I had for around 20 years a neighbor on the first floor who covered a lot of the lyric soprano roles at the Met. She had a lot of stories about the monstrous Miss Battle, as did several agents at Columbia Artists.
Would love to hear some of those stories. I'm remembering an article in
The New Yorker when she was canned.
My first sight of her was in one of the operas at the Cincinnati May Festival in the mid-1970s and I thought she was the sweetest, most innocent thing. But I guess that's what we were supposed to think.
But I wonder if she was always what people grew to know later, or if she went through a change over the years, and how quickly or gradually that change occurred.
