Frederica von Stade


Frederica "Flicka" von Stade Gorman is a semi-retired American opera singer. Since her debut in New York in 1970, she has performed in operas, musicals, concerts and recitals in venues throughout the world, including the Met, La Scala, the Paris Opera, the Vienna State Opera, the Salzburger Festspielhaus, Covent Garden, Glyndebourne and Carnegie Hall. Conductors with whom she has worked include Abbado, Bernstein, Boulez, Giulini, Karajan, Ozawa, Solti and Tilson Thomas. She has also been a prolific and eclectic recording artist, and has made many appearances on television.
A mezzo-soprano equally at home in lyric music and in coloratura, von Stade has assumed fifty-four operatic roles on stage and eight more in concert or on disc. She is especially associated with the Mozart, Rossini and French repertoires and with contemporary American music, particularly the works of Jake Heggie. Among her signature roles are Penelope, Rosina, Angelina, Charlotte, Lucette, Mélisande, Hanna Glawari and Mrs de Rocher, and, in trousers, Cherubino, Hänsel, Chérubin and Octavian.
Her divorce from her first husband, Peter Elkus, was important in the development of American family case law, establishing the principle that when the marriages of performing artists are dissolved, the courts can attribute an economic value to their celebrity status and treat it as marital property to be shared with their former spouses.

Antecedents

Von Stade is a member of a large, wealthy family long prominent in northeast American high society, with roots in Ireland and the Isle of Man as well as in north Germany.
Her patrilineal great-great-grandfather, Friedrich Wilhelm von Stade, was a merchant who was born in Altona, a suburb of Hamburg, Germany. He emigrated to America in the mid-19th century, founding a bristle importing company at 73 Beekman Street, New York City.
Her great-aunt, Eleanor Herndon Steele Reese, rancher, rural philanthropist and erstwhile Countess de la Greze, was once an international concert and operetta soprano who sang at Paris's Opéra-Comique, toured with her third husband, the tenor Clovis Hall, and commissioned compositions from Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Darius Milhaud. Her parents were First Lieutenant Charles Steele von Stade, trained as an architect and winner of the US Open Polo Championship in 1941, and Sara Worthington Clucas von Stade.

Early life

Infancy

Von Stade was born in Somerville, New Jersey on June 1, 1945, a premature baby weighing 2½ pounds. Seven weeks earlier, on April 10, 1945, her father had been killed in action in World War 2. The many letters that he had written to her mother later inspired Kim Vaeth and Richard Danielpour to devise the song cycle Elegies for her. She described her feelings about her father in her 2004 song lyric "To my Dad", which was set to music by Jake Heggie and performed by them on his album Flesh & Stone.
She was named after her maternal grandmother. Her family later came to call her by a nickname, Flicka, Swedish for "little girl".
On December 6, 1946, von Stade's mother married Lieutenant Colonel Horace W. "Hod" Fuller. He and his family spent several years in Greece and Italy, but his work commitments allowed him so little time with his stepdaughter that she scarcely got to know him. Von Stade's memories of her childhood in Athens inspired one of the poems in her lyric cycle Paper Wings, which was set to music by Jake Heggie and performed by them on his album .

Childhood

On October 6, 1950, Sara Fuller and her children left Le Havre on the SS America to return to the United States. The Fullers divorced in 1951. Sara von Stade established a new life for herself in Washington, D. C., working for the CIA as a secretary. Von Stade remembers her early self as a "latchkey kid" with a dynamic, clever, humorous, volatile mother whose "problem with booze" did not compromise her passionate attachment to her daughter.
Von Stade's education began at the Holy Trinity School, Georgetown, a parochial elementary school founded by Jesuits and staffed by nuns. In grades 5 to 7, she studied at the Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, a college-preparatory school near the Bethesda Naval Hospital. When she reached grade 8, her mother took her back to the Clucases' rural homeland in New Jersey, where she spent two years at the Far Hills Country Day School before returning to the care of the nuns of the Convent of the Sacred Heart at their elite boarding college-preparatory school, no longer extant, in Noroton, Connecticut.
Each of von Stade's closest relatives had at least some enthusiasm for music. At Yale University, her brother Charles sang in the Whiffenpoof a capella chorus; her mother liked listening to operas on the radio and to popular melodies on her Victrola record player; and her father, admired by his comrades for his attractive singing, was an amateur pianist and organist who might have studied music in college if he had survived his military service. She herself began singing when she was six or seven, pleased to discover that dressing up and performing for her family helped her to cope with a shyness so extreme that the prospect of going to a party could make her physically ill. At Stone Ridge, she sang processional music and Masses under the guidance of Mother Jan McNabb. From the age of fourteen, she began taking Saturday train rides from New Jersey to New York to see the latest musicals on Broadway; she routinely bought standing passes for a matinee and an evening performance on the same day, whiling away the interval between them by loitering outside the Metropole Cafe and eavesdropping on jazz played by Gene Krupa or Dizzy Gillespie. Among the shows that she enjoyed were Peter Pan, The Sound of Music, Camelot and Tovarich, and she went ten times to hear Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun. At school in Far Hills, she made her own first appearances in musicals in productions mounted by a teacher called Betty Noling.
When she was sixteen, her mother took her to the Salzburg Festival to hear Karl Böhm conducting Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Christa Ludwig in Der Rosenkavalier. Despite arriving at the Festspielhaus dishevelled and wet after being driven through the rain in a leaking Volkswagen, she was spellbound by what seemed to her the most beautiful thing that she had ever heard, and she still treasures an autograph that she subsequently solicited from Schwarzkopf after glimpsing her through a restaurant window. She was introduced to much more classical music in her senior high school years in Noroton, where she sang choral works by Mozart, Handel, Palestrina, Orlande de Lassus and Josquin des Prez. But neither Richard Strauss nor any of the other composers in the classical pantheon could seduce her away from the kind of music that won her heart in her earliest years. When she entertained her friends and family at one of their gatherings, it was invariably with pop songs or show tunes that she had picked up by ear.

