Shirley Verrett was born on May 31, 1931, and passed away on November 5, 2010. She was an American operatic mezzo-soprano who successfully took on soprano roles, making her a soprano sfogato. She was very famous from the late 1960s until the 1990s. She was especially known for singing music written by Giuseppe Verdi and Gaetano Donizetti.

Life and career

Shirley Verrett was born into an African-American family of very religious Catholics in New Orleans. She grew up in Los Angeles. In her memoir, she wrote that her mother changed from being a strict Catholic to an even stricter Seventh-Day Adventist. Verrett and her siblings attended school in the Seventh-Day Adventist system. She sang in church and showed early talent for music, but her family did not support her becoming a singer at first.

Verrett went to Oakwood University, a private historically black Seventh-Day Adventist university in Huntsville, Alabama, for one semester in 1949. She then returned to southern California and earned an associate degree in real estate from Ventura College. Though she was successful as a real estate agent, she thought about changing her career and began serious voice training. In 1955, she won two California state competitions organized by the Young Musicians Foundation. Later that year, she appeared on Talent Scouts, a national television show hosted by Arthur Godfrey. Her performance on that show earned her a scholarship to the Juilliard School in New York. At Juilliard, she studied with Anna Fitziu and Marion Szekely Freschl. In 1961, she won the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions.

In 1957, Verrett made her operatic debut in Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia under her married name, Shirley Carter. She later used the name Shirley Verrett-Carter and eventually just Shirley Verrett. In 1958, she made her New York City Opera debut as Irina in Kurt Weill’s Lost in the Stars. In 1959, she made her European debut at the Cologne Opera in Nicolas Nabokov’s Rasputins Tod. In 1962, she received praise for her performance as Bizet’s Carmen at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto. She repeated the role at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1963 and at the New York City Opera in 1964. In 1966, she first appeared at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, as Ulrica in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera.

Verrett appeared in the first televised concert from Lincoln Center in 1962. She also performed that year in the first of the Leonard Bernstein Young People’s Concerts, which was broadcast from the same venue, now known as David Geffen Hall.

In 1968, Verrett made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera as Carmen. In 1969, she performed at La Scala in Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Dalila. Her mezzo roles included Cassandra and Didon in Berlioz’s Les Troyens, including the Met premiere when she sang both roles in the same performance. She also performed Verdi’s Ulrica in Un ballo in maschera, Amneris in Aida, Eboli in Don Carlo, and Azucena in Il trovatore. She sang roles in operas by Donizetti, Gluck, and Rossini. Most of these performances were recorded professionally or privately.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Verrett took on soprano roles, including Selika in L’Africaine, Judith in Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, and Lady Macbeth in Macbeth. She performed Madame Lidoine in Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites at the Met in 1977. She also sang Tosca, Norma, Aida, Desdemona in Otello, Leonore in Fidelio, Iphigénie, Alceste, and Médée. In December 1978, she performed the role of Tosca in a Live from the Met television broadcast alongside Luciano Pavarotti and Cornell MacNeil.

In 1990, Verrett sang Didon in Les Troyens at the inauguration of the Opéra Bastille in Paris. She also added Santuzza in Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana to her repertoire. In 1994, she made her Broadway debut in the Tony Award-winning revival of Carousel at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, playing Nettie Fowler.

In 1996, Verrett joined the faculty of the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance as a professor of voice and the James Earl Jones Distinguished University Professor of Voice. In 1995, at the National Opera Association Gala Banquet and Concert honoring Mattiwilda Dobbs, Todd Duncan, Camilla Williams, and Robert McFerrin, Verrett spoke about her experiences.

Verrett married twice. Her first husband was James L. Carter, a real estate broker and sheriff’s deputy, whom she married in 1951. They divorced in 1959 after she experienced abuse. In 1963, she married artist Louis Lo Monaco. She was survived by Lo Monaco, their adopted daughter, and their granddaughter. She was also the estranged paternal aunt of Durek Verrett, a controversial American media personality.

Verrett died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on November 5, 2010, at the age of 79, from heart failure following an undisclosed illness. In her honor, the University of Michigan established an annual Shirley Verrett Award in 2011. The award recognizes a faculty member whose work supports the success of female students or faculty in the arts who come from diverse cultural and racial backgrounds.

Autobiography

In 2003, Shirley Verrett wrote a book called I Never Walked Alone (ISBN 978-0-471-20991-1). In the book, she talked openly about the racism she faced as a Black person in the American classical music world. When conductor Leopold Stokowski invited her to sing with the Houston Symphony in the early 1960s, he had to cancel the invitation because the orchestra board would not allow a Black soloist to perform. Later, Stokowski apologized by offering her a special performance opportunity with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Honors

• Received a grant from the John Hay Whitney Foundation, a scholarship from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund, and a fellowship from the Ford Foundation Opera Program
• Awarded the William Matheus Sullivan Award
• Recognized as an African American Woman of Distinction by Essence Magazine
• Received the Marian Anderson Award (1957)
• Won the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation Award (1958)
• Honored as Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (1970)
• Received the Achievement Award from the Women's Division of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (1975)
• Awarded an Honorary Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the College of the Holy Cross (1978)
• Received the NAACP Special Achievement Award (1980)
• Honored as Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres (1984)
• Awarded an Honorary Doctor of Music degree from Northeastern University, Verrett's alma mater (1987)
• Received an Honorary Doctor of Music degree from the Juilliard School (2002)

The Shirley Verrett Award was established at the University of Michigan in 2011 by the Office of the Senior Vice Provost.