Out of the Shade

When Mezzo-Soprano Marilyn Horne made her New York debut in Bellini's Beatrice di Tenda four years ago, the critics were rapturous in their praise--for Joan Sutherland, the celebrated coloratura who also happened to be making her New York debut that night in the title role. Poor Marilyn was completely submerged in the flood of acclaim for Sutherland. The reviewer for the New York Times neglected to mention that she was even present, much less accounted for.

Last week Marilyn Horne was back on stage with Soprano Sutherland in the Boston Opera's production of Rossini's Semiramide. This time there was no overlooking her. For one thing, she was five months pregnant and singing the hero's role of Arsace, an officer in the Scythian army, complete with beard and free-flowing robes. For another, she sang magnificently.

Newscaster's Diction. Though Semiramide is musically the most brilliant of Rossini's 35 operas, it has not been staged in the U.S. since 1906. Written in 1823 as a florid showcase for the human voice, Semiramide is among the most fiendishly difficult of all operas to sing, a kind of vocal decathlon that requires a range and stylistic flexibility that few if any modern-day singers would or could tackle--that is, until Horne and Sutherland came along. But both their husbands decided that not even Rossini's musical scrollwork was adequate to display the full virtuosity of their two stars. Sutherland's husband Richard Bonynge, who conducted the Boston production, and Horne's spouse Henry Lewis, who as associate conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic is the leading Negro conductor in the U.S., put their heads together to compose some additional vocal scrimshaw of their own. The result was a stunning display of bel canto acrobatics of a kind rarely heard in any age.

"The way our two voices blend together," says Sutherland, "is so exciting for us. It's fantastic." The audience agreed. Sutherland as Queen Semiramide was her usual dazzling self, but Horne matched her roulade for roulade, trill for trill, most enchantingly in the final act in which the two coloraturas melded voices in a breathtakingly lovely duet. Marilyn exhibited a regal voice that spans two octaves, warm and bronze-toned in the middle, vibrantly brilliant at the top. With the diction of a newscaster, she breezed through the complicated Rossini libretto as easily as a mother singing a nursery rhyme.

Place to Be Lousy. Marilyn began her voice lessons at five under the unstinting tutelage of her father, a "semiprofessional tenor" when he wasn't tending to his duties as town assessor of Bradford, Pa. When the family moved to Long Beach, Calif., Marilyn joined the Roger Wagner Chorale, later won a voice scholarship to the University of Southern California where she flunked, among other things, opera workshop for refusing to sing Carmen (she did not feel ready for the role). She spent her time instead singing avant-garde music at the Hollywood Bowl under the direction of Igor Stravinsky, dubbed in the singing voice for Dorothy Dandridge in the movie Carmen Jones, was a disembodied voice in Hollywood's Flower Drum Song.

Deserting college in her third year, she headed for Europe "to have a place where I could be lousy and make all my mistakes." After a year of study in Vienna, she sang for three years with Germany's Gelsenkirchen Municipal Opera. But each summer she always made it a point to come back to California to sing at the Hollywood Bowl "just to make sure the people of America didn't forget about me." She can rest assured. At 31, thanks to her Semiramide performance and an excellent new London recording, Presenting Marilyn Horne, she now ranks as the finest, most versatile young mezzo singing today.

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