Young adulthood

After graduating, von Stade was given a sum of money by her grandfather, with the advice to spend it on something better than clothes or a car. Her mother suggested using it to finance a gap year in Paris. She combined waitressing, tending bar and working as a part-time nanny to three children with studying piano at the École Mozart, although she was so embarrassed by the youth and skill of her fellow pupils that she did not persist with her lessons for long. She had happier musical experiences hearing Schwarzkopf in recital at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and Carmen at the Opéra.
Once back in New York, she worked as a sales assistant in the stationery department of Tiffany's"I was terrible at it, and kept sending out orders to Houston, Wyoming and Sacramento, Nevada"and took secretarial night classes that led to a job at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut. But she also began to investigate the possibility of earning money from her voice. Offering herself as a freelance singer for hire, she found employment in cocktail bars where "customers were not expected to listen, and didn't", and she took part in a promotional industrial musical staged for the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Eventually she summoned up enough courage to begin asking for small parts in summer stock musicals. It was not an easy process for her: "You do fifty or sixty auditions and get called back five times and maybe get one job offerif you're lucky." But ultimately her persistence was rewarded when she made her stage debut in the Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven in 1966, playing Beauty in a children's production of Beauty and the Beast.
Torn between her growing ambition, her difficulty in acknowledging it, her Catholic guilt over it and her fear of failure, she was unsure whether to commit herself to the training that would be necessary if she were to become the professional singer that she increasingly dreamt of being. Ultimately it was a friend's $50 dare that tipped the balance and led to her approaching a conservatory that happened to be close to her East 73rd Street Manhattan apartment, New York's Mannes School of Music. Even then, she was still hesitant, initially limiting herself to a part-time course in sight-reading. It was only at the urging of her instructor that she applied to become a full-time student singer. Hoping that she would at least learn how to play the piano well enough to handle pop tunes at parties, she auditioned with Mignon's "Connais tu le pays?", and was accepted into the college's vocal programme. She was funded by help from her family and part-time secretarial work, including a day's temping as Ethel Merman's PA. Despite a disappointing evening at a Metropolitan Opera Arabella"Awful, no melody"she chose to make opera her speciality, because it offered the quickest route to a degree. Under the tutelage of Sebastian Engelberg, she discovered talents in herself that she had not anticipated, yet she was still so unsure of herself that she contemplated a switch to nursing. But after Harold Schonberg wrote an appreciative review of her Lazuli in the college's production of Chabrier's L'étoile in The New York Times"This little girl has real personality and an interesting voice. She could go places"she found enough self-confidence to enter the Met's 1969 recruitment competition. Her singing of Charlotte's letter aria from Massenet's Werther got her through to the semi-finals, and the house's general manager, Rudolf Bing, was sufficiently impressed to sign her up on a three-year comprimario contract without further ado.

Career

Apprenticeship

Von Stade made the first of her 305 Met appearances on January 10, 1970 as one of the Three Boys in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, singing from a basket dangling vertiginously near the top of the proscenium arch: "We were so scared by the time we got down to the stage that we didn't even know what opera we were in". Her subsequent comprimario roles were Bersi, Cherubino, Hänsel, Lola, Maddalena, Mercédès, Nicklausse, Preziosilla, Tosca's Shepherd, Siébel, Suzuki, Tebaldo, Virginella, a Flowermaiden in Parsifal, an Unborn Child in Die Frau ohne Schatten, Wowkle, Flora. After recording her first LP in February 1973Joseph Haydn's Harmoniemesse, conducted by Leonard Bernstein she crossed the Atlantic to begin preparations for her Paris Figaro. Both the production and her contribution to it were widely acclaimeda French critic wrote that she had the voice of an angeland she was soon receiving offers from many of the world's greatest opera houses. The first that she took up reunited her with Te Kanawa at Glyndebourne. She made her British debut there on July 1 under John Pritchard in another, televised staging of Figaro, singing with her modesty intact despite the wish of her producer, Peter Hall, that she should perform part of the boudoir scene naked. In the autumn, she returned to San Francisco as Dorabella in Mozart's Così fan tutte; and at Christmas, she came back to the Met eighteen months after leaving it, debuting her Rosina in Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia as an acknowledged international star. Meeting Marcia Baldwin in later years, she joked that her colleague's night of illness back in 1970 had been singularly serendipitous. "Without you, honey, I would not have had a career."

