Page 32 - Classical Singer magazine Spring Issue 2020

Mildred Miller:
The Met’s Unstoppable Mezzo
TONY VILLECCO
Mildred Miller’s boisterous career has truly come full circle. Read about her early work in Europe that led to hundreds of Met performances and how all that experience is now impacting the lives of university students.
She’s outspoken, funny, and sharp as a tack. At 95, she
still teaches voice at Carnegie Mellon University School of Music, and the word “retirement” is foreign to her. “I came in through the back door,” she laughs. “Mimi Lerner became ill and asked me to take over for her students. So I did, but then she became ill again. Now they won’t let me retire!”
The head of the department asked her point blank: “What are you going to do? You got plans?” She chuckles lightly, “I think I’ll probably carry
on until I fall over. I really enjoy teaching.”
But before instructing countless students in operatic roles and German Lieder, Miller was one of the most popular mezzo-sopranos on the Metropolitan Opera roster from her debut in 1951 until her last performance in 1974, turning in 338 performances.
Born Mildred Müller in Ohio to German immigrants from Stuttgart
in 1924, it was the Met’s Rudolf Bing who encouraged her to change her last name to Miller due to anti-German sentiment following World War II.
“I lived through the Depression and the war,” she recalls. She mentions the madness of Hitler that propelled many talented German Jews to America. “As far as my career was concerned, I remember so many outstanding musicians from Germany coming to the United States.
“They helped nurture us. I am
a product of that. When I was at the Met in the 50s, practically all of the coaches were immigrants from Germany, and a lot of them were friends of Rudolf Bing. They were good, outstanding people.”
But before Miller would make her Met debut, she had attended the
Cleveland Institute of Music, and upon her graduation in 1946, she entered
the New England Conservatory. It was while there that she met legendary conductor and opera impresario Boris Goldovsky. “He got me nancial assistance to come to Boston for my graduate studies,” she says. She credits Goldovsky for starting her o so well
32 Classical Singer | Mar/Apr 2020
Mildred Miller as Cherubino in Columbia Symphony Orchestra’s production of Le nozze di Figaro, 1961