Mail Clerk’s Daughter

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31672, 7 May 1968, Page 21

Mail Clerk’s Daughter

Mattiwilda Dobbs has an unusual background for an operatic soprano. She was one of six daughters of a railway mail clerk in Atlanta, all of whom were gifted and obtained university degrees. Mattiwilda did a teachers' college course at Columbia University, and would have

been a schoolteacher had the voice training that she did at the same time as her other studies not indicated that she had a great career ahead as a singer. She studied first with the noted New York teacher, Lotte Leonard, and her first award was the Marian Ander-

son acnoiarsnip. runner awards took her to an opera workshop course in New York, to Tanglewood for a summer, and then to Paris for two years. With this training behind her she entered and won the International Music Competition in Geneva—the competition which had launched Victoria de los Angeles a few seasons earlier. In 1953 she made a historic operatic debut. The opera house was La Scala, in Milan, the performance was as Elvira in Rossini’s “The Italian in Algiers," and the occasion the first in which a Negro singer had performed in that great opera house. Successes at Glyndebourne and Covent Garden were next, and soon she began making annual return concert tours and operatic appearances in America also, in 1958 she made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Gilda in Rigoletto. On one of these return visits to her homeland she appeared in the first integrated public concert in the Municipal Auditorium in her home town. She sings all the Mozart operatic roles beloved of lyric coloratura sopranos and has won particular praise for her interpretation of the role of Constanze in II Seraglio. Lasl year her performance in this Mozart opera at the Bath Festival, with Yehudi Menu hin conducting, led the London “Daily Telegraph” music critic to describe her as “the Constanze of one’s dreams.” Mattiwilda Dobbs now spends her time, between con cert or opera engagements, in Hamburg, Stockholm and Ma jorca. In Hamburg 'she has a home because she is the leading lyric coloratura soprano at the State Opera: she spends her summers at a villa on the island of Majorca; and Stock holbi claims her periodically because her husband, the Swedish writer, Bengt Janzon, has his publishers there.