Muriel Costa-Greenspon
Muriel Costa-Greenspon (b. December 1 1937, Detroit, Michigan - d. December 26 2005, New York City) was a mezzo-soprano (or, as she termed it, "dramatic alto") at the New York City Opera for over thirty years.
Born as Muriel Greenspon in Detroit, the daughter of deaf parents, she went to Cass Technical High School and later to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she received bachelor’s and master’s degrees. She made her professional debut as Miss Todd in The Old Maid and the Thief in 1960, thus beginning, at twenty-three, a gallery of character roles that extended from twentieth-century works by Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britten, Carlisle Floyd, Lee Hoiby, Arthur Honegger, Gian Carlo Menotti and Douglas Moore, to the contralto heroines of Gilbert and Sullivan, and comic scene-stealers by Puccini, Mozart and Donizetti.
The characters she assumed were real characters, rather than caricatures, an attribute that won her the early admiration of composer Menotti, at whose invitation she sang Madame Flora in The Medium at the Spoleto Festival.
Her New York City Opera tenure began as Olga Olsen in Kurt Weill's Street Scene (1963), and eventually included forty-five roles and participation in some of the company’s landmark productions of the 1960s and 1970s, including Frank Corsaro's La traviata (as Flora Bervoix, with Patricia Brooks), as well as Tito Capobianco's production of Le coq d'or (as Amelfa) and Corsaro's Faust (as Marthe), both opposite Beverly Sills and Norman Treigle. Also in her repertoire were Geneviève in Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, Dame Quickly in Sarah Caldwell's production of Verdi's Falstaff, Frau von Luber in Weill's Der Silbersee, and the name part in Offenbach's La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein.
Another notable production was of The Medium in Detroit, in 1973. Costa-Greenspon portrayed the title role, and Sal Mineo both directed and took the part of the mute, Toby. For the New Orleans Opera Association, in 1970, she sang Ulrica in Verdi's Un ballo in maschera, with Plácido Domingo and Cornell MacNeil.
Costa-Greenspon also took on leading roles for NYCO in the American premieres of Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel (1965) and von Einem’s Dantons Tod (1966), and the 1964 world-premiere of Hoiby’s Natalia Petrovna (A Month in the Country). Her last performance with the company was as Grand Duchess Anastasia in The Student Prince (1993).
In 1983, she and her husband Giorgio Costa, a carpenter for the Metropolitan Opera, enjoyed a brief burst of extra-musical fame when they won $1.7 million in the state lottery. The winnings did not cause her to abandon City Opera, however; she continued to perform with the company until her retirement 10 years later.
After retiring from the stage, Costa-Greenspon served on the faculty of the prestigious Bronx High School of Science. She died on December 26 2005, aged 68, in New York City. Her death was due to natural causes, according to her son, Stefano Costa.
Videography
- Donizetti: La fille du régiment (Sills, McDonald, Malas; Wendelken-Wilson, Mansouri, 1974) [live] VAI