Thelma Votipka
Encyclopedia
Thelma Votipka was an American mezzo-soprano
who sang 1,422 performances with the Metropolitan Opera
, more than any other woman in the company's history (her nearest rival, Mathilde Bauermeister
, sang 1,062).
Votipka was born in Cleveland, Ohio
, and educated at Oberlin College
. She specialized in comprimario
roles. She also studied in New York City with Anna E. Schoen-Rene, a student of Pauline Viardot-Garcia and Manuel Garcia.
She was a member of Vladimir Rosing
's American Opera Company
in the late 1920s and made her debut as the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro
on December 14, 1927 in Washington D.C.
She made her Metropolitan debut on December 16, 1935, as Flora in Verdi's
La traviata
, a role she sang 101 times with the company.
Other frequent roles with the Met included Giovanna in Verdi's Rigoletto
(139 performances), Marthe in Gounod's
Faust
(128), Alisa in Donizetti's
Lucia di Lammermoor
(116), Frasquita in Bizet's
Carmen
(112), Marianne in Strauss's
Der Rosenkavalier
(109), the Priestess in Verdi's Aida
(101), Gerhilde in Wagner's
Die Walküre
(93), and Mamma Lucia in Mascagni's
Cavalleria rusticana
(72). Mamma Lucia was the role of her final performance, in Dallas
, on May 11, 1963.
Votipka shared the stage with many artists on the occasions of their Metropolitan debuts: Marjorie Lawrence
, Zinka Milanov
, Rose Pauly, Eleanor Steber
, Astrid Varnay
, Robert Merrill
, Victoria de los Ángeles
, Hilde Gueden
, Charles Anthony, Mattiwilda Dobbs
, Nicolai Gedda
, and Joan Sutherland
.
She returned to the Met on April 16, 1966, to sing in the quintet from Carmen as part of the gala farewell performance at the opera house at Broadway
and 39th Street.
She died in New York in 1972.
Mezzo-soprano
A mezzo-soprano is a type of classical female singing voice whose range lies between the soprano and the contralto singing voices, usually extending from the A below middle C to the A two octaves above...
who sang 1,422 performances with the Metropolitan Opera
Metropolitan Opera
The Metropolitan Opera is an opera company, located in New York City. Originally founded in 1880, the company gave its first performance on October 22, 1883. The company is operated by the non-profit Metropolitan Opera Association, with Peter Gelb as general manager...
, more than any other woman in the company's history (her nearest rival, Mathilde Bauermeister
Mathilde Bauermeister
Mathilde Bauermeister was an opera singer who for decades held the record for most performances by a female artist at the Metropolitan Opera, a record now held by Thelma Votipka....
, sang 1,062).
Votipka was born in Cleveland, Ohio
Cleveland, Ohio
Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and is the county seat of Cuyahoga County, the most populous county in the state. The city is located in northeastern Ohio on the southern shore of Lake Erie, approximately west of the Pennsylvania border...
, and educated at Oberlin College
Oberlin College
Oberlin College is a private liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio, noteworthy for having been the first American institution of higher learning to regularly admit female and black students. Connected to the college is the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the oldest continuously operating...
. She specialized in comprimario
Comprimario
A Comprimario is a supporting role in an opera. Derived from the Italian "con primario", or "with the primary", the term refers to a performer who sings small role pieces....
roles. She also studied in New York City with Anna E. Schoen-Rene, a student of Pauline Viardot-Garcia and Manuel Garcia.
She was a member of Vladimir Rosing
Vladimir Rosing
Vladimir Sergeyevich Rosing , aka Val Rosing, was a Russian-born operatic tenor and stage director who spent most of his professional career in England and the United States...
's American Opera Company
American Opera Company
The American Opera Company was the name of four different opera companies active in the United States. The first company was a short-lived opera company founded in New York City in February, 1886 that lasted only one season...
in the late 1920s and made her debut as the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro
The Marriage of Figaro
Le nozze di Figaro, ossia la folle giornata , K. 492, is an opera buffa composed in 1786 in four acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, based on a stage comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais, La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro .Although the play by...
on December 14, 1927 in Washington D.C.
She made her Metropolitan debut on December 16, 1935, as Flora in Verdi's
Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian Romantic composer, mainly of opera. He was one of the most influential composers of the 19th century...
La traviata
La traviata
La traviata is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi set to an Italian libretto by Francesco Maria Piave. It is based on La dame aux Camélias , a play adapted from the novel by Alexandre Dumas, fils. The title La traviata means literally The Fallen Woman, or perhaps more figuratively, The Woman...
, a role she sang 101 times with the company.
Other frequent roles with the Met included Giovanna in Verdi's Rigoletto
Rigoletto
Rigoletto is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi. The Italian libretto was written by Francesco Maria Piave based on the play Le roi s'amuse by Victor Hugo. It was first performed at La Fenice in Venice on March 11, 1851...
(139 performances), Marthe in Gounod's
Charles Gounod
Charles-François Gounod was a French composer, known for his Ave Maria as well as his operas Faust and Roméo et Juliette.-Biography:...
Faust
Faust (opera)
Faust is a drame lyrique in five acts by Charles Gounod to a French libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré from Carré's play Faust et Marguerite, in turn loosely based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, Part 1...
(128), Alisa in Donizetti's
Gaetano Donizetti
Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti was an Italian composer from Bergamo, Lombardy. His best-known works are the operas L'elisir d'amore , Lucia di Lammermoor , and Don Pasquale , all in Italian, and the French operas La favorite and La fille du régiment...
