Ruby Cutter Savage

Ruby Clementine Cutter Savage Willis (October 7, 1876 – July 9, 1949) was an American soprano who performed in opera, concert, and on Broadway during the early twentieth century. Born in Boston, she was the daughter of Fitch Henry Cutter and Mary Alvida Clark Cutter.

Savage received her vocal training from multiple teachers across several cities. In Boston she studied with Arthur J. Hubbard, and she traveled to Paris to work with W. Elliott Haslam on voice. In New York City she studied German and French diction with Margaret Goetz.

Her professional career encompassed a range of operatic and concert engagements. She sang as a soprano soloist with the Boston Opera Company and appeared in a 1903 production of Orfeo ed Euridice in Angers. The following year she joined a tour with the New York Philharmonic, performing in forty cities alongside tenor Dan Beddoe under the direction of conductor Walter Damrosch. In 1905 she sang with the Savage Opera Company. A 1904 profile in Musical Courier described her voice as phenomenal in both quality and range. In 1906 she performed in Montreal, stepping in as a last-minute replacement soloist for a performance of Handel's Messiah. She and tenor Theodore van Yorx gave a joint concert at Boston's Jordan Hall in 1907. Savage returned to the operatic stage in 1909, appearing in La traviata and Faust at the German Opera House in Prague, and later that year performing the role of Mimi in La bohème in Boston. In 1913 she performed with the Zuro Opera Company under the name Rena Saville.

Her Broadway credit came in 1914, when she played Josephine in a large-scale production of H.M.S. Pinafore at the Hippodrome, a staging described at the time as mammoth and featuring real water and real sailors. During the 1920s she worked as a church soloist in Florida.

Savage married twice. Her first marriage, to singer and voice coach Paul Savage, took place in Italy in 1902 and ended in divorce in 1915. That same year she married Pierre LaJard Willis in New Jersey; that marriage also ended in divorce. In the 1930s and 1940s she lived with her mother in Los Angeles, where she died on July 9, 1949, at the age of 72.