Baroque opera

Von Stade's first season at Glyndebourne gave her the opportunity to become acquainted with Peter Hall's staging of Monteverdi's Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria. She attended each of that summer's seventeen performances of the work. She was enthralled by how he had crafted it"I don't think I've ever had an experience before or since that compared to it"and also by Janet Baker's Penelope: "If I could project her quiet dignity and devotion in just one of my performances, I'd rejoice for the rest of my life." She was also delighted by Raymond Leppard's extravagant realization of the piece. While acknowledging that his way with baroque scores had been slighted by some musicologists as anachronistic, she relished the appealing vivacity of the results: "I think he brought them alive and gave them a life that made them intensely popular." It was in Leppard's version of Ulisse that she appeared in her house debut with the Washington Opera in the piece's first American staging. She was Penelope again in her house debut with the New York City Opera, subsequently stepping into Baker's shoes under Leppard's direction at Glyndebourne in 1979 and reprising the role in San Francisco andin Glen Wilson's austere editionin Los Angeles. She returned to Monteverdi in the autumn of her career, performing the smaller role of the scorned empress Ottavia in L'incoronazione di Poppea in Houston and in Los Angeles.
She collaborated with Leppard on an unhappier baroque enterprise in 1980, singing Iphise in a televised, ultra-modernist staging of Rameau's Dardanus in Paris. One of Leppard's books recounts the project's troubles, which included a clowning violist, an incompetent organist. wire-flown singers who squeaked with terror and a producer and designer who abandoned their creation midway through its run. Von Stade thought the staging so inept that after the exit of its authors, she felt obliged to take control of it and try to repair its infelicities herself. Leppard described the experience as the worst of his conducting life, an agonizing episode that left a permanent scar on his psyche.
Handel's Serse was the only other baroque opera in which von Stade appeared, and the only British opera in her entire curriculum vitae. Singing its title role in a staging by Stephen Wadsworth in Santa Fe in 1993 withoutby her own admissionadequate preparation, she suffered a disastrous memory lapse in the opening lines of her first major aria. "I'm here to tell you that you don't actually die from shame", she said to her manager afterwards. "You might like to, you might wish you couldbut you don't." She revisited Serse in her house debut at Seattle Opera when Wadsworth's production was revived there in 1997.

18th century opera

Mozart is von Stade's favourite composer. She thinks that Cherubino was to some extent autobiographical: "In many respects he is the spirit of Mozart. That's how I imagine to have acted and looked, from his letters. I think very close to his character without the dark side." In particular, she sees the composer and his creation as both "little devils", sharing the "bug-eyed admiration of women" that she remarked in Tom Hulce's portrait of Mozart in the film Amadeus. Her playful, aristocratic interpretation of the adolescent page, informed by her observations of seven teenaged male cousins, was greeted by the eminent record producer Walter LeggeElisabeth Schwarzkopf's husbandas revelatory: "The joy of the evening is Frederica von Stade, an actress of seemingly unlimited resources. I've never seen or heard a better Cherubino." Certainly no role figured in her engagement diary more often. Her early appearances as the farfallone amoroso were followed by others in Houston, Paris, Salzburg, Vienna, Chicago and San Francisco, and she incarnated him forty-four times at the Met between 1975 and 1997.
Mozart's other da Ponte operas were less important in her career. She sang Zerlina with the Met in its spring tour in 1974, and Despina in Così fan tutte in San Francisco and at the Ravinia Festival. But she was often heard in trouser roles in Mozart's opera serie. Her Sesto in Santa Fe's 1971 La clemenza di Tito was followed by further performances at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, Munich, San Francisco and Dallas, and she recorded the opera's secondary role of Annio for Colin Davis. In 1982, she returned to the Met after a hiatus of six years to star as Idamante in the house's televised company premiere of Idomeneo. the only staging that ever partnered her with Luciano Pavarotti. She revisited the piece with other tenors at the Met and, in concert, at Tanglewood.
The seldom performed operas of the 18th century's other great master, Joseph Haydn, were works in which she was never heard theatrically, but she did contribute to the pioneering series of recordings of them conducted by Antal Doráti. She was an uncharacteristically furious Amaranta in La fedeltà premiata, and Lisetta in the astronomical comedy Il mondo della luna.

