Shirley Verrett

Shirley Verrett was born on the thirty-first of May 1931 at New Orleans, the daughter of Leon Solomon Verrett — a building contractor and the choirmaster of the Pentecostal Holiness Church of the city — and Elvira Harris Verrett, a homemaker. The family relocated to Oxnard, California in 1942 when her father took a Pacific war-industry construction contract.

She was placed at twelve at the Oxnard High School Choir under her father’s direction and at seventeen at the Ventura Junior College in voice and Bible studies. She graduated as a real-estate broker from the Ventura Junior College in 1951 — the only college credential of her early career — and worked as a real-estate broker at Los Angeles between 1951 and 1955.

She was heard by the broadcaster Sam Levenson at a private home recital at Los Angeles in 1955 and arranged on Levenson’s recommendation a 1955 audition at the Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts television programme. She won the Godfrey audition on the nineteenth of September 1955 and used the prize money to enrol at the Juilliard School of Music at New York under Marion Szekely-Freschl from 1955 to 1961 — the same teacher who had supervised Camilla Williams (placed in this archive) at the Philadelphia Musical Academy in 1942.

She gave her New York opera debut at the New York City Opera on the twenty-eighth of September 1958 in the role of Irina in Kurt Weill’s Lost in the Stars, and her European debut at the Spoleto Festival on the twentieth of June 1962 in the title role of Manuel de Falla’s El Amor Brujo.

She made her Metropolitan Opera debut on the twenty-first of September 1968 at the Metropolitan Opera’s tour at the Lincoln Center in the title role of Bizet’s Carmen, opposite Plácido Domingo as Don José under the direction of Erich Leinsdorf.

She sang both the mezzo-soprano role of Amneris and the soprano role of Aïda in a single performance of Verdi’s Aïda at the Metropolitan Opera on the twenty-second of January 1973 — the first singer of either sex to sing both roles in the same evening at the Met. She substituted for the indisposed soprano Grace Bumbry (placed in this archive) in the title role through the second and third acts after singing the second-act Amneris through to the Triumphal March.

She sang across the following twenty seasons at the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, Covent Garden, and the Wiener Staatsoper in twenty-six principal roles.

She taught voice at the University of Michigan School of Music from 1996 to 2009.

She died at Ann Arbor, Michigan on the fifth of November 2010 of complications of heart failure, at seventy-nine.

She is honored here as the principal mezzo of the post-war Metropolitan Opera.