Louise Pettitt (1918 – March 25, 2006), born Florence Louise Staples, was one of the first American female opera conductors. For over forty years, she simultaneously served as orchestral conductor, dramatic director, and vocal director for the Chaminade Opera Group, which she founded in 1959.Records of the Chaminade Opera Group She promoted the growth of opera, and the advancement of many performers, ranging from amateur enthusiasts to internationally known professionals.
Biography
Florence Louise Staples Pettitt was born in Massachusetts in 1918.Massachusetts Vital Records
Her father—Charles Albert Staples—was a classical cellist who played in various New England orchestras.Louise's Boston Globe Obituary. His obituary also says he played in the Burlington Symphony Orchestra He took Louise to countless rehearsals during her childhood. The two also performed in local theaters.
She was a high school valedictorian and mastered the cello, like her father.Boston Globe Obituary
Pettitt came from a school with a prominent music program. Opera star Robert Rounseville and BSO violinist Sheldon Rotenberg and composer Ray Coniff were taught by her music teacher, who was a graduate of the New England Conservatory.page 237, "1894 Attleborough - Attleboro 1978", by Dr. Paul Tedesco, Copyright 1979 Attleboro Historical Commission, (1979) Attleboro, Mass. Rounseville came back to honor and commemorate this teacher years later, in 1953, after making the internationally renowned film version of the "Tales of Hoffmann".May 16, 1953 Attleboro Sun-Times, Front Page. Rotenberg was on tour at the time, according to the article, and unable to attend.
Even in high school, Louise Pettitt was promoting opera. She and her close friend, violinist Sheldon Rotenberg, tried to create an opera club at their school."The Blue Owl", 1935. Louise and Sheldon were co-editors of the classical music section of a student publication at their high school.
This enthusiasm for opera never left her.
As a young woman she shifted from cello to classical singing, and sought the best training available in Boston, New York City, and Providence, Rhode Island.
She trained with Gladys Childs Miller in Boston, Massachusetts, at the New England Conservatory from 1939 to 1941.Records of the New England Conservatory, Boston Globe Obituary Several of Miller's students went on to sing for the Vienna, Paris, and New York Metropolitan opera companies. One of them, Lillian Johnson, also came to sing for Louise in the Chaminade Opera Group. Louise also received instruction from Margaret Armstrong Gow of the Harvard Musical Association, Gertrude Erhardt, and others. She gradually became a leading soprano in the Boston area.
She sang professionally for many of Greater Boston's better known churches. One of her most prominent recurring performances was the regular weekly recital at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She later also sang at Tanglewood in the summers. And eventually, she became a member of the National Association of Teachers of Singing.
Although she devoted more hours over her long life to the production of opera than to her own singing career, and though she was eventually better known as a teacher and director, she always considered herself to be a singer, and continued to give solo vocal performances into the 1970s. During her many years of opera work, she devoted time in every week to her voice students, and she continued to sing, generally in support of Chaminade.
She also gradually gained some stage and drama experience in small local theatrical productions, and Gilbert and Sullivan; but in Massachusetts in the thirties and forties, there were few opportunities for young performers to try their hand at serious, fully staged opera.
The only fully staged operas in Boston then were generally done by New York's Met on tour at the Huntington Avenue site. Opera "scenes" were done at NEC by Goldovsky and others in Jordan Hall. There were very few opera companies in existence then, compared to the 1970s.
When Louise was finishing her studies at New England Conservatory in 1941, "..opera was then in eclipse...".page 99 "Measure by Measure: a History of N.E.C. from 1867" by Bruce McPherson and James Klein, copyright 1995 by the NEC Trustees.
Goldovsky, when he arrived in 1942, found the opera situation in Boston "dormant".page 110 "Measure by Measure: a History of N.E.C. from 1867" by Bruce McPherson and James Klein, copyright 1995 by the NEC Trustees At Tanglewood, "the war shut down opera and nearly everything else..,"page 210 "Scenes from Tanglewood" 1989 by Andrew L. Pincus, Northeastern University Press though Goldovsky predicted "a growth in operatic productions similar to the great recent growth in symphonic performances and numbers of orchestras."page 99 "Measure by Measure: a History of N.E.C. from 1867" by Bruce McPherson and James Klein, copyright 1995 by the NEC Trustees
Louise performed in small theatre, opera scenes, and light opera nonetheless.
One of her earliest acting credits was a minor local production called Aunt Emma Sees It Through ( performed January 24, 1936 ).
When the faculty of Wheaton College ( Norton, Massachusetts ) formed its own Gilbert and Sullivan troupe in 1945, she became a perennial female lead for about 15 years, and never left the group.Seen the Norton Singers website.
Her later ability to conduct opera was most likely complemented and improved by her concurrent responsibility as conductor/director for that group, beginning in 1961.Having been director of COG for two years, Louise also became director of Wheaton's Norton Singers in 1961.
She played soprano roles in other Gilbert and Sullivan productions in eastern Massachusetts in the 1940s and 1950s. She and her husband performed a consistent repertoire of G & S scenes professionally for various civic women's clubs (Foxboro, Framingham, Boston, etc ) under contract to "Flora Frame" of Boston in the 1950s and early 1960s.
