PEDRO FIGARI
www.pedrofigari.com
fernandosaavedra@pedrofigari.com - figarisaavedra@hotmail.com
BETTY ALLEN'S VISIT
for
Dona Margarita Figari de Faget
A memory of one of
the strongest artistic
impressions – I carry with me.
I trully regret that many
Americans can not see (in person)
the art of this fellow American (Latin).
He painted with sympathy & with
wit and grace-
Betty Allen
Oct. 1, 1968
June 25, 2009
Betty Allen, Opera Singer and Educator, Dies at 82
By MARGALIT FOX
Betty Allen, an American mezzo-soprano who transcended a Dickensian girlhood to become an internationally known opera singer and later a prominent voice teacher and arts administrator, died on Monday in Valhalla, N.Y. She was 82.
The cause was complications of kidney disease, her daughter, Juliana Lee, said. A longtime resident of Harlem, Ms. Allen lived most recently in Bronxville, N.Y.
An Ohio native who fell into opera by chance, Ms. Allen was part of the first great wave of African-American singers to appear on the world’s premier stages in the postwar years. Active from the 1950s to the 1970s, she performed with the New York City Opera, the Metropolitan Opera and the opera companies of Houston, Boston, San Francisco, Santa Fe, N.M., and Buenos Aires, among others.
Ms. Allen, who also toured as a recitalist, was known for her close association with the American composers Virgil Thomson, Ned Rorem and David Diamond. At her death, she was on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music, where she had taught since 1969. She was also the president emeritus and a former executive director of the Harlem School of the Arts.
In 1954 Ms. Allen made her City Opera debut as Queenie in “Show Boat,” by Jerome Kern. She sang the role of Begonia in the City Opera production of Hans Werner Henze’s comic opera “The Young Lord,” conducted by Sarah Caldwell in 1973. Reviewing the production in The New York Times, Harold C. Schonberg wrote of Ms. Allen, “When she was onstage everything came to life, and everything around her was dimmed.”
With the Met, Ms. Allen sang the role of Commère in Mr. Thomson’s “Four Saints in Three Acts” in 1973; she later participated in the first complete recording of the work. Elsewhere, her roles included Teresa in “La Sonnambula,” by Bellini; Jocasta in Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex”; Monisha in Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha”; and Mistress Quickly in Verdi’s “Falstaff.”
Elizabeth Louise Allen, known as Betty Lou, was born on March 17, 1927, in Campbell, Ohio, near Youngstown. Her father worked in the steel mills; her mother had a thriving business taking in laundry. Growing up, she was exposed to the opera that poured from neighbors’ radios.
“The families on my street were mostly Sicilian and Greek,” Ms. Allen told The Times in 1999. “On Saturday, walking down the street, you could hear the Met broadcasts coming from the windows of everybody’s house. No one told them that opera and the arts were not for them, not for poor people, just for rich snobs.”
When Betty was 12, her mother died of lung cancer. Her father, as she said in interviews afterward, began drinking heavily. Betty took over running the house and caring for him till, one day, fed up, she boarded a bus to Youngstown. At the courthouse there, she told a startled judge that she wanted somebody to adopt her.
“That judge didn’t know what to do with me,” Ms. Allen told The Times in 1973. “You see, in those days, there was no orphanage for black children. You either had to be put in a detention home or you were put in a foster home. I chose to be put in foster homes.”
Several turbulent years followed, first in the home of a white couple where the husband turned out to be “lecherous,” Ms. Allen recalled. Next came a white family who made her do all the cooking, cleaning, washing and ironing in exchange for $3 a week and a bed in the attic. After that, she lived with an elderly black woman.
“She was a mean old lady,” Ms. Allen told The Times. “You couldn’t play the piano on Sunday, you couldn’t play cards, you couldn’t go out, you couldn’t wear makeup.”
At 16, Betty moved into the Youngstown Y.W.C.A., supporting herself by cleaning houses. On a scholarship, she entered Wilberforce College in Wilberforce, Ohio. (A historically black institution, it is now Wilberforce University.) She had excelled in Latin and German in high school and hoped to become a translator.
At Wilberforce, Ms. Allen met Theodor Heimann, a former Berlin Opera tenor who taught German and voice there. He encouraged her to sing. (The soprano Leontyne Price was a classmate at Wilberforce.) Ms. Allen went on to earn a scholarship to what was then the Hartford School of Music in Connecticut.
In the early 1950s, Ms. Allen studied at Tanglewood, where Leonard Bernstein chose her to be the mezzo-soprano soloist in his Symphony No. 1 (“Jeremiah”); she was later a frequent soloist with Mr. Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. Ms. Allen made her New York recital debut at Town Hall in 1958 in a program that included Brahms and Fauré.
Besides her daughter, Juliana Catherine Lee, of the Bronx, Ms. Allen is survived by her husband, Ritten Edward Lee II, whom she married in 1953; a son, Anthony Edward Lee of Bronxville; and three grandchildren.
The executive director of the Harlem School of the Arts from 1979 to 1992, Ms. Allen was on the boards of Carnegie Hall, the New York City Opera, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Theater Development Fund and the Manhattan School of Music. She also taught at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and the North Carolina School of the Arts, now the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.
If Ms. Allen was not as well known as other singers of her era, like Ms. Price, Shirley Verrett and Grace Bumbry, it did not seem to bother her in the slightest.
“I’m not a household name,” she told The Times in the 1973 interview. “I don’t stay awake nights plotting and planning. Maybe I don’t have that extra drive and ambition and energy that makes for a blazing career. I need a home, and I need to be looked after. I may look to be a very self-sufficient female. I act very brazen and hard and matter-of-fact and seem as though I could cope with anything. Well, I can’t. I’m as soft as putty underneath.”