA Symphony and Opera Workshop.
After her last
performance in Milan (as Marie in Wozzeck in
1977), Gloria Lane took selected private vocal students in and around Los
Angeles; her husband retired in 1991 but also continued to teach privately. He
became an invalid in 1999, requiring intensive care from her until his death
from a heart attack in 2005, exactly one day before what would have been their
fiftieth wedding anniversary.
The performing
traditions that Gloria Lane has left to the opera world are probably
innumerable, but there is one in particular that resists eradication. She was
singing Carmen’s “Seguidilla” – the first-act aria “where I have my hands tied
behind my back." Her Don José, the scenery-chewing tenor David Poleri, was
(probably intentionally) distracting the audience by playing with his rifle.
“So I figured, 'I have to get [their] attention.' And so, with my hands behind
my back, I leaned over and picked up my skirt with
Never to be
replicated, however, was Lane’s storied solo performance of the final murder
scene in Carmen. It was 1953; New York City Opera was visiting
at the Lyric in Chicago. The tempormental tenor had grown more and more
frustrated with the conductor’s tempo changes. In the final duet, when Don José
threatens to kill Carmen if she will not come with him, and she refuses. But the tenor had had enough. Poleri strode to the
center, faced the conductor, who was oblivious, said “Goddammit, finish it
yourself!” and stalked out of the house and onto the Chicago street, still in
his costume.
She thought, “Well, I've got some high notes
to sing, so damned if I'm going to get off the stage.” The conductor was
apparently still oblivious. “So I sang his part and mine, and killed myself
with an imaginary knife. I got press from all over the world. As a matter of
fact, I was on the Edward R. Murrow show, showing how I stabbed myself. I have
a feeling that when I die, they'll tell that story."
– Lucy E. Cross
