Cyrena van Gordon

Cyrena van Gordon was the stage name of an American operatic contralto born Cyrena Sue Pocock. Sources variously list her birth date as September 4, 1893, 1896, or 1897 (one citing 1866 is implausible) in Camden, Ohio; she died on April 4, 1964 in New York City. In approximately 1918 she married Dr. Shirley Munn, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist in Chicago.

After studies with Louise Dotti, van Gordon made her operatic debut as Amneris in Verdi's Aida in 1913. A principal member of the opera companies active in Chicago during her career, she also performed in New York City, Philadelphia, and as far afield as San Francisco. She left recordings for the Edison and Columbia companies.

Notable events in her career would include the following:

• December 26, 1917, created the role of Papantzin in Henry Kimball Hadley's short-lived opera Azora, the Daughter of Montezuma.

• October 5, 1919, first New York recital, Aeolian Hall. Her program included Handel's Come, Beloved; Carey's Pastoral; songs in English by Salter, Gretchaninov, Sturani, Kramer, Hadley, and Spross; an air by Henry Bishop; and a French air by Lenormand.

• February 8, 1922, appeared as Venus, opposite the Elisabeth of Rosa Raisa, in the first production in German of Wagner's Tannhäuser at New York's Manhattan Opera House; the work had been heard there in French a dozen years before. The New York Times praised her voice as being "of genuine beauty, just as in stature she looked the goddess queen."

• July 12, 1922, performed the first in a series of six operatic concerts sponsored by Wrigley Field in Chicago. She sang on a platform built over the baseball diamond illuminated by electric lighting; the conductor stood over the pitcher's mound.

• May 27, 1933, sang The Star-Spangled Banner at the opening ceremonies of the Century of Progress 1933 World's Fair in Chicago.

• November, 1933, appeared as Delilah in Saint-Saëns's Samson and Delilah in San Francisco. TIME magazine reported that she received ten curtain calls after singing "Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix"; it also remarked that she "was bigger than Samson (Tenor Giovanni Martinelli)...."

• March, 1935, appeared as Clytemnestra in the United States premiere of Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide, Philadelphia.

References

• ClassicAlmanac
• "A Pageant of Color", Chicago Daily News, May 27, 1933
• "Gives First Song Recital", The New York Times, October 6, 1919
• "Gluck in Philadelphia", TIME, March 4, 1935
• "Hadley's 'Azora' Given", The New York Times, January 28, 1918
• Hover, John C. et al., eds., Memoirs of the Miami Valley (Chicago, Robert O. Law Company, 1919)
• The Official Site of the Chicago Cubs: Chicago Cubs News, September 3, 2005
• "Opera in San Francisco", TIME, November 13, 1933
• "Tannhäuser Sung", The New York Times, February 9, 1922