19th century Italian opera

Von Stade has often spoken of her special devotion to the Italian operas of the early 1800s. "I love bel canto; it's the core of what singing is about." "I really believe so much in bel canto, and particularly Rossini's music. It does everything that can be accomplished through the voice." "Sometimes what you want to get across is: 'This is hard, but I am fantastic because I can do this.'... That's what Rossini is".
She is identified with Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia almost as closely as with Cherubino, although she has confessed to loving the Rossini role much less than the Mozart one. "I used to be uncomfortable doing Rosina. … She's usually played as the pert soubrette, with sort of a sharp turn. But I found I can do it within my own terms. Rosina can be wilful one moment, but she can be tender the next." She sang the role twenty-two times at the Met between 1973 and 1992, and also at Covent Garden and at La Scala, in San Francisco, in Hamburg, in Vienna, and in Chicago. Her first La Scala staging was nearly aborted when its producer, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, insisted that she sing the cavatina "Una voce poco fà" unembellished. He relented only when the conductor Thomas Schippers called in the musicologists Philip Gossett and Alberto Zedda to persuade him to allow his weeping prima donna the ornaments and cadenza that she had prepared for him.
She finds Rossini's La Cenerentola a more sympathetic work, enjoying his treatment of Cinderella for more than its "vocal fireworks and slapstick comedy". "Warmth is the message here. As the subtitle says, it's 'la bontà in trionfo', the triumph of goodnessnot goody-goody bontà, but bontà in the spiritual sense, … the sense that we can be everything to each other. I do feel it as a religious message. My joy is to have the privilege of expressing it. Cenerentola has a certain quality that all the women I play have, a softness. I guess that's what my definition of femininity isthe Cinderella softness." Her Angelina was heard in San Francisco, Paris and Dallas, and also with the company of La Scala when they visited the United States to celebrate the republic's bicentenary. Her interpretation of the role is preserved in a 1981 film of a production by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle which, she thought, achieved the opera's goal of making you "feel like your whole inside is smiling".
Comic operas were not the only bel canto works in which she performed. In 1978, she joined José Carreras to record Rossini's little known Otello under Jesús López Cobos. The vocal historian J. B. Steane regarded her interpretation of Desdemona as the "most lovely and suitable of her Rossini singing". "The character's tenderness and the music's lyricism asked for just what she had to give." She was also Elena in Rossini's La donna del lago in the opera's first 20th century American production in Houston, reprising the role in concert at Carnegie Hall and theatrically at Covent Garden. In Bellini's operas she was heard only rarely, despite her high estimation of them: "If I were a soprano, I would sing nothing but Bellini. I think Bellini comes closest to everything I believe about the greatness of singing." Her Adalgisa in a Met Norma had the misfortune to be paired with an incongruously cast Wagnerian in the opera's title role. Damning the production as "a travesty of Bellini's work both musically and dramatically", Donal Henehan of The New York Times wrote that Rita Hunter's "monumental proportions and virtual immobility as an actress" were not mitigated by her shrill top notes, her effortful coloratura in "Casta diva" and her being apparently often out of breath. Von Stade's hopes of revisiting the opera with Shirley Verrett came to nothing, but she did get to sing Amina in La Sonnambula in San Francisco and Dallas, performing in a partly transposed version of the score based on that tailored for Maria Malibran.

19th century French opera

Von Stade became skilled in French while still at school in Noroton, prescribed fifty or sixty pages of Voltaire or Saint-Exupéry a night by a teacher who banned English speech from her classroom. She finds French music more comfortable to sing than Italian, and she has a high regard for French musical sensibilities: "French music is luscious. … The French have a sense about proportion, and they know what works."
In Berlioz, she was Béatrice in concert performances of Béatrice et Bénédict in Boston and Carnegie Hall and at Tanglewood. In Offenbach, she sang the title role in La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein in Los Angeles. In Thomas, she starred in Mignon in Santa Fe after undertaking the smaller trouser part of Frédéric in the recording of the opera conducted by Antonio de Almeida. But the composer most important in her French operatic repertory was Massenet.
"I didn't like Charlotte in Werther at first", she says. "She seemed cold. I don't think so at all now. … She's seeking freedom of expression. … She's been trained within an inch of her life, trained by the period in which she grew up, by an ill parent. … For Charlotte, responsibility is the message. … Every woman who has a child is never the same, in the most awesome way. It's a privilege, but it's heavy. Since Charlotte has had motherhood passed on to her, she feels it with a certain sense of burden. She's still so young." "It takes courage for her to permit herself to experience the kind of passion she has for Werther." Von Stade sang in her first Werther in Houston, revisiting the opera at Covent Garden, in Vienna and at the Met.
Von Stade describes Cendrillon, Massenet's Cinderella opera, as "the musical embodiment of the fairy tale as I remember it as a child. The characters are nicely defined and have great humanity." "Pretty party dresses and ball gowns and glass slippers and long hairoh, it couldn't be more fun." In playing Lucette, she felt obliged to exercise a degree of restraint: "I find that with Massenet so much is stated musically, so much romanticism is there, that if you echo it too much in the musical line, it's like being tickled to death. It's too much." She was first seen in Cendrillon in a televised production in Ottawa, and then in Washington and, again televised, in Brussels and in Liège. Cendrillon, Mignon and Offenbach's La Périchole were the three panels of a French triptych of semi-staged performances that her manager, Matthew Epstein, organized for her at Carnegie Hall in 1983.

