Steber, Eleanor
Eleanor Steber (July 17, 1914[1] – October 3, 1990) 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.
She was noted for success in the music of Wagner, Alban Berg, Giacomo Puccini and also in French opera. Steber sang the lead in the world premiere of the American opera Vanessa by Samuel Barber. She was also featured in a number of Metropolitan Opera premieres, including Strauss’s Arabella, Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and Berg’s Wozzeck.
Outside the Metropolitan her career included a 1953 engagement at the Bayreuth Wagner Festival, where her performance as Elsa in Lohengrin was highly acclaimed and recorded by Decca Records. She sang with Arturo Toscanini in his 1944 NBC Symphony broadcast of Beethoven‘s Fidelio. In 1954 at the Florence May Festival she sang a celebrated performance of Minnie in Puccini’s La fanciulla del West with conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos. With Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra she sang the world premiere in 1948 of Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, a work which she commissioned.
Beyond the opera, Steber was popular with radio and television audiences in frequent appearances on The Voice of Firestone, The Bell Telephone Hour and other programs. Her extensive recording output included many popular ballads and operetta tunes in addition to arias, art songs and complete operas.
In 1973 she recorded a live album of arias and songs for RCA Red Seal at the Continental Baths in New York City where a young Bette Midler was then a regular performer. At the same time she was still heard in recital at Carnegie Hall and sang a noted late-career performance of Strauss’s Four Last Songs with James Levine and the Cleveland Orchestra.
While she was known as an artist of the highest standards, some critics observed that her reportedly tempestuous personal life eventually took a toll on her voice. In a well-known story, following a brilliant success in 1946 as the Countess in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro at the Edinburgh Festival, HMV Records engaged her to record some Mozart and other popular arias. By the account of Walter Susskind, the conductor of both the Edinburgh performances and the proposed recordings, she arrived at the Abbey Road Studios not feeling well, having been up most of the night. She could not sing her standard arias, saying “I don’t feel like singing that.” Susskind, trying to save the recording session, asked, “What do you feel like singing?”. Steber thought for a moment and said, “Let’s try ‘Depuis le jour‘” (from Louise). Orchestra parts were found and the disc was cut in one take. It became a famous recording of the aria, revealing a superb lyrical vocal line and an eloquent interpretation.
Upon retiring from singing, she taught on the faculty of the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Juilliard School and maintained a private voice studio. She established the Eleanor Steber Vocal Foundation with an annual contest to assist young singers in launching their careers. Her many recordings are still available, as are audio and visual tapes of her radio and television broadcasts for The Voice of Firestone. Her papers are held by Houghton Library at Harvard University.
Steber struggled at times with asthma and alcoholism.[2] She was married twice. Her first husband was pianist Edwin Lee Bilby. Her second husband was Colonel Gordon Andrews, whom she married in 1958, at the time she created the role of Vanessa at the Metropolitan Opera. Andrews managed her career and started the STAND record company, a joint venture that produced numerous recordings of Steber’s performances. They were married for nine years. She had three stepchildren: Marsha Andrews, an opera singer who studied with her at the Cleveland Institute of Music and in New York and who also sang at the Metropolitan Opera for 12 seasons; Gordon Andrews Jr., retiree from GM, now deceased; and Michelle Andrews Oesterle, a choral conductor, singer and founder of the very successful Manhattan Girls Chorus.[citation needed]
She died on October 3, 1990, in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, following heart valve surgery and is interred at Greenwood Cemetery, Wheeling, West Virginia.[2]
