Regina Resnik

Regina Resnik, born Regina Resnick on August 30, 1922, in the Bronx, New York City, was an American opera singer and stage performer whose career extended across five decades. The daughter of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, she dropped the "c" from her surname early in life. Academically accelerated, she skipped multiple school grades and attended Herman Ridder Junior High School and James Monroe High School in the Bronx, where she sang leading roles in school operetta productions and participated in the glee club. She credited the New York school system with developing her awareness of her voice. After graduating high school in 1938, she studied with Giuseppe Danise at Hunter College, earning a Bachelor of Arts in music in 1942.

Resnik gave her professional debut as a recitalist on October 27, 1942, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Her first formal voice lessons had begun at age thirteen with Rosalie Miller, a teacher she would return to throughout her career. Her operatic stage debut followed just two months after the recital, when she sang Lady Macbeth in Verdi's Macbeth with Fritz Busch's New Opera Company at the Broadway Theatre in Manhattan. Early engagements also took her to Mexico City, where she sang Leonore in Fidelio and Micaela in Carmen under Erich Kleiber at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in early 1943. In the spring of 1944 she appeared with the New York City Opera in its inaugural season, singing both Frasquita and Micaela in Carmen and Santuzza in Cavalleria rusticana.

Her relationship with the Metropolitan Opera began in April 1944, when she won the Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air. Her Met debut came on December 6, 1944, when she substituted on one day's notice for Zinka Milanov as Leonora in Il trovatore. Over the following decade she sang twenty soprano roles at the Met, including Donna Elvira and Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, Sieglinde in Die Walküre, Gutrune in Götterdämmerung, Chrysothemis in Elektra, Aida, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and Musetta in La bohème, among others. She was the Met's first Ellen Orford in Peter Grimes and created the role of Delilah in the world premiere of Bernard Rogers' The Warrior. Her soprano voice drew comparisons to Rosa Ponselle, and she worked during these years with conductors including Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, George Szell, Fritz Reiner, William Steinberg, and Erich Leinsdorf.

In 1953, while singing Sieglinde at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, conductor Clemens Krauss suggested that her voice was in fact a mezzo-soprano. Observing that her voice had been steadily darkening, Resnik undertook a year of restudy with Danise beginning in 1955. Her mezzo-soprano debut at the Metropolitan took place on February 15, 1956, when she sang Marina in Boris Godunov under Dimitri Mitropoulos. She subsequently removed soprano repertoire entirely from her performances. Her first mezzo roles included Amneris in Aida and Laura in La Gioconda, and she went on to make Carmen, Klytemnestra in Elektra, Mistress Quickly in Falstaff, and the Countess in The Queen of Spades her signature parts. She became the only singer in operatic history to have performed both the soprano and mezzo leads across a substantial portion of her repertoire.

Her debut at the Royal Opera House in London came in October 1957 with Carmen, launching a long association with that company during which she also sang Amneris, Marina, Ulrica in Un ballo in maschera, the Nurse in Die Frau ohne Schatten, and the Old Prioress in Dialogues of the Carmelites. Her Mistress Quickly in the Zeffirelli-Giulini production of Falstaff became a benchmark for the role. Comic roles also figured prominently in her career, including Orlovsky in Die Fledermaus and the Marquise in La fille du régiment alongside Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti. She performed fluently in six languages and appeared at La Scala, the Paris Opéra, the Vienna State Opera, the San Francisco Opera, and at festivals and opera houses in Salzburg, Buenos Aires, Hamburg, Berlin, Edinburgh, and elsewhere. Her recorded legacy includes Carmen conducted by Thomas Schippers, Klytemnestra under Georg Solti, Mistress Quickly under Leonard Bernstein, Orlovsky under Herbert von Karajan, the Countess in The Queen of Spades under Mstislav Rostropovich, and Sieglinde under Clemens Krauss.

From 1971 to 1981, Resnik worked as a stage director at European opera houses, typically collaborating with her husband, the Lithuanian-born painter, sculptor, and scenic and costume designer Arbit Blatas. Productions they mounted together included Carmen in Hamburg, Falstaff in Venice, Warsaw, Madrid, and Lisbon, and The Queen of Spades in Vancouver and Sydney. She also taught voice at several music conservatories, including the Juilliard School.

After the mid-1980s, Resnik transitioned toward musical theater. Her Broadway career spanned 1944 to 1987 and included appearances in Cabaret and I Pagliacci. Her work in musical theater earned her a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical in 1988 and a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical in 1991. Regina Resnik died on August 8, 2013.