Enchanted Melody

A star of stage and screen is now a celebrated citizen of Schroon Lake, N.Y.

Story by Benjamin Pomerance

The house lights dimmed. Members of the crowd settled in their chairs, adjusting themselves one last time for the best possible view. Slowly, dramatically, the curtain of Spokane’s Fox Theatre rose. An eight-year-old girl, festooned in a lavish costume, stood in the spotlight. Not a trace of nerves betrayed her. There were, in fact, no nerves to let her down. With the bright lights beating down on her and an audience watching her every move, Patrice Munsel was at home.

It would be her home for a lifetime, this public arena where everything was scrutinized and nothing went unnoticed. Never, she says now, did she feel the least bit afraid. Not at age eight, performing a recital of "whistling en pointe," a unique mixture of dramatic bird calls and classical dance, in her hometown. Not at eighteen, the year she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, appearing alongside established stars as the youngest artist ever signed by the storied company. Not at any moment throughout a 15-year career at the Met, portraying some of opera’s greatest roles before arguably the toughest audiences in the business, nor at any time during the remarkable journey through musical comedy and television that followed her Metropolitan legacy. Today, her home in Schroon Lake, N.Y., is quietly filled with mementos of a life beyond the grasp of most, a career on the professional stage that epitomizes the often-misused title of "star". Yet for Munsel, these things are nothing unusual; rather, they represent a way of life. "It was something I had to do,"she says of her theatrical livelihood. "I was meant to do it, and I loved doing it, and I could do it. For as long as I can remember, I just knew this was how I wanted to spend my life."

"I would sing, dance, whistle, whatever. It was such fun"

She knew at age five, the year Munsel decided she was going to be a ballerina. Her parents found her a private dance tutor at once. "I was very fortunate,"Munsel recalls, "to be an only child."She laughs, a light, bell-like tone that conjures up images of her coloratura soprano heyday, a time when she could play vocal gymnastics throughout her upper register. "I chose my parents well."Not long after starting ballet, she went to a Disney cartoon with her parents and changed her aspirations before the movie was half-over. "I wanted to be a professional whistler,"she says, laughing again. "I wanted to whistle the bird calls for the Disney movies. So my parents went looking for a teacher for me, and remarkably, they found a professional whistling instructor, Mrs. Marjorie Clark Kennedy, right there in Spokane."Munsel quickly found that she had "a good pucker."At age eight, she found a home for both talents in "whistling en pointe,"the first public stage appearance she can recall. In her theatrical debut, the girl who would become one of the leading vocalists of her generation never sang a note.          

Performing was hardly foreign to Munsel, even at such a young age. Often, she says, she would invite her friends over for impromptu productions. Her bedroom was the only stage she needed. "They would all sit on my bed,"Munsel remembers, "and I would get up and perform for them. I would sing, dance, whistle, whatever. It was such fun. Then, when I was about 10, I hung curtains in our garden, and invited my friends over, and performed a striptease for them. My mother looked out the window at one point to see what I was doing in the garden — and when she saw what I was up to, she was horrified. But I was performing. And when I was performing, I felt glorious."

The dream to sing, as Munsel recalls it, really emerged in first grade. After Munsel sang for her class one day, her teacher called the Munsel household, informing the star-to-be’s mother that her daughter had a beautiful voice. The real inspiration to vocalize, though, came from the radio. Listening with her parents to Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, Munsel determined that she was going to become an opera singer. Not just any opera singer, either. "I always told people that I was going to become an opera star,"Munsel says. "I didn’t want to be in the chorus. I knew that I wanted to be up front. I wanted to go right to the Met and become a star."

To go right to the Met and become a star. Munsel says she quickly found that nobody in Spokane, had any idea how to go to the Met, much less to become a star. Her parents found her a local voice teacher, a Mrs. Lange, to help their daughter try. "She did me no harm,"Munsel says, "and that really was more important than it sounds. So many excellent young voices are wrecked by bad teachers."When musicians came to Spokane on tour, Munsel’s parents would write to them and ask the performers to hear their daughter sing. Many accepted the offer. At age 12, Munsel was performing privately for some of the best singers and conductors in the world. She also found time for several other pursuits, including football — where, she still proudly recalls, she once tackled a boy on the sidewalk and shattered his collarbone — and "biking madly all over town, often with no hands (on the handlebars)."

When Munsel was 15, the great soprano Lily Pons gave a concert in Spokane. Via her parents’ maneuvering, Munsel gained an audience with Pons’s accompanist, who invited her to study with him in New York City. That summer, Munsel and her mother boarded a train for New York. "It seemed,"Munsel says, "like a wonderful opportunity."

It turned out to be a nightmare. "He was a fake,"Munsel says bluntly. "He was a wonderful pianist and accompanist, but he was not a voice coach. He had me doing some really crazy things there. My voice was natural — I would just open my mouth and sing easily. Now, it was sounding forced, and really quite awful."Finally, Munsel and her mother had enough. Mother and daughter booked train reservations back to Spokane, and were about to return home when Munsel’s father phoned them with unexpected news. A woman in Spokane who had sung with Munsel had just discovered a wonderful voice teacher in New York, a man named William Herman. Would Munsel be interested in singing for him? She was, and she did. Herman was impressed with the voice he heard from the teenage girl. Then he sat Munsel and her mother down for a harsh dose of reality.

