Martha Lipton

Martha Lipton (April 6, 1913 – November 28, 2006) was an American operatic mezzo-soprano and voice educator whose career centered on the Metropolitan Opera, where she performed for seventeen seasons between 1944 and 1961. Born in New York City, she was the daughter of Leon Lipton and Estelle Lipton, née Laiken, whose brief career as a concert soprano under the name Estelle Laiken provided Lipton with her earliest vocal instruction. She subsequently trained at the School of Musicianship for Singers, Inc. under Anna E. Ziegler, studied privately with Melanie Guttman-Rice, and attended the graduate program at the Juilliard School from 1937 to 1939, where she worked with tenor Paul Reimers. After completing Juilliard, she continued her studies with Ettore Verna. In 1936 she joined the rosters of Riverside Church and Temple Emanu-El of New York as a resident soloist, and the following year made her radio debut on NBC Radio's "Magic Keys" program, having been selected by Walter Damrosch.

Lipton's public debut came on December 15, 1933, at Carnegie Hall, where she performed as a soloist in a concert of operetta music by Reginald De Koven with the New York Light Opera Guild. In January 1939 she won the singing competition of the MacDowell Club of New York, which led directly to her New York City recital debut at the club's concert hall on January 26, 1939. That May she took first prize at the national level of the National Federation of Music Clubs singing competition, earning a cash prize and a nationally broadcast concert appearance as soloist with a seventy-piece orchestra conducted by Alfred Wallenstein. Both competition victories expanded her professional profile and generated engagements with symphony orchestras across the country, among them the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Portland Symphony Orchestra, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, and Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.

While still enrolled at Juilliard, Lipton joined the resident opera company at Radio City Music Hall as a contract member, making her professional opera debut on November 6, 1938, as Alisa in Lucia di Lammermoor, conducted by Ernö Rapée. Additional roles with the company that season included Lucia in Cavalleria rusticana and Maddalena in Rigoletto, all performed before live audiences and broadcast on the NBC Blue Network program "Radio City Music Hall of the Air." On October 8, 1939, she created the role of Queen Isabella in the world premiere of Eugene Zador's opera Christopher Columbus, presented in concert form by the Radio City Music Hall Opera Company at the Center Theatre and also broadcast on that same radio program.

Lipton's Broadway career began in 1941, when she performed the role of the Lady-in-Waiting in the United States premiere of Giuseppe Verdi's 1865 version of Macbeth at the 44th Street Theatre. In 1944 she appeared as Nancy in Friedrich von Flotow's Martha during the New York City Opera's inaugural season, a credit that appears in her verified Broadway record under the title Martha. That same year she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera as Siebel in Charles Gounod's Faust, launching an association with the company that would span more than 400 performances and encompass 36 distinct roles across seventeen seasons. Among her most frequently performed parts at the Met were Annina in Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier and Emilia in Verdi's Otello. She appeared as Mrs. Sedley in the Met's first staging of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes in 1948, and in 1953 she performed the role of Mother Goose in the United States premiere of Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress.

Beyond the Met, Lipton created roles in the world premieres of two operas by Douglas Moore: Augusta Tabor in The Ballad of Baby Doe in 1956 and Aunt Maud in The Wings of the Dove in 1961. She appeared as a guest artist at opera houses in Mexico, Brazil, Holland, and the United Kingdom, and undertook a concert tour of South America in 1946. During the 1950s and into the 1960s she made multiple recordings for Columbia Records, including sessions with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and with the New York Philharmonic under Leopold Stokowski, Bruno Walter, and Leonard Bernstein, as well as complete opera recordings with the Metropolitan Opera.

Following the conclusion of the 1960–1961 Met season, Lipton largely withdrew from performance and joined the faculty of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where she taught voice until her retirement in 1983. She never married. Lipton died in Bloomington on November 28, 2006, at the age of 93.