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Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Beverly Sills
BEVERLY SILLS GREENOUGH
Awarded by
President Jimmy Carter
June 9, 1980
Beverly Sills has captured with her voice every note of human feeling, and with her superb dramatic talent projected them out to us with ringing clarity. Through her many and diverse roles, she tells and retells opera's intensely heightened stories of human folly, goodness, pain and triumph. She has touched and delighted audiences throughout the world as a performer, as a recording artist, and now as a producer--and of all her arts she is a master.
Sills, Beverly (1929- ), American soprano, who combined critical success with international popularity as a result of her clear, supple coloratura voice and sparkling personality. Her ability to give dramatic substance and vitality to her roles further advanced her success. Her autobiography, Bubbles (1976), received its title from her childhood nickname.
Born Belle Miriam Silverman in Brooklyn, New York, she sang on radio as a child and at the age of 12 began serious study with American voice teacher Estelle Liebling. She made her debut with the New York City Opera in 1955, where, for a decade, she formed an important but unacclaimed part of its roster. With the 1966 production of Giulio Cesare , an opera by George Frideric Handel, she became the star of the company. Over the next 10 years everything she sang was greeted enthusiastically--Manon, by French composer Jules Massenet; the queen of Shemakhan in Le Coq d’Or, by Russian composer Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov; the queens in three operas by Gaetano Donizetti, based on events in English history. After success in London, England, and Milan, Italy, her belated and highly publicized debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City occurred in 1975 as Pamira in the Siege of Corinth , by Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini. Sills made her final appearance on the operatic stage in 1980, appearing in the opera La Loca, especially written for her by Italian composer Gian-Carlo Menotti.
Sills served as general director of the New York City Opera from 1979 to 1989. To bring opera to wider audiences, she promoted live television broadcasts and the use of supertitles (English-language translations of opera texts that appear above the stage). In 1980 Sills was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States, in recognition of her service to the arts. From 1994 to 2002 she was chair of the board of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. Six months after retiring from that position, she accepted the chair of the board of the Metropolitan Opera. Among Sills’s most significant achievements have been her successful negotiations for increased federal money for the arts in many appearances before Congress and her equal successes in wooing philanthropic donations from wealthy patrons. She also has worked tirelessly to raise money for the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation and has served as its national chair. Her commitment to this organization stems from having a daughter who was born deaf and a son who is mentally retarded and autistic.
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Medal History
