Rose Bampton
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Rose Bampton (November 28, 1907 – August 21, 2007) was an American opera singer.
Bampton was a mezzo-soprano, later a soprano, who made her debut as Siebel in Gounod's Faust in 1929. She sang primarily at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, but also at major opera houses worldwide.
She made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Laura in La Gioconda in November 1932. She sang the role of the Wood Dove in Arnold Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder in the first American performances by Leopold Stokowski the same year. She frequently performed Schoenberg's Lied der Waldtaube from Gurre-Lieder and his Buch der hängenden Gärten, Op. 15.
At the height of her popularity, Bampton, who was noted for her three-octave range, performed in one week in New York the contralto role of Laura in Ponchielli's La Gioconda at the Met, gave a recital at the Town Hall, and took the mezzo-soprano solo part in Bach's B Minor Mass with the New York Oratorio Society.
In 1944, Ms. Bampton performed the role of Leonore in conductor Arturo Toscanini's radio broadcast of Beethoven's opera Fidelio. Toscanini conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and others in the cast included Jan Peerce and Eleanor Steber. The performance, originally broadcast in two parts, each on a separate week, was released years later on LP and still later on CD. It was Toscanini's first radio broadcast of a virtually complete opera - all of the music was included, but all of the dialogue (except for the spoken melodrama in the prison scene) was omitted.
In 1937, Bampton married the noted Canadian conductor and pianist Wilfrid Pelletier, who died in 1982. They had no children.
