This post is the first in a series on the Eleanor Steber collection to mark the centenary of her birth.
A full century ago, this July, Eleanor Steber burst upon the world stage. She would later say unblushingly that she wasn’t “just born,” and that she had been “making grand entrances ever since.” Steber was this country’s first native-trained operatic soprano, only-begotten among American singers of her time, with musical gifts as outsized as her joie de vivre.
Steber studied at the New England Conservatory before landing a contract with the Metropolitan Opera in 1940. For the next two and a half decades she sang fifty-six roles in nearly that many operas—thirty-three of them across four hundred and five performances at the Metropolitan alone. Her lyrical phrasing and warmth of expression earned her acclaim as an interpreter of Mozart and Strauss; but it was her versatile range, whose middle and lower registers only ripened with age, and her formidable technique that gave her what looked (and sounded) like instinctive sovereignty over the national styles and languages of Europe, and over an expanding American repertory.
She made appearances at Edinburgh, Vienna, Florence, and Bayreuth. Still, her widest audience came from her many recordings, and from radio and television where she was a mainstay on the weekly arts broadcast, Voice of Firestone. Despite these successes, Steber often felt her career eclipsed by foreign artists whom the Met eagerly engaged in the postwar years. Rivals seized on her turbulent private life and rumored carousing, dubbing her “the Primitive Diva.” It’s obvious, though, that she relished the spotlight as much as her craft. She told Opera News on the eve of the 50th anniversary of her Met debut, just months before she died, “Nothing I have ever done has been mediocre. . . . Whatever I did, I did excessively.”
The Eleanor Steber collection was received as a gift from her estate in 1991 through the generosity of William C. Steber and the careful shepherding of her colleague and friend, Richard Conrad, also a longtime supporter of the Harvard Theatre Collection. It includes correspondence, performance photographs, vocal scores (many inscribed or manuscript), financial records, recordings, costumes, and an unexpected find: a collection of first-performance conductors’ batons from Steber’s collaborations with Arturo Toscanini, Bruno Walter, Dimitri Mitropoulos, as well as Serge Koussevitzky’s baton from the premiere of Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” at Symphony Hall in Boston, inscribed to Steber; a work which she commissioned and later recorded.
As we canvass its contents in the coming weeks, no doubt more raw material for scholarship will present itself through which to examine Steber’s singular career and legacy.
Dale Stinchcomb, Curatorial Assistant in the Harvard Theatre Collection, contributed this post.