19th century German opera

Von Stade's 19th century repertoire included a single major role in a German opera, Hänsel in Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel. She played him in eleven child-oriented English language performances at the Met between 1972 and 1983; that of Christmas 1982 was televised.

20th century French opera

She starred in Massenet's Chérubin when it received its US premiere in concert in Carnegie Hall and again, theatrically, in Santa Fe.
She performed in Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande in Geneva, in Paris, at La Scala, in Vienna, and at Covent Garden. At the Met, she sang the role in 1988 and again in 1995, when the house celebrated her quarter century of service to it with a new production of the opera by Jonathan Miller.
She was in Ravel's L'Enfant et les sortilèges, in semi-staged presentations: one in London's Barbican Hall, the other in San Francisco, both presided over by her friend Michael Tilson Thomas. She did appear theatrically as Sister Blanche de la Force in Poulenc's Catholic-themed rarity, Dialogues des Carmélites, in a single run of performances at the Met.

20th century German and Austrian opera

One of her German-language roles was Octavian in Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier. She first portrayed him in Houston, revisiting him at the Holland Festival, in Hamburg, in Paris, on a Met spring tour and in San Francisco. Her other Richard Strauss role, the Komponist in Ariadne auf Naxos, she abandoned after concluding from a production in Hamburg that it called for a voice with more thrust than hers.
The tormented lesbian Countess Martha Geschwitz in Alban Berg's Lulu, essayed by her in San Francisco, was another role that was only peripheral to her career, although her interpretation of it was favourably received by critics. But a venture into the world of operetta was more profitable. She had loved Franz Lehár's Die lustige Witwe ever since one winter in a rural phase of her childhood, when "the fire trucks sprayed water on the ponds to make them smoother for ice skaters. Then the waltz from The Merry Widow was played over loudspeakers, and I skated around in pure bliss." She cites the work as supporting her belief that light music can be as great in its own way as Mozart's in his. "It has some of the most genuine, emotionally honest music ever composed, and some of the orchestrations just break your heart. It's sweet, but it's also real, with an adorable story that can be by turns funny, tender and harsh." She was Hanna Glawari in Paris, at the Teatro Colón and in San Francisco. And it was waltzing with the Count Danilo Danilovitsch of Plácido Domingowho had first sung with her in a Tosca on a Met visit to Cleveland, Ohio on April 29, 1970that she thought it fitting to bring her thirty years at the Met to a close.

American opera

The opera of her native land was an important component of von Stade's career almost from its beginning. In Houston in 1974, she was the infatuated ingénue Ninasharing the stage with her maternal grandmother in a bit part in the premiere of Thomas Pasatieri's The Seagull. In Dallas in 1988, she starred as the vulnerable spinster Tina in the televised premiere of Dominick Argento's The Aspern Papers. In San Francisco in 1994, she was the vicious and manipulative Marquise de Merteuil in the televised premiere of Conrad Susa's The Dangerous Liaisons"I thought, who can compete with Glenn Close? So I didn't even try"finally granting the director Frank Corsaro his wish of two decades earlier that she would one day play "a real bitch". In 2014, she starred as the embittered nonagenarian Myrtle Bledsoe in Ricky Ian Gordon's A Coffin in Egypt in its premiere in Houston, reprising the role at Opera Philadelphia and at the Chicago Opera Theater and, in concert, in Wynton Marsalis's Jazz at Lincoln Center. And in 2018, she returned to Philadelphia to create the role of Danny, a woman in the early stages of Alzheimer's dementia, in the premiere of Lembit Beecher's Sky on Swings. The Beecher project was one of her most personal: her aunts Carol and Marjorie had both fallen prey to Alzheimer's, and she hoped that, as well helping its audience to understand the disease better, Beecher's opera would foster empathy for Alzheimer's victims' families. "They're essentially losing someone, only they don't die."
Her work on Dangerous Liaisons in 1994 sparked what turned out to be the most consequential of all her professional relationships. The man whom San Francisco Opera assigned to chauffeur her to promotional interviews was its then head of publicity, Jake Heggie, a 33-year-old aspiring composer. When he introduced her to his settings of three Irish folk-songs"Barb'ry Allen", "He's gone away" and "The leather-winged bat"they struck her as marvellously accomplished, and she immediately set about doing all that she could to advance his career. Eighteen months later, San Francisco Opera commissioned him to work with the writer Terrence McNally on an operatic version of Sister Helen Prejean's then recent Dead Man Walking, a bookalso the basis of a film starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon written in the hope of dissuading its readers from supporting capital punishment.
Heggie wanted von Stade to play his opera's central role, Sister Helen, but she declined it in favour of his second choice, the mezzo-soprano Susan Graham. She was, however, eager to create the role of Mrs Patrick de Rocher, the mother of a man awaiting execution, which Heggie and McNally expanded into "a kind of fulcrum" of the work to take advantage of von Stade's assumption of it. The opera is especially dear to her: she says that there is none that she more enjoys listening to, and she cites McNally as her favourite writer. The piece's implicit condemnation of the United States' retention of the death penalty is a reproof that she wholeheartedly endorses, basing her critique of capital punishment on behaviourism. "If you know nothing but brutality your whole life, it becomes your life. And that is where the mistake is. You can't just remove people, you have to remove what is making them that way, and that's what we're not doing." "Capital punishment is an extreme form of state-sponsored vengeance that only demeans and dehumanizes everyone, and does nothing for the victims' survivors, nothing for society. We're all losers when someone is executed." She was Mrs de Rocher at the world premiere of Dead Man Walking in San Francisco, at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna and in Houston. Heggie wrote roles for her in two more of his operas: she starred as the celebrated actor Madeline Mitchell in Three Decembers in Houston, at the University of California, Berkeley and in Hawaii, and she was the music teacher and philanthropist Winnie Flato in Great Scott in Dallas and San Diego.

