Eleanor Steber (1914-1990) was a leading soprano at the Metropolitan Opera for over two decades. Today is her 100th birthday. Over the past weeks this blog has featured items drawn from Steber’s papers in the Harvard Theatre Collection that document two significant collaborations with American composer Samuel Barber: Vanessa (1958) and Knoxville: Summer of 1915…
Steber and Knoxville: Summer of 1915
In April 1948 concertgoers at Symphony Hall in Boston listened as Eleanor Steber sang for them of summer evenings: It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street… The words are James Agee’s, excerpted from a portrait of his boyhood in Knoxville…
Eleanor Steber at 100
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…