Rosa Ponselle
But with the influence and example of her older sister, Carmela, who was then pursuing a career as a cabaret singer, Rosa began to augment her engagements as a silent-movie accompanist in and around Meriden by singing popular ballads to her audiences while the projectionist changed film reels.
By 1914, her reputation as a singer led to a long-term engagement at the San Carlino theater, one of the largest movie houses in New Haven, near the Yale campus.
In 1918, Carmela and Rosa demanded a substantial fee increase from the Keith Vaudeville Circuit, as a result of which their act was dropped.
Soon afterward, Thorner persuaded the great tenor Enrico Caruso, star of the Metropolitan Opera, to visit his studio to hear Carmela and Rosa sing.
Rosa Ponselle made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera on November 15, 1918, just a few days after World War I had ended, as Leonora in Verdi's La forza del destino, opposite Caruso and Giuseppe De Luca.
She was quite intimidated for being in the presence of Caruso, and in spite of an almost paralyzing case of nervousness (which she suffered from throughout her operatic career), she scored a tremendous success, both with the public and with the critics.
"[3] In addition to Leonora, Ponselle's roles in the 1918/19 season included Santuzza in Cavalleria rusticana, Reiza in Weber's Oberon, and Carmelita in the (unsuccessful) world premiere of Joseph Carl Breil's The Legend.
A tour of the West coast included an appearance at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara on March 14, 1927 in the Artist Series of the Community Arts Association's Music Branch, accompanied by pianist Stuart Ross.
As her career progressed, Ponselle negotiated through her manager more concerts and exponentially higher fees before and after each Metropolitan Opera season.
Her success was such that she considered an engagement at Milan's La Scala, but after witnessing a Florence audience's brutal treatment of a famous tenor, Giacomo Lauri-Volpi, who cracked on a high note, she decided not to press her luck further with the notoriously difficult Italian opera-going public.
These included, amongst others, her receding upper vocal range which intensified her nerves; her dissatisfaction with the Metropolitan Opera House's refusal to accede her proposed musical repertoire (she had expressed a desire to sing Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur, which had an appropriately low tessitura, but general manager Edward Johnson blocked any revival due to the opera's poor financial returns during its 1907-1908 season at the Met, despite the presence of Caruso in the cast); mental and physical performance exhaustion from the strain of 21 intensive years of continuous performances and rising levels of performance-related anxiety; her marriage in 1936 to Carle A. Jackson, the socialite son of the then-mayor of Baltimore; and her enjoyment of the life she now led without the demands of performing.
Among those to have received her tutelage during their Baltimore Civic Opera appearances, at the start of their careers, were Beverly Sills, Sherrill Milnes, Plácido Domingo, James Morris, Lili Chookasian, Joshua Hecht, and Martha King.
In her obituary, Allen Hughes wrote in The New York Times, "Miss Ponselle made an indelible impression through the impact of her phenomenal voice.
It was a dramatic soprano that seemed to move seamlessly from the low notes of a contralto to a dazzling high C. She had coloratura flexibility, a splendid trill, powerful fortes, delicate pianissimos and precise intonation.
"[1] Hughes quotes Harold C. Schonberg who wrote in 1972, "That big, pure colorful golden voice would rise effortlessly, hitting the stunned listener in the face, rolling over the body, sliding down the shoulder-blades, making one wiggle with sheer physiological pleasure.
She was universally lauded for opulence of tone, evenness of scale, breadth of range, perfection of technique and communicative warmth.
In 1954 she made a few private song recordings, later released commercially, revealing a still opulent voice of darkened timbre and more limited range.
Romani, a young composer whose opera Fedra had earned favorable attention in Italy, was conducting recording sessions for Columbia at the time.
Under his baton, Ponselle made 44 discs for Columbia, including arias from many operas in which she never sang, such as Lohengrin, Tosca, La bohème, Madama Butterfly, and I vespri siciliani.
Of particular interest among the Columbia discs are three duets she made with Carmela of some of their vaudeville hits, including a version of "Comin' Thro' the Rye" that features an elaborate coloratura cadenza that would not be out of place in Bellini's Norma but sounds a bit strange in the Scottish Highlands.
"Not only in the richness of the sound and the trueness of the emotion," critic Irving Kolodin wrote of the first RCA Victor LP, "but in the admirable discipline of what she has undertaken, the best in these performances of October 1954 mark the Ponselle of today as an artist to be reckoned with the fine singers of 1955.