"He told me, ‘You can do exactly what you want to do and be exactly what you want to be, but it will take a lot of time and a lot of work and a lot of money’"

"He told me, ‘You can do exactly what you want to do and be exactly what you want to be, but it will take a lot of time and a lot of work and a lot of money,’" Munsel remembers. Still, Munsel was not deterred. After taking two lessons a day with Herman for 10 days, she returned with her mother to Spokane to consider what the experienced pedagogue had said. Three months later, she was back at his studio door. Today, she considers this move back to New York with her mother one of the most important decisions she ever made.

The work, as Herman warned her, was hard. Two voice lessons, plus opera coaching, French lessons, and Italian lessons, formed Munsel’s daily regimen, along with classes in piano, harmony and theory, and fencing (to improve her poise and posture). "We hit the ground running," Munsel says. "I always knew my voice was there, that I had that natural ability. But I needed someone to show me what I could do with it, to refine it. That’s what William Herman did for me."

Herman also introduced Munsel to the person responsible for her first big break: her opera coach, the chorus master of the Metropolitan Opera. After Munsel had been training with Herman for three years, the opera coach suggested that she try out for the Met Auditions of the Air, the company’s nationwide search for the next generation of stars. When Munsel went to audition at New York’s NBC Studios, she was so young that her mother had to sign a special consent form to let her sing. When she performed before Metropolitan Opera conductor Willfrid Pelletier, though, the voice that emerged from her slender frame was hardly the tone of a 17-year-old girl. The coloratura soprano is often described as a singer who plays musical chairs among all the right notes without ever sitting down. For her audition, Munsel selected three of the hardest arias from the coloratura reparatory, works about as easy as dancing a mazurka on a tightrope. With Pelletier watching from the control booth, she sang her coloratura triathlon — the Mad Scene from Lucia di Lammermour, the "Bell Song"from Lakme, and Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute — with ease. After she finished, Pelletier invited Munsel back for the Auditions finals, scheduled for the following Sunday.

Munsel turned him down. At least she did at first, long enough to call her father and learn his opinion of the whole affair. "It seemed to me that when people actually won the Met auditions, they never went anywhere,"Munsel explains. "So I told Willfred Pelletier that I had to call my father before I could say yes. And I called him and told him, and asked if I should go back and sing on Sunday, and he said "Sure — why not?"

The day of the finals, Munsel was rehearsing at NBC Studios when she noticed someone watching her. The woman, an employee in NBC’s script division, was enamored by the sound of this singer she had never heard before. "I asked her what she was rehearsing for,"Toni Palladino remembers, "and she told me that she was rehearsing for the broadcast. I smiled and told her that she had no problem, that she would probably win because her voice was so lovely. And then I told her that when she became famous, I was going to be her secretary. It never occurred to me to ask her — I just told her. She laughed and said it was a deal."

That night, Munsel sang the finals with the Metropolitan Opera orchestra accompanying her. Palladino, in the audience that night, said it was no surprise to her when Munsel was announced as the winner. Not long after the competition, she wrote Munsel a letter, reminding her of their meeting at NBC. "She remembered me, and called,"Palladino says, "and I started to work for her part-time. Then, because I was going to be married at the time, I stopped, but Patrice never failed to drop me a line from wherever she was, and we kept in touch for a number of years."

"Just because someone hasn’t done something doesn’t mean no one can do it"

Munsel, meanwhile, was preparing for perhaps the most nerve-wracking moment in a highly touted opera singer’s career: her Metropolitan debut. At age 18, she already knew nine operas. Mignon, the work in which she was cast for her opening performance at the Met, was not one of them. Edward Johnson, the general manager, gave her six weeks to master it. Her learning curve would be steep — cast alongside operatic sensations Rise Stevens and James Melton, she would have little room for error. Yet Munsel still says she was not nervous when she made her debut on December 4, 1943. "People told me that I was too young to join the Met,"she remembers, "but I didn’t pay attention. Just because someone hasn’t done something doesn’t mean no one can do it."

Critical reviews of Munsel’s performance were mixed, with many writers deeming her voice "promising"but harping on her lack of experience. At the Met, though, her work was respected enough that she returned in grand fashion the following autumn, performing to public acclaim as Rosina in The Barber of Seville and the title role in Lucia. For Munsel, portraying Lucia — a role known best for the "Mad Scene"she had sung for Pelletier in the Auditions of the Air — remains a treasured experience today. "I loved dying on stage,"she says. "That was so much fun. You could just sing away for what seemed like half an hour of magnificent dying music."

While Munsel liked dying, audiences liked laughing, a fact Munsel first learned when she sang Victor Herbert’s operetta Naughty Marietta in Pittsburgh during the summer of 1949. "That was (when I got) my first big laugh,"Munsel says, "and I loved it."That fall, she accepted her first comic role at the Met: Zerlina in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Audiences and critics alike hailed her portrayal of the witty country maid, and a new image for Munsel was born. More lighthearted female parts, commonly called "soubrette" roles, began flooding her reparatory: Despina in Cosi Fan Tutte, Musetta in La Boehme, Adele in Rudolf Bing’s celebrated English-language version of Fledermaus. "I was, and probably am, an incurable ham," Munsel says. "I loved comedy."

Munsel also found she enjoyed her many co-stars at the Met. In an era when wartime restrictions prevented the company from bringing in singers from Europe, the principal Met performers formed a stalwart group that returned year after year. When speaking of her male partners on stage, Munsel sounds as if she is speaking of old friends — Ezio Pinza, Lawrence Tibbett, Leonard Warren, Cyril Ritchard. " (Tenor) Jan Peerce, my first Duke in Rigoletto, was wonderful,"she says. "When I was about to begin ‘Caro Nome’, my great big aria, he snuck behind me and swatted me on the behind and whispered ‘Give ‘em hell."

Off the stage, Munsel had found someone she favored more than any tenor: Robert C. Schuler, heir to a family empire of candy companies and not a particularly devoted follower of the opera. He was, however, a devoted follower of Patrice Munsel, and she, before long, became an equally devoted follower of Schuler. In 1953, they were married. They would remain together for more than 50 years. To this day, when asked how she was able to make her hectic celebrity lifestyle work for so long, Munsel has only one response: "Marrying the right man."

By the mid-50s, Munsel appeared to be living the perfect life: happily married, living with Schuler in a four-story penthouse near Central Park, and more popular than ever among Met audiences. Yet Munsel longed for one thing more: a more serious, dramatic part in which she could shine. Being general manager Rudolph Bing’s star soubrette year after year was enjoyable, and filed with plenty of challenges, but Munsel wanted a shot at something a little bit different. Revered by audiences as the flirtatious Musetta in La Boheme, she wanted to someday have a chance at playing the more serious — and tragic — Mimi. For years, Bing, who Munsel says "was not a gentle person at all,"kept Munsel from playing Mimi or any other part of that ilk at the Met. Finally, in 1958, he allowed her one night as Mimi — opposite a tenor who tried to upstage her at every opportunity. By that point, Munsel had seen enough. Two weeks after playing Mimi, and 225 performances after her debut at the age of 18, Munsel took her final bow on the Metropolitan stage. She would never spend much time on full-length operas again.

"I was crossing over before they even came up with that term"

Instead, a whole new world called out to her. Except to Munsel, musical theatre was not the foreign universe it might have been to other opera stars. For years, Munsel had spent her Sundays singing on radio broadcasts of The Prudential Family Hour, a chance to perform non-operatic works to a nationwide audience. "I loved popular music, I loved show tunes, I loved all of it,"Munsel says. "I had been singing them all my life."When she entered musical theatre, directors were surprised to discover how comfortable she was in this more "popular"art form. Long before crossover singing — the term used today for a performer who sings professionally in both opera and musical theatre — became in vogue, Munsel was crossing over with aplomb. "I was crossing over,"she says, a note of distinct pleasure in her voice, "before they even came up with that term."

Still, performing in musical comedy was a new adventure on a number of levels. "To begin with,"Munsel says, "I was singing in English."The characters she portrayed, she continues, tended to be more realistic than those she brought to life on the operatic stage. The music, while hardly to the level of technical difficulty the coloratura had experienced at the Met, was hardly easy. And the shows, quite often, forced her to travel frequently, a challenge not only for her but for Schuler and their four young children. Top billing in Mame, Hello Dolly, Carousel, Kiss Me Kate, South Pacific, and a slew of other musicals awaited Munsel…as long as she was able to take advantage of the offers that came her way.

So the family found a way. Typically, that way meant traveling en masse from city to city, with all four kids and a menagerie of animals — dogs, turtles, hamsters, an armadillo sent by a fan in Texas, and a boa constrictor that commonly draped itself around Munsel’s neck when they went out in public — in tow. It also meant taking time off now and then for family globetrotting excursions, even if that required turning down the chance for a major role. "Family came first,"Munsel says. "We went everywhere together. Many female singers did not want to have children — they wanted their careers to be the most important part of their life, so they didn’t allow themselves the joy of having children."She pauses. "But for me, marrying Bob and having four wonderful children is the part of my life that I treasure the most."

Finding a way also was helped by a strong support staff, including one very devoted secretary. Years after their first meeting at NBC Studios, Toni Palladino and Patrice Munsel were back together, with Palladino taking over the secretarial duties she promised an 18-year-old Munsel she would someday fulfill. "I love my job, and I love Patrice,"says Palladino, who still works as Munsel’s secretary today. "I’m very proud to be a secretary to someone who has left such a mark in the world."Yet Palladino’s respect for Munsel extends far beyond that of a star-struck fan. She savors the memory of the time Munsel was playing Mame in Connecticut, the night when Munsel drove by a car accident on her way to the theatre. The victim was sprawled on the sidewalk, shivering. "Despite the