Negro singers are still rare enough in grand opera to be news to the public and to make managers self-conscious about what roles to give them. Two possible answers: Carmen, the gypsy girl, and Aïda, the Ethiopian slave. But they are also taxing debut parts, both vocally and dramatically. Last week, on opera stages 4.000 miles apart, two of the most promising of the U.S.'s young Negro singers appeared in Carmen and Aïda to audience cheers.
¶ Brooklyn-born Gloria Davy, 25, made her first musical splash four years ago as the replacement for Leontyne Price in Porgy and Bess. She toured in the role from San Francisco to Cairo, finally abandoned Bess to avoid being typed. She studied Aïda, sang the title role in the opera house at Nice but had never attempted it with a big-league company before her debut at the Metropolitan Opera last week. Soprano Davy was thrown in with a strong cast—Kurt Baum as Radames, Irene Dalis as Amneris. Leonard Warren as Amonasro—which might well have overpowered her. Tentative at first, Singer Davy warmed up as the evening progressed, sang her low tones with a throaty richness, her upper ones with limpid, free-flowing clarity. Her O patria mia was a triumph of yearning beauty. She lacked the sheer vocal force to carry over Baum's bellowing and Warren's thunderous tones, but she matched the acting of the veteran cast with a touchingly natural performance. All in all, Soprano Davy proved that the Met is where she belongs.
¶ Vera Little is a strapping, 27-year-old Memphis girl who went to Europe on a Fulbright fellowship in 1954 to study voice at the Paris Conservatory. While on a concert tour, she dropped into a Hamburg café one day, was spotted by an opera official. "That's exactly the kind of girl wre're looking for to sing Carmen," he said to his companion. "Pity she's not a singer." Said his companion, a friend of Vera's: "But she is—and besides she's a mezzo." Next day Soprano Little flew to West Berlin to audition for brilliant Opera Director Carl Ebert (TIME, Jan. 24, 1955), was hired to sing the title role in his new production of Carmen.
In her debut, Soprano Little radiated much of the cool assurance—but not all the stagewise technique—of a veteran. The voice she displayed was not yet a big one, but it had a smooth, satiny quality ideally suited to the menacing, feline tension of her carefully calculated movements. Her opening-night performance was received with warm applause and scattered smart-aleck brays of "Little, go home!" By the second performance, she had her audience cheering after both her big first-act arias. Concluded one influential critic: "The debut came perhaps a bit too early, but it might well be the beginning of a great stage career."