Page 34 - Classical Singer magazine Spring Issue 2020

Mildred Miller
After earning her artist diploma from the New England Conservatory in 1948, she won the prestigious Frank Huntington Beebe Fund for Musicians fellowship, which allowed her to return to Stuttgart and join the roster of the Staatsoper Stuttgart. Many important debuts followed, including the Bavarian State Opera, Vienna State Opera, and the Edinburgh Festival as well as Glyndebourne.
Her initial auditions for Bing were not accomplished without complications, however. “The rst time I sang
for him was in Munich,” she says. “He o ered me some ridiculous roles, and I said I’d be much better use if you let me stay here in Europe and get some experience.”
Bing asked to hear her a week later. “We were in Düsseldorf. I had to turn him down because I was pregnant,” she remembers. “I thought that was the end of the world. So I joined my husband Wesley Posvar for his last year at Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
“Well, I was sure that was the end of me. But in April another telegram came: ‘How soon can you sing for me again?’ How about that! That was just so incredible. So I quickly went over to Germany and brushed up with my teacher.
“It was before the Met went on tour [that] I ew over. Bing paid for my ight and accommodation in New York.
I got onstage at the appointed time and stood on the stage for one hour before he came to hear me sing for a third time! The reason he wanted to hear me on the Met stage, and that was the old opera house, [was that] he had gotten burned a couple times. Voices that he heard in the room that sounded enormous did not project well in the old house.
“It had peculiar acoustics. We who were singing onstage could hardly hear ourselves, [so] you really felt something was wrong and started to push, but the voice did project out. In the new auditorium we think we sound great;
we hear ourselves onstage but we’re not always carrying, projecting as well as we think. So, he never hired anybody again without hearing them on the opera stage. Probably Callas was the exception.”
Consequently, Miller made an auspicious Met debut in November 1951 as Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro. A stellar cast included Cesare Siepi, Victoria de los Ángeles, and a young Roberta Peters. The N ew York T imes was laudatory: “The young newcomer had everything in her favor, including a handsome magnetic stage presence; a ne, fresh voice expertly produced; and pronounced histrionic ability.”
Still, it proved challenging having a family and a career, and when she became pregnant with her third child, Bing
34 Classical Singer | Mar/Apr 2020