Martina Arroyo
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Martina Arroyo is an American soprano, best known for her performances of the Italian spinto repertoire. She possessed a large, rich voice that soared over large orchestras but could also be refined to a lovely pianissimo.
Miss Arroyo was born on February 2, 1937 in New York City. After completing a B.A. in romance languages at Hunter College and while working on her dissertation at New York University on Ignacio Silone's Pane e Vino and Vino e Pane, she was offered a role in Pizzetti's Murder in the Cathedral. This was the beginning of a long career as well as the end of her formal academic training.
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[edit] Musical career
Having performed in the major opera houses and with the greatest symphony orchestras of the world, she has left a legacy of recordings which show the range of her musicianship with baroque to modern music: Handel's Judas Maccabeus (twice) and Samson, Mozart's Don Giovanni (Elvira for Karl Böhm and Anna for Sir Colin Davis), Beethoven's Missa solemnis and Ninth Symphony, Rossini's Stabat mater, Verdi's Messa da requiem and Mahler's massive Eighth Symphony (the Symphony of a Thousand).
Her complete opera recordings similarly testify to the range of her repertoire: Mozart's Don Giovanni, Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots, Halévy's La Juive (highlights only), Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana and three operas by Verdi: Les vêpres siciliennes (in Italian), Un ballo in maschera and La forza del destino (in both the original and revised versions). She has also recorded important 20th century music, including Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder and Carlo Franci's African Oratorio and two works she "created" in their world premieres: Karlheinz Stockhausen's Momente and Samuel Barber's Andromache's Farewell.
Martina Arroyo's discography (which also includes an aria recital), though enviable, does not encompass anything like the full range of roles she essayed onstage. At the Metropolitan Opera alone, these are the operas she performed but never recorded commercially: Verdi's Ernani, Macbeth, Il trovatore, Don Carlos (the Celestial Voice as well as Elizabeth, both in Italian), and Aida; Wagner's Lohengrin and Der Ring des Nibelungen (featured roles in all four operas); Ponchielli's La Gioconda; Giordano's Andrea Chénier; and Puccini's Madama Butterfly and Turandot (as Liù; she played the title role in Toronto). Elsewhere, she played Sélika in Meyerbeer's L'Africaine (Berlin) and Amelia in Verdi's Simon Boccanegra (Lyric Opera of Chicago) and premiered William Bolcom's Simple Stories.
[edit] Teaching career
Since her official retirement from singing in 1989 (the occasional special appearance aside), Miss Arroyo has amassed significant teaching credits, including stints at Louisiana State University(LSU), Baton Rouge, UCLA, University of Delaware, Wilberforce University, the International Sommerakademie-Mozarteum in Salzburg and Indiana University. She has given masterclasses nationally and internationally and judged several competitions including the George London Competition and the Tchaikovsky International Competition.
With Dr. Willard L. Boyd, former President of the University of Iowa, she co-authored the Task Force report of music education in the United States (Published by the NEA, Washington D.C.). She is an active on the Board of Trustees of Hunter College of the City of New York University and the Board of Trustees of Carnegie Hall and is a frequent panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts.
In 1976, she was appointed by President Gerald Ford to the National Council of the Arts in Washington. Miss Arroyo has also founded the Martina Arroyo Foundation, which is dedicated to the development of emerging young opera singers by immersing them in complete role preparation courses. Martina was coached by some great vocal coaches such as Martin Rich. The first "Prelude to Performance" summer program was launched in June 2005 in New York City with students from the United States and Europe.
[edit] Public persona
No account of Martina Arroyo's life would complete without providing some sense of her delightful, charming personality, apparent to anyone who witnessed any of her 20+ appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson or her guest turn on the sitcom The Odd Couple.
She admitted she was perhaps not the most subtle or interesting actress on the operatic stage; then again, she once explained, some of her roles were fairly static ones. "What do they want me to do?" she asked. "Come in on roller skates?" Acknowledging her ample physical proportions (particularly noticeable when she played a certain Puccini heroine), she described herself as "Madam Butterball."
She was equally candid about her perceived status as second-best to her great contemporary, fellow African-American spinto Leontyne Price; once, when a Met doorman greeted her as "Miss Price," she sweetly replied, "No, honey: I'm the other one."
