Beverly Sills passes away at 78

I found this wonderful video on You Tube of Beverly at age seven singing “Il Bacio” (‘The Kiss”) by Luigi Arditi.

When I studied opera back in Nebraska, Beverly Sills was among my top ten favorite female artists. Beyond her remarkably light soprano, she possessed an incomparable drive to succeed. She took opera out of its dusty old box and presented it to the Muppet generation.  

Sills never once smoked, so her death from inoperable lung cancer is all the more tragic.

If you’re a fan, then you’ll also enjoy this finale concert from 1980, when ‘Bubbles’ retired from a 25 year performance career at the Met. Be warned, her fittingly poignant ‘finale’ is a Portuguese folk song of ‘farewell’ that left me weeping.