O.C. MUSIC / CHRIS PASLES : Peters Finds Merry Life in Coloratura

Roberta Peters was 19 when she stood on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York to audition for the formidably difficult role of Queen of the Night in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflote.”

“I sang the first aria, and I heard a voice say, ‘Miss Peters, would you mind repeating that?’ ” she recalled over lunch recently at a nearby restaurant. “So I did. Then after the second time, from another part of the house, I heard, ‘Miss Peters, Would you please repeat that one more time?’

“I did it four times.

“What I didn’t know was that Mr. Bing (Sir Rudolf Bing, general manager of the Met) was out there asking the different conductors who were in the house to come in and hear it. When I got off, he gave me the contract.”

The contract lasted 35 years.

As it turned out, Peters actually made her professional debut, at the Met, two months earlier than scheduled, in another Mozart opera. On Nov. 17, 1950, she took over Zerlina in “Don Giovanni” as a last-minute replacement.

She brings all that experience to the title role of Lehar’s “The Merry Widow,” which Opera Pacific presents starting Friday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

“My teacher instilled in me such a confidence,” she said, “that when I look back now I’m scared, thinking about how confident I was and how I was able to go out on the stage just like that, within three hours’ notice, never having been on any stage. The Met was my first job.”

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Her teacher was William Herman, and she is still grateful to him.

“He took me as a little girl from the Bronx, who didn’t know a thing--nobody in my family ever sang--and threw me into this completely different world. And, of course, I was ready to accept it.”

She committed herself totally to his teaching. “I stopped school when I was 13 to study singing, and I got the education that I need for this kind of career. I would take the subway into Manhattan, have a singing lesson about 10 o’clock and then I would go from that to a French lesson and then I would go to a ballet lesson and then maybe to an Italian lesson.

“So all day long I was traveling around New York City, as a 13-year-old little girl . . . . I didn’t go to proms. I never was with my contemporaries. But I was so happy, I can’t tell you.”

Herman wouldn’t let her sing anywhere professionally for the next six years, however. Not until he felt she was ready.

“It was very intense, and I knew 20 operas when I got into the Met. I was prepared, absolutely prepared. That’s why I was able to go out and sing Zerlina without one rehearsal.”

During her long and distinguished career at the Met, Peters was noted especially for coloratura roles--those requiring high, light, agile singing in virtuosic arias. But she doesn’t see many young coloraturas coming along now. That kind of voice, too, has become less fashionable as the dramatic revolution wrought by Maria Callas and other singers became dominant.

“I think a lot of voices that may have been high coloraturas started to do the heavier repertoire because Callas’ voice was richer, heavier and much more dramatic,” she said.

“I’m just hoping that it is a cycle, because right now I don’t see many out there--one or two that I know of, but the voices are very small, and I don’t know that they’ll really make a big career. But also I think it’s a question of having the correct schooling.”

Her advice to young singers is to “get with the best teacher you can find. But that’s very difficult--to find the right person, because it has to be a complete rapport. And then another difficult thing, too, is that if the teacher isn’t right for you, the student gets too attached. You say, ‘Oh, gee, what if I leave this teacher? Where am I going to go?’

“I still practice and study. I have a coach in San Diego, George Trovillo, who was my accompanist for about 12 years, before he moved out here and retired. I come out here about three or four times a year. I call it my retreat. I’m out for a week or so, and we work all the time. You see, you have to have somebody who says, ‘Watch this. Be very careful of this.’

“Today, one of the members of the (‘Widow’) cast asked me, ‘What is your secret of staying in so long?’ . . . First and foremost, I stayed with the correct repertoire for me. I didn’t go into too much Puccini. I didn’t do ‘Toscas.’ I stayed with the (lighter) ‘Lucias,’ ‘Rigolettos’ and ‘Barbers’ and didn’t push my voice.

“I would have loved to do a ‘Salome’--I love that kind of (heavy Germanic) music--but not in this lifetime.”

Younger singers also face obstacles she didn’t face.

“They take one lesson a week. They have to work. They come in the evening because they don’t have the money, and the lessons are $125 to a $150 each. So really, where are you going to get that training any more?”

Additionally, “a lot of audiences are accepting mediocrity,” she said. “I think they don’t know any better. They never heard (Jussi) Bjoerling or those other great singers. There were great artists in those days. But we can’t let that stop us. We’ve got to look for good talent in the artists, in the composers. You’ve got to give the young ones a chance. Maybe something will come.”

* Opera Pacific presents Lehar’s “The Merry Widow,” Friday through Jan. 30 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $15 to $75. (714) 979-7000.