Eleanor Steber

Eleanor Steber (July 17, 1914 – October 3, 1990) was an American soprano and voice teacher. She was particularly celebrated for her performances in the operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Strauss. A native of West Virginia, she was educated at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston where she began her performance career in the 1930s. She made her opera debut in 1936 at the Boston Opera House as Senta in Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman.

In 1940 Steber won the Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air competition which garnered her a contract with the Metropolitan Opera ("the Met"). She was a leading soprano at the Met for 22 continuous years during which time she gave more than 400 performances in more than 30 roles. Disagreements between Steber and the Met's director Rudolph Bing led up to his decision not to renew Steber's contract after a December 1962 performance as Donna Anna in Don Giovanni. She later returned to the Met in 1966 for a final opera appearance as Minnie in Puccini's La Fanciulla del West.

Steber's career was mainly based in the United States, and she only made a relatively small number of appearances abroad. These included performances at the Bayreuth Festival, the Edinburgh Festival, the Glyndebourne Festival, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, and the Salzburg Festival. She was a charter member of the Lyric Opera of Chicago when it was founded in 1954. She performed the title role in Puccini's Tosca during the company's first season, and performed regularly with the company during the 1950s. She also worked as a guest artist with other American opera companies into the 1970s; including performances with the San Francisco Opera and the Santa Fe Opera. She was a prolific recording artist; performing on more than 100 albums.

Steber was the head of the voice department at the Cleveland Institute of Music from 1963 to 1972, and later taught voice on the faculties of the Juilliard School and Brooklyn College.

Early life The daughter of William Charles Steber, Sr, and Ida Amelia (née Nolte) Steber, Eleanor Steber was born in Wheeling, West Virginia on July 17, 1914. Her paternal grandfather anglicized the family name from Stuber to Steber. Her father was a bank teller. She was the oldest of three children in the Steber family; with her siblings including William Charles Jr. (born 1917) and Lucile (born 1918). For the first three years of her life she lived above the general store owned and operated by her grandparents in Wheeling. When she was four years old the Steber family moved to Warwood, West Virginia.

As a child, Steber studied piano and singing with her mother who was a music teacher and church musician. Her mother performed locally as a soprano, pianist, and church organist. She sang her first church solo at the age of 4, and attended Warwood High School (WHS) where she performed in school plays. She obtained her first paid job as a singer while in high school; working as the resident soprano at Second Presbyterian Church in Wheeling from the age of 16. She graduated from WHS in 1931, and then spent the next two years studying drama at the Idabel Waggoner School of Dramatic Art in Wheeling.

New England Conservatory and first marriage Steber's mother was responsible for pushing Eleanor into a more competitive conservatory outside of West Virginia; an academic pursuit her father opposed. It was her mother who selected the New England Conservatory of Music (NECM) in Boston, and encouraged her daughter to pursue training as a concert pianist at that school. After successfully auditioning for Charles Dennée, Steber was admitted as a piano major at the NECM in 1933. Her parents paid her tuition for her first year of study, and she paid for her remaining education through of a combination of scholarships and money she earned working as an accompanist.

In her first year at the NECM, Steber was a piano student of Dennée and also studied voice with William L. Whitney. With Whitney's support she switched to being a voice major. Whitney was the head of NECM's voice department and had studied singing with Luigi Vannuccini in Florence. Steber credited Whitney with grounding her in a solid bel canto technique. She graduated from the NECM in 1938.

Steber married fellow singer and NECM student Edwin Lee Bilby in September 1938. The marriage ended in divorce in 1954. They did not have children. In January 1936 she was the soprano soloist in Felix Mendelssohn's Lobgesang at Jordan Hall under conductor Ernst Hoffmann in a concert sponsored by the Works Project Administration (WPA). She made her professional opera debut the following September under Hoffmann's baton at the Boston Opera House as Senta in Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman in a production mounted by the WPA.

In her early career Steber worked as a radio singer on a variety of programs out of Boston; one of them being the I. J. Fox Fur Trappers Radio Show. In March 1937 she performed in another WPA concert at Sanders Theatre at Harvard University as the soprano soloist in Felix Mendelssohn's Elijah with conductor A. Buckingham Simson. She returned to that theatre the following December as a soloist in another oratorio by Mendelssohn, St. Paul. That same month she was the soprano soloist in Handel's Messiah at the TT under conductor George Sawyer Dunham. In 1938 she performed with the Boston Pops at Symphony Hall singing the aria "Pace, pace, mio Dio!" from Verdi's La forza del destino.

In May 1939 Steber won second prize in the national music competition given by the National Federation of Music Clubs with first prize going to Martha Lipton. Shortly after this competition win she moved to New York City to pursue further training after being advised to do so by her teacher, William L. Whitney. She studied with tenor Paul Althouse in New York. In November 1939 she won the first round of the Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air (MOAA) contest by which time she was working as a resident soprano at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew (CSPSA). She worked as a singer at CSPSA on an intermittent basis for the remainder of her career. In March 1940 she won the finals of the MOAA competition which earned her a contract with the Metropolitan Opera ("the Met"). The press from this win led to her giving a 1940 concert tour of the United States; the first of many such tours she gave during her career. She reportedly had conflicts with conductor Lorin Maazel during this last production. Elizabeth in Don Carlo, Elsa in Lohengrin, Rosalinde in Die Fledermaus, Violetta in La traviata, and the title roles in Manon, Manon Lescaut, and Tosca. She subsequently appeared with SFO that same year as Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier and Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni.

