BETTY Allen was an American mezzo-soprano who transcended a Dickensian girlhood to become an internationally known opera singer and later a prominent voice teacher and arts administrator.
Falling into opera by chance, Allen was part of the first
great wave of African-American singers to appear on the world's premier stages in the post-war years. Active from the 1950s to the 1970s, she performed with the New York City Opera, the Metropolitan Opera and the opera companies of Houston, Boston, San Francisco, Santa Fe, and Buenos Aires among others.
Allen, who also toured as a recitalist, was known for her close association with the American composers Virgil Thomson, Ned Rorem and David Diamond. At her death, she was on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music, where she had taught since 1969. She was also the president emeritus and a former executive director of the Harlem School of the Arts.
In 1954 Allen made her City Opera debut as Queenie in Show Boat, by Jerome Kern. She sang the role of Begonia in the City Opera production of Hans Werner Henze's comic opera The Young Lord, conducted by Sarah Caldwell in 1973.
With the Met, Allen sang the role of Commère in Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts in 1973; she later participated in the first complete recording of the work. Elsewhere, her roles included Teresa in La Sonnambula, by Bellini; Jocasta in Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex; Monisha in Scott Joplin's Treemonisha; and Mistress Quickly in Verdi's Falstaff.
Elizabeth Louise Allen, known as Betty Lou, was born in 1927, in Campbell, Ohio. Her father worked in the steel mills; her mother had a thriving business taking in laundry. Growing up, she was exposed to the opera that poured from neighbours' radios.
"The families on my street were mostly Sicilian and Greek," Allen said in 1999. "On Saturday, walking down the street, you could hear the Met broadcasts coming from the windows of everybody's house. No-one told them that opera and the arts were not for them, not for poor people, just for rich snobs."
When she was 12, her mother died of lung cancer and her father began drinking heavily. Allen took over running the house and caring for him until, one day, fed up, she boarded a bus to nearby Youngstown. At the courthouse there, she told a startled judge she wanted somebody to adopt her.
Several turbulent years followed in foster homes, first in the home of a white couple where the husband turned out to be "lecherous", Allen recalled. Next came a white family who made her do all the cooking, cleaning, washing and ironing in exchange for $3 a week and a bed in the attic. After that, she lived with an elderly black woman.
At 16, Allen moved into the Youngstown YWCA, supporting herself with cleaning jobs. On a scholarship, she entered Wilberforce College in Wilberforce, Ohio. (A historically black institution, it is now Wilberforce University.) She had excelled in Latin and German in school and hoped to become a translator.
At Wilberforce, Allen met Theodor Heimann, a former Berlin Opera tenor who taught German and voice. He encouraged her to sing. Allen went on to earn a scholarship to what was then the Hartford School of Music in Connecticut.
In the early 1950s, Allen studied at Tanglewood, where Leonard Bernstein chose her to be the mezzo-soprano soloist in his Symphony No. 1 (Jeremiah); she was later a frequent soloist with Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. Allen made her New York recital debut at Town Hall in 1958 in a programme that included Brahms and Fauré.
Executive director of the Harlem School of the Arts from 1979-92, Allen was on the boards of Carnegie Hall, the New York City Opera, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Centre, the Theatre Development Fund and the Manhattan School of Music. She also taught at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and the North Carolina School of the Arts, now the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.
If Allen was less well known than other singers of her era, like Shirley Verrett and Grace Bumbry, it did not seem to bother her in the slightest.
"I'm not a household name," she said in a 1973 interview. "I don't stay awake nights plotting and planning. Maybe I don't have that extra drive and ambition and energy that makes for a blazing career. I need a home, and I need to be looked after.
"I may look to be a very self-sufficient female. I act very brazen and hard and matter-of-fact and seem as though I could cope with anything. Well, I can't. I'm as soft as putty underneath."
Allen is survived by her husband, Ritten Edward Lee II, whom she married in 1953, as well as a son, a daughter and three grandchildren.