Musical theatre

Von Stade does not regret her decision to pursue a career in opera rather than in musicals: she knows that if she had been a Broadway singer, she would have had to perform daily rather than just two or three times a week, and she is thankful that she was spared the injury to family life that such an onerous routine entails. Nevertheless, she has never lost the love of musical theatre that took root in her as a child, when the brassy sound of a Broadway band could excite her almost to the point of making her pass out. "I wanted Broadway more than anything," she says. "My heart is on Broadway." "My idea of dying and going to heaven is walking in a Broadway theatre and hearing the overture." When the commercial success of Bernstein's operatically cast recording of West Side Story proved that there was a market for musicals sung by the likes of José Carreras and Kiri Te Kanawa, she was happy to avail herself of the crossover opportunities that his album opened up for her.
The first came in the summer of 1987, when EMI spent half a million dollars recording John McGlinn's musicologically rigorous version of Jerome Kern's Show Boat. As a little girl, she had dressed up in her mother's clothes and sat on her mother's piano to sing "Bill", but EMI cast her not as Julie LaVerne but in the dual roles of Magnolia Hawkes and the adult Kim Ravenal. A Granada Television documentary, The Show Boat Story, documents the making of the album. In 1990, von Stade returned to Show Boat in Flicka and Friends: From Rossini to Show Boat, a televised concert staged in New York's Alice Tully Hall, in which Jerry Hadley and Samuel Ramey joined her in singing excerpts from the work. In the autumn of 1987, she recorded a collection of show numbers and pop songs in Flicka: Another Side of Frederica von Stade; the difficulty that she experienced in adapting her technique to the requirements of pop left her with an abiding respect for the singers into whose territory she had trespassed. In December, she starred in the most nearly complete version of the The Sound of Music ever recorded, conducted by Erich Kunzel, after two preparatory concert performances of the piece in Cincinnati. In 1988, she was Hope Harcourt in another John McGlinn recording, a historically scrupulous version of Cole Porter's Anything Goes. Her final collaboration with McGlinn was in 1989, when they taped My Funny Valentine: Frederica von Stade Sings Rodgers and Hart.
In 1992, she was Professor Claire de Loone in a semi-staged production of Bernstein's On the Town in London that was recorded for release on CD, VHS video cassette and Laserdisc. In 1994, she was reunited with Jerry Hadley and Erich Kunzel to record an anthology of show tunes, Puttin' on the Ritz. In 1999, she was Desiree Armfeldt in Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music in Houston, performing a specially revised version of the score that reallocated some music from its Greek Chorus to its principals. And in 2014, she was the Old Lady who was easily assimilated in a semi-staged performance of Bernstein's Candide at Tanglewood.

Concert music

Von Stade's concert repertoire included sacred music by J. S. Bach, Handel and Mozart. She sang in Mozart's Requiem under Carlo Maria Giulini, and she took part in the filmed performance of his Great Mass in C minor presided over by Bernstein six months before his death. It was Bernstein who introduced her to a very different Christian work, Mahler's Symphony No. 4, as she sat beside him on his piano stool and was treated to a private lesson on the song in which it culminates. The symphony's child's-eye vision of paradise entrances her: "I love this concept of heaven that Mahler giveshaving asparagus, and Cecilia, and baking the bread. It meant so much to me. being a Catholic." She sang in the symphony under Pierre Boulez, Claudio Abbado, Seiji Ozawa and André Previn. The other work of Mahler's with which she was particularly closely associated was his song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, which she sang under Erich Leinsdorf and Ozawa.
French music was as prominent in her concert career as in her theatrical work. In Berlioz, she was heard in the orchestral version of his song cycle Les nuits d'été under Ozawa and John Nelson, and she was the mezzo-soprano soloist in Roméo et Juliette under James Levine. In La damnation de Faust, she was Marguerite under Georges Prêtre, Ozawa and Georg Solti, as well as starring in a quasi-operatic staging of the piece produced by Luca Ronconi. In Chausson, she sang in Poème de l'amour et de la mer under Riccardo Muti In Debussy, she was La Damoiselle élue under Ozawa. And she sang Ravel's song cycle Shéhérazade under Michael Tilson Thomas, Ozawa, Leonard Slatkin and Hans Graf as well as performing it under Slatkin in her belated, televised debut at the BBC Proms in 2002.
She sang in the first performances of several works by contemporary American composers. Together with Thomas Hampson, she starred in the premiere of the version of Bernstein's Arias and Barcarolles orchestrated by Bruce Coughlin. Many of her other premieres were of music that had been composed with her in mind. From Dominick Argento, there was Casa Guidi ; from Richard Danielpour, Elegies ; from Jake Heggie, "On the road to Christmas", I shall not live in vain, Patterns and Paper Wings ; and from Nathaniel Stookey, Into the Bright Lights, a cycle of three songs setting poems by von Stade herself about singing, aging and her love of her daughters.

