SHIRLEY VERRETT (1931 – 2010) was an internationally renowned opera singer. Born May 31, 1931, into a devout family of Seventh-Day Adventists in New Orleans, she began singing in the church at a young age. Raised in Southern California, Shirley graduated from the Juilliard School of Music in New York before winning the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions.

Shirley made her operatic debut in Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia before being hired by composer Leopold Stokowski in 1959 for Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder with the Houston Symphony. The orchestra’s board, however, would not allow a black soloist to perform, and Stokowski cast Shirley in a performance of Falla’s Amor Brujo with the Philadelphia Orchestra instead.

Although her religious family initially disapproved of Shirley’s singing career, they eventually hoped she’d follow in the footsteps of Marian Anderson, rather than opera. In 1962, they made their first trip to Europe and heard her sing the title role in Carmen. She wrote that they “got down on their knees and prayed for forgiveness”.

Known as Shirley Verrett-Carter in the first few years of her career after marrying James Carter in 1951, she divorced her controlling and abusive husband after finding a gun under his pillow. In 1963, she married artist/writer Lou LoMonaco and adopted a daughter, Francesca.

In 1962, Shirley appeared in the first concert ever televised from Lincoln Center in New York, but it wasn’t until six years later that she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in Carmen before also performing over 40 roles at the world’s great opera houses including La Scala in Milan, London’s Royal Opera House, the Bolshoi Opera in Moscow, the Paris Opera and the Vienna Staatsoper. Continue