Lucia di Lammermoor
Lucia di Lammermoor
Lucia di Lammermoor is a dramma tragico in three acts by Gaetano Donizetti. Salvadore Cammarano wrote the Italian language libretto loosely based upon Sir Walter Scott's historical novel The Bride of Lammermoor....
(116), Frasquita in Bizet's
Georges Bizet
Georges Bizet formally Alexandre César Léopold Bizet, was a French composer, mainly of operas. In a career cut short by his early death, he achieved few successes before his final work, Carmen, became one of the most popular and frequently performed works in the entire opera repertory.During a...
Carmen
Carmen
Carmen is a French opéra comique by Georges Bizet. The libretto is by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, based on the novella of the same title by Prosper Mérimée, first published in 1845, itself possibly influenced by the narrative poem The Gypsies by Alexander Pushkin...
(112), Marianne in Strauss's
Richard Strauss
Richard Georg Strauss was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; and his tone poems and orchestral works, such as Death and Transfiguration, Till...
Der Rosenkavalier
Der Rosenkavalier
Der Rosenkavalier is a comic opera in three acts by Richard Strauss to an original German libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. It is loosely adapted from the novel Les amours du chevalier de Faublas by Louvet de Couvrai and Molière’s comedy Monsieur de Pourceaugnac...
(109), the Priestess in Verdi's Aida
Aida
Aida sometimes spelled Aïda, is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni, based on a scenario written by French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette...
(101), Gerhilde in Wagner's
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
Die Walküre
Die Walküre
Die Walküre , WWV 86B, is the second of the four operas that form the cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen , by Richard Wagner...
(93), and Mamma Lucia in Mascagni's
Pietro Mascagni
Pietro Antonio Stefano Mascagni was an Italian composer most noted for his operas. His 1890 masterpiece Cavalleria rusticana caused one of the greatest sensations in opera history and single-handedly ushered in the Verismo movement in Italian dramatic music...
Cavalleria rusticana
Cavalleria rusticana
Cavalleria rusticana is an opera in one act by Pietro Mascagni to an Italian libretto by Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci, adapted from a play written by Giovanni Verga based on his short story. Considered one of the classic verismo operas, it premiered on May 17, 1890 at the Teatro...
(72). Mamma Lucia was the role of her final performance, in Dallas
Dallas, Texas
Dallas is the third-largest city in Texas and the ninth-largest in the United States. The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is the largest metropolitan area in the South and fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States...
, on May 11, 1963.
Votipka shared the stage with many artists on the occasions of their Metropolitan debuts: Marjorie Lawrence
Marjorie Lawrence
Marjorie Florence Lawrence CBE was an Australian soprano, particularly noted as an interpreter of Richard Wagner's operas. She was the first soprano to perform the immolation scene in Götterdämmerung by riding her horse into the flames as Wagner had intended. She was afflicted by polio from 1941...
, Zinka Milanov
Zinka Milanov
Zinka Milanov was a Croatian-born operatic spinto soprano who had a major career centred on the New York Metropolitan Opera.-Biography:...
, Rose Pauly, Eleanor Steber
Eleanor Steber
Eleanor Steber was an American operatic soprano. Steber is noted as one of the first major opera stars to have achieved the highest success with training and a career based in the United States.-Biography:...
, Astrid Varnay
Astrid Varnay
Ibolyka Astrid Maria Varnay was an American dramatic soprano of Hungarian heritage and Swedish birth, who did most of her work in the United States and Germany. She was one of the best-known Wagnerian heroic sopranos of her generation...
, Robert Merrill
Robert Merrill
Robert Merrill was an American operatic baritone.-Early life:Merrill was born Moishe Miller, later known as Morris Miller, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, to tailor Abraham Miller, originally Milstein, and his wife Lillian, née Balaban, immigrants from Warsaw, Poland.His mother...
, Victoria de los Ángeles
Victoria de los Ángeles
Victoria de los Ángeles was a Spanish Catalan operatic soprano and recitalist whose career began in the early 1940s and reached its height in the years from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. Her obituary in The Times noted that she must be counted “among the finest singers of the second half...
, Hilde Gueden
Hilde Gueden
The Austrian soprano Hilde Gueden, or Güden was one of the most appreciated Straussian and Mozartian sopranos of her days...
, Charles Anthony, Mattiwilda Dobbs
Mattiwilda Dobbs
Mattiwilda Dobbs is an African-American coloratura soprano and one of the first black singers to enjoy a major international career in opera...
, Nicolai Gedda
Nicolai Gedda
Nicolai Gedda is a Swedish operatic tenor. Having made some two hundred recordings, Gedda is said to be the most widely recorded tenor in history...
, and Joan Sutherland
Joan Sutherland
Dame Joan Alston Sutherland, OM, AC, DBE was an Australian dramatic coloratura soprano noted for her contribution to the renaissance of the bel canto repertoire from the late 1950s through to the 1980s....
.
She returned to the Met on April 16, 1966, to sing in the quintet from Carmen as part of the gala farewell performance at the opera house at Broadway
Broadway (New York City)
Broadway is a prominent avenue in New York City, United States, which runs through the full length of the borough of Manhattan and continues northward through the Bronx borough before terminating in Westchester County, New York. It is the oldest north–south main thoroughfare in the city, dating to...
and 39th Street.
She died in New York in 1972.