Chamber music, song recitals and special events

In 1974, von Stade performed in a programme of songs, arias and duets with Judith Blegen and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in Alice Tully Hall, subsequently becoming the first singer admitted to the Society as a member. She gave her first solo recital in 1976 at Carnegie Hall: forgetting the words of Charles Ives's Tom sails away, she fell across Michael Tilson Thomas's piano in laughter and embarrassment. In 1977, she took part in President James Carter's New Spirit Inauguration Concert, singing Take care of this house from Bernstein's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue under the baton of the composer.
In 1985, she sang for President Ronald Reagan at the gala preceding his second inauguration, and again when he visited the Kennedy Center for a tribute in honour of Irene Dunne and other performers. In 1988, she went to Tanglewood to sing A little bit in love from Wonderful Town in a telecast gala celebrating Leonard Bernstein's seventieth birthday.
In 1990, she was invited to the White House to entertain Presidents George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev. In 2009, she went to Washington to sing with Bill Cosby, James Taylor, and President Barack Obama at the seventy-seventh birthday celebrations of Senator Edward Kennedy. She was accompanied by some young singers from UC Berkeley's Young Musicians Choral Orchestra, a philanthropic foundation instituted to support the education of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. In 2010, she performed with another of her young protégés when she paid a visit to Garrison Keillor's radio show, A Prairie Home Companion.

Semi-retirement

Von Stade stepped back from full-time performing in 2010. She was honoured at the Metropolitan Opera Guild's annual Waldorf-Astoria luncheon, and she gave a farewell recital at Carnegie Hall. In 2011, many of her closest friends in music joined her in San Francisco's Herbst Theater for Celebrating Frederica von Stade, a gala to raise funds for some of her charities. She has remained active in several spheres of music, creating roles in contemporary operas, appearing as a recitalist and in concert, giving masterclasses in conservatories and supporting a number of philanthropic musical enterprises including the YMCO, El Sistema, the Longy School Side by Side Orchestra and the Dallas Street Choir.

Personal life

Marriage and children

At Mannes, von Stade met Peter K. Elkus, bass-baritone, photographer and, later, teacher, a son of Richard J. Elkus, chairman of Ampex. Von Stade and Elkus were married in Paris in the spring of 1973. In 1976, they moved from their 23rd-floor West Side apartment overlooking the Lincoln Center and the Hudson River to a rented Parisian house near the Bois de Boulogne. Their elder daughter was born in 1977; Jenifer Rebecca Elkus was named after a Carol Hall song that von Stade was recording as her baby began to arrive – "She heard her name and figured she'd better come out". Formerly a middle school counselor, Jenny now practises as a clinical psychologist in Virginia, but is also a singer who can be heard duetting with her mother on von Stade's jazz recording Frederica von Stade sings Brubeck - Across your dreams. Anna Lisa Elkus was born in 1980. Von Stade's lyric cycle Paper Wings, sung by her on the CD , presents vignettes of Lisa's infancy. Now a manager at a global technology company in California, Lisa was a devotee of dance and pop music as a child and has performed as a singer in a rock 'n' roll band.