She gave regular solo performances of arias in Boston and elsewhere. She performed in many area churches and other venues as a classical soloist in oratorios, light opera, and mixed programs. She sang at Old South Church, Trinity, St Paul's and many others.
This experience, along with her classical musicianship and vocal training prepared her for her eventual role as opera conductor.
When interest in opera grew in the late 1950s, her experience enabled her to make a vital, pioneering contribution.
Boston Opera at a low point: 1933–1958
In the depths of the great depression, the Chicago opera company stopped touring in Boston. This cancellation and the creation of new companies in the late 1950s form the bookends of a difficult period for opera in Boston.
The New England Conservatory had always been the backbone of local Boston opera companies in the twentieth century. But in the 1930s, the conservatory had great difficulty even maintaining a teaching schedule in opera."Measure by Measure" Wallace Goodrich tried in 1936 to create a school of opera there without success.page 99, "Measure by Measure"
When Louise was in attendance at NEC ( 1939–1941Archives of the New England Conservatory of Music ), Goodrich was still trying to put together a program. Goodrich won approval to hire a conductor from London's famous Covent Garden in 1940, but this was a far cry from the robust opera department that he conceived. When Goldovsky was hired there in 1942 he was only paid $2,500 for the entire year and told to work part time.page 102 "Measure by Measure" Fortunately for him, he was able to supplement his income as of 1946 by becoming "Mr. Opera," the voice that was broadcast every Saturday afternoon nationwide from New York by Texaco.
By hiring Goldovsky in 1942, upon the recommendation of Koussevitsky, Goodrich laid the foundations for the renaissance that bore fruit over the next 50 years. But the 1940s and 1950s were still lean years compared to the 1960s and onward.
The gas rationing of 1943 reduced Tanglewood to a simple red cross benefit concert in the Lennox public library, but this wasn't the entire reason for the leanness of opera in those years.p 5, "Tanglewood: the clash between Tradition and Change" Northeastern University Press (1998), by Andrew L Pincus
The fact that the axis of Germany, Austria, and Italy ( the native home of opera ) became America's foremost enemy in WWII may have been a factor. Jazz was seen as a more American style.
Public demand for opera seems to have been historically low in Boston in this period. The Metropolitan Opera cancelled its 1947 tour of Boston completely, and Goldovsky's company was the only local replacement available. During the war, NEC's "Popular Music Program" ( which focussed on the composition and arrangement of big band swing music ) garnered far more tuition revenue than opera instruction.
Opera was expensive, and money was tight in the 1930s and 1940s.
The Boston Opera House that had been built by Parkman Haven and Eben Jordan (who also built nearby NEC's Jordan Hall, Symphony Hall, and other great Boston buildings) on Boston's celebrated Culture Way was gradually lost to Boston's opera lovers over the years.
By the time Goldovsky and Koussevitsky were reinvigorating Boston high culture in the forties, the building had fallen into the hands of a theatre chain who saw no profit in its original purpose.
"The first spark of revival of interest in a potential resident company was kindled by the protean Boris Goldovsky with his New England Opera Company..."p280, The Boston Opera Company 1909–1915, by Quaintance Eaton, Appleton-Century Press, (1965) New York
He made an earnest effort at grand opera in the old hall with his Les Troyens, but he ultimately focussed on teaching and touring.
Goldovsky and the New England Conservatory's Opera aficionados were allowed some use of the hall, but it ultimately fell to the wrecking ball in 1958.Records of the Boston Opera House (1909)
It stood at 343 Huntington Avenue, between Symphony Hall and the Museum of Fine Arts, near to New England Conservatory, Boston Conservatory, and the Handel and Haydn Society from 1908 to 1958.see Walter Muir Whitehill's "Topographical Boston"
One of the Boston Globe critics claimed that "Operapathy" had taken hold of Boston's citizens.see p280 of Quaintance Eaton's 1965 work "The Boston Opera Company" published by Appleton-Century in New York
"Since the 1957 demolition [sic] of the old opera house, there had been talk of a new performing arts complex....All this had come to nothing."Kessler, Daniel: Sarah Caldwell: The First Woman of Opera, page 94. Scarecrow Press, 2008
"With the demise of the opera house, Boston was left with fading vaudeville houses and movie palaces, all with shallow stages and small orchestra pits- none ideal for opera."Kessler, Daniel: Sarah Caldwell: The First Woman of Opera, page 28. Scarecrow Press, 2008
The loss of the Opera House was a great blow to the Boston Opera scene, and put the efforts of Goldovsky and the others at great disadvantage. For about forty years afterward, the perennial fulfillment of Boston's operatic aspirations was accomplished by under-financed, under-accommodated devotees in shifting and uncertain circumstances.
After the demolition, "Goldovsky struggled on at Harvard's Loeb Theatre. There he staged his last three Boston productions...".page 115 "Measure by Measure" After those few performances, Goldovsky then "retired to the relative leisure of his NEC visiting lectureship. The Conservatory began to fret about opera and 'its need for improvement'."
Chicago also had an "opera drought" of about eight years beginning in 1946.
Women were very important in overcoming these setbacks, but they faced some challenges.