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.
I saw her debut at Cncinnati Summer Opera in Don Giovanni.
Was that at the zoo?
Wikipedia reminds me that she sang in the Mahler Eighth at the 1973 May Festival, something I'd forgotten. I was a rehearsal pianist for that and a few other things during the following two years. The 1975 opera was Tannháuser in which she sang the Shepherd, which was her Met debut role a couple of years later.
I never met her. I think I was only playing choral rehearsals for the Mahler, but I was at all the orchestra rehearsals and have always remembered watching her as the Shepherd. I might still have cassette recordings of the FM broadcasts of a few of those works, and maybe a couple of rehearsals.
Edit: I'd also forgotten that she'd studied with Italo Tajo, one of the most amazing character actor/singers ever. That might have been at UC.