Divorce, remarriage and grandchildren

As Jenny approached school age, Elkus and von Stade relocated to a Colonial mini-estate near Glen Head on Long Island, not far from the sprawling mansion once occupied by von Stade's paternal grandparents in the ultra-exclusive enclave of Old Westbury. Elkus coached his wife until 1985: "It's the same old story," said von Stade. "You can't learn to drive from your husband. A husband-and-wife team is a risky thing,... We thought we were strong enough to defy it, and we weren't." Von Stade filed for divorce in 1990, instigating a courtroom conflict that earned the couple many column inches in newspapers and a place in legal history.
Von Stade and Elkus agreed to share custody of their children, but they were unable to negotiate a mutually satisfactory division of their wealth. In the year of their wedding, von Stade's income net of expenses had been just $2,250; by the time that their marriage was dissolved, it had swollen to $621,878. While her growing success was obviously founded partly on the innate qualities of her voice, it was equally plainly attributable partly to her artistry and fame, and Elkus thought that these latter intangibles were part of the couple's marital property and, moreover, assets that he had had a hand in creating. After marrying von Stade, he had given up his own work as a singer and teacher in order to travel with her, attend her rehearsals and performances, advise and critique her, photograph her for album covers and magazine articles and help her care for their daughters. He believed that his efforts in support of von Stade's career entitled him not just to a share in the couple's current riches but also to a paymentperhaps as high as $1.5 millionanticipating the money that she would make in the coming years from performing and, possibly, from undertaking celebrity endorsements. Arguing that no such endorsements were in prospect, that she had already been successful before her marriage and that Elkus's coaching had sometimes done her voice more harm than good, von Stade's lawyers asked the Supreme Court of New York County to rule that her career and profile belonged to her and her alone. In an order made on September 26, 1990, Walter M. Schackman, J. found in von Stade's favour, noting that Elkus's self sacrifice in supporting her endeavours had been compensated by a "substantial life style" in which he had "reaped the rewards of his association" with her, and that his services to her would be adequately remunerated by his share of the couple's tangible assets. But when Elkus's lawyer appealed to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York, Rosenberger, J. and four of his colleagues took a different view, overturning the trial court's order in a unanimous judgement handed down on July 2, 1991 that effectively made Elkus a shareholder in von Stade's future. In an analysis of the case that questioned whether the Appellate Division's holding was compatible with the Thirteenth Amendment's prohibition of involuntary servitude, Janine R. Menhennet, an attorney practising in California, condemned Rosenberger's decision as an insult to von Stade that had invaded the personal nature of her voice and awarded Elkus a part of her very identity.
On December 30, 1990, von Stade married fellow divorcee Michael G. Gorman, father of three, a San Francisco manufacturer and, later, banker, no musician but rather, in her words, "a normal dude", whom she had met in 1988. Her second marriage earned her another page in the annals of family law when Elkus returned to the courts to try to prevent her from uprooting their daughters from their settled life on Long Island. Once again, Elkus lost the first round of his fight but won the second: despite von Stade's assurances that she would address Elkus's concerns for their children's welfare by hiring a housekeeper, curtailing her travelling and supporting him in visiting them, a New York appellate court reversed the holding of a lower court and found that there was "no compelling reason or exceptional circumstances to justify relocation to California". In the event, Jenny and Lisa did ultimately join their mother, stepfather and step-grandfather in a 1910 Tudor Revival O'Brien & Werner house in the middle of Alameda, a home in which Gorman and von Stade lived for many years before moving to a property on the island's southeast waterfront.
Von Stade became a grandmother in June 2010 when Jenny gave birth to the first of her two daughters, Charlotte Frederica. As of 2014, the Gormans' tally of grandchildren numbered six.

Recordings

Von Stade has sung on more than a hundred recordings, including symphonic works, sacred music, operas, musicals, art songs, pop songs, folk songs, jazz and comedy. Her recordings have garnered eleven Grammy nominations and two Grammy wins, two Grand Prix du Disque awards, the Deutsche Schallplattenpreis, Italy's Premio della Critica Discografica, and "Best of the Year" citations by Stereo Review and Opera News. Her personal favourites are her Arthaus video and Decca audio recordings of Le nozze di Figaro, her EMI Pelléas et Mélisande, her Deutsche Grammophon Mahler Symphony No. 4, her pop album Flicka - Another side of Frederica von Stade and her jazz album Frederica von Stade sings Brubeck - Across your dreams.
All of the von Stade recordings first released on vinyl have now been issued on compact disc as well, but six are only available on CD in boxed collections. Frederica von Stade Live! and Shéhérazade are only available in the 18-CD set Frederica von Stade: The Complete Columbia Recital Albums, and , Frederica von Stade: Song Recital, Frederica von Stade: Italian Opera Arias and the Mahler album Songs of a Wayfarer, Rückert-Lieder and songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn are only available in that same anthology and in the 4-CD set Frederica von Stade: Duets, Arias, Scenes and Songs. The two SACDs in the discography are hybrid discs which are compatible with any CD machine. Recordings highlighted in blue are the subject of ancillary articles which deal with their taping, cover art, track listings and release histories and provide summaries of reviews by notable critics including Denis Arnold, Alan Blyth, Edward Greenfield, Richard Freed, George Jellinek, William Mann, Stanley Sadie and J. B. Steane.

Albums of music by a single composer

Von Stade was honoured with an award in 1983 at the White House by President Reagan in recognition of her significant contribution to the arts, and by France's second highest honour in the Arts as an officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In April, 2012 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Boston and Yale, the Mannes School of Music, the Cleveland Institute of Music, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the Georgetown University School of Medicine.

Trivia

Von Stade was the idol of key character Maggie in the CBS series Northern Exposure.