The aura of eternal youth floated around soprano Roberta Alexander. Existence had left its marks on her face, but when you met her, her zest for life always struck you again. Singing kept her young. The big roles were out of sight now that she was in her seventies, but she was still on stage in small character roles, because in addition to being a great soprano, she was a gifted actress.
In recent years she has sung in a praised performance of Richard Strauss’ Electricity and was due to perform in Charpentiers Louise at the prestigious opera festival in Aix-en-Provence, France last summer. But probably due to the differences between the heat outside and the air-conditioned coolness inside, she had to cancel due to pneumonia.
Alexander – with her characteristic wide grin – divided an opera career into four stages. “One: Who the hell is Roberta Alexander! Two: Get me Roberta Alexander! Three: Get me someone like Roberta Alexander! And four: Who the hell was Roberta Alexander!”
On Wednesday it was announced that she died suddenly the night before, at the age of 76.
Opera dream
Roberta Alexander was a child of the black civil rights movement. She was born in the American state of Virginia in the late 1940s, in the heart of the racist south, in a city with the ominous name Lynchburg for blacks. Her mother had to be rushed to the hospital for the birth. And since the ambulances were for white people, she was picked up by a hearse. No one around noticed that.
She was six years old when a small black woman, Rosa Parks, sparked the emancipation of African Americans by refusing to stand up for a white person on a bus. That same year, television station NBC rocked America with a coast-to-coast live broadcast of Puccini’s opera Tosca to award the leading role to the black soprano Leontyne Price, who would later become a shining example for Alexander.
At the time, the family was living in Wilberforce in northern Ohio, a village with one of the first black universities, where her father was a choir conductor and her mother a singing teacher and where she would later study herself. Music ruled in the Alexander family. Her mother’s voice was among her earliest and fondest memories, especially the Puccini aria ‘Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore’ – I lived only for art, only for love – from Tosca.
“For me, this aria is about the love I feel for the music,” she said. “If I remember that sentence Tosca should mutter from the bottom of my heart on my deathbed, I will die a happy person. Then I did what I dreamed of. Although I must admit that this life turned out to be harder and less glamorous than I thought in my youth, but fortunately I did not know that in advance.”
Natural talent
The dream came true, but the road was long. In primary school she skipped two grades, making her an easy target for bullying as the youngest. Some years later, her high school career counselor told her she didn’t have the intelligence to become anything more than a store clerk or factory worker. She also had to deal with racism in the opera. “I often ignored it because I didn’t want to become bitter and paranoid. There was enough desperation like that among blacks.”
About fifty years ago she came to the Netherlands in the wake of conductor Edo de Waart, her then husband. There was nothing to indicate that the young man in his twenties still had ambitions in the opera, also because De Waart told his wife that he saw no future for her there. Nevertheless, Alexander persevered, auditioned with the Dutch Opera Studio and took private lessons with pedagogue Herman Woltman.
“He only gave me my real voice lessons ten years after my first singing lesson. Until then I lived on natural talent. Everything went by itself. Woltman sobered me up. ‘You have a beautiful sound,’ he stated, ‘but you don’t know what you are doing.’ He laid the foundation for my voice.”
That voice would go on to shine in leading roles on major stages, such as the New York Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall in her native country. An American reviewer called her voice “luminous and elegant” and her singing “soft and rich as velvet, lustrous as satin, and airy as organza.” Just to be sure, her parents took a picture of her in front of the billboard with her name so that people in Ohio would believe it too.
Alexander was able to talk about her career in a tasty and humorous way. “It was inevitable,” she said, “but that I should become a musician, for music was the language I was brought up with; it was there from my first breath, never to leave me.”
Also read
An interview with Roberta Alexander: ‘To say that I have suffered from racism as an artist would be a big lie’
Video: Roberta Alexander gives a masterclass. (2020)
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