In 1947 Steber portrayed Countess Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro at the Glyndebourne Festival; and that same year toured with the Glyndebourne company for further performances in that opera at the very first Edinburgh Festival (EF). portraying the title role in Puccini's Tosca in the LOC's first season in November 1954. Other roles she performed with LOC included Maddalena di Coigny in Andrea Chénier (1956, with Mario Del Monaco in the title role), Donna Anna (1956), Minnie (1956), Countess Almaviva (1957), and Violetta in La traviata (1958, with Léopold Simoneau as Alfredo).

In 1956 Steber gave a concert tour of the Middle East and Asia sponsored by the United States Department of State that included performances in 33 cities across more than 50,000 miles of travel. While performing in Saigon, Vietnam on this tour she met American military officer Gordon Andrews; a man she later married in 1957. Together Steber and Andrews co-founded the ST/AND Records in 1959; a record label which released recordings by Steber as well as recordings by other singers and instrumentalist. The label was dissolved after declaring bankruptcy in 1962. Steber and Andrews divorced in 1966.

Teaching career and later life Steber was the head of the voice department at the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM) from 1963 to 1972. In 1971 she joined the faculty of the Juilliard School. and Geraldine McMillian. She also gave masterclasses at her alma mater, the New England Conservatory of Music, in the 1970s. In 1973 she founded the Eleanor Steber Music Foundation; Shortly before her death she wrote an autobiography with Marcia Sloat, Eleanor Steber: An Autobiography, which was posthumously published in 1992. Her death occurred shortly after having heart valve surgery following a health emergency while visiting her sister in Pennsylvania. She is interred at Greenwood Cemetery, Wheeling, West Virginia.

Recordings and media appearances Steber began her recording career anonymously; performing uncredited as the leading soprano in a series of LP records of "opera highlights" made in the early 1940s. Some of her other complete opera recordings include Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro (1943, Metropolitan Opera), until as late as 1956. In April 1957 she was a guest alongside Mickey Rooney on The Steve Allen Show. Other programs she was a guest performer on included The Bell Telephone Hour and The Railroad Hour among others.

Her extensive recording output of more than 100 albums includes many popular ballads and operetta tunes in addition to arias, art songs and complete operas.

Selected discography Eleanor Steber sings Richard Strauss; VAI Audio; Karl Böhm (1st work), James Levine (2nd work, encore), conductors. Recorded: Munich, June 4, 1953, (1st work); Cleveland, May 5, 1970 (2nd work, encore) Eleanor Steber sings Mozart – Selections Voice of Firestone; VAI Audio; Robert Lawrence (1st–6th works), Wilfred Pelletier (7th) or Howard Barlow (8th–10th), conductor. Recorded Apr., 1960 (1st–6th works); from Voice of Firestone radio broadcasts, 1946–1952 (remainder). Eleanor Steber, her first recordings (1940); VAI Audio; Wilfrid Pelletier, conductor; Recorded May 30–31, 1940 and June 25–26, 1940, Town Hall, New York City; and June 17, 1940, Academy of Music, Philadelphia. The Eleanor Steber Collection. Vol. 1, The Early Career, 1938–1951; Armand Tokatyan (3rd and 5th works); George Cehanovsky (6th work); Leonard Warren (6th work); Recorded 1938–1951. Puccini – Madama Butterfly; Sony Classical/ Columbia; Jean Madeira, Suzuki; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus; "1949 Metropolitan Opera Association Production". Samuel Barber – Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (Columbia Masterworks). Dumbarton Oaks Chamber Orchestra, William Strickland, conductor. Recorded November 7, 1950. Wagner – Lohengrin; Teldec; Bayreuth Festival; Josef Keilberth, conductor. Live 1953. Hector Berlioz: Les Troyens (Chester Watson (bass), Regina Resnik (soprano), Martial Singher (baritone), Frances Wyatt (mezzo-soprano), William Lewis (tenor), John Dennison (baritone), Kenneth Smith (bass), Regina Sarfaty (mezzo-soprano), Glade Peterson (tenor), Eleanor Steber (soprano), Richard Cassilly (tenor); conductor: Robert Lawrence.) Recorded at Carnegie Hall, New York City, December 29, 1959 and January 12, 1960. Label: Vai Audio Puccini – La Fanciulla del West 1954 June 15 live performance at the Florence Maggio Musicale, Dimitri Mitropoulos conductor, with Mario Del Monaco and Gian Giacomo Guelfi (2008 CD release on Regis Records RRC2080) Samuel Barber – Vanessa; RCA Victor; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus; Dmitri Mitropoulos, conductor; Recorded February and April 1958 in Manhattan Center. Eleanor Steber Live at the Continental Baths; RCA Victor; Recorded October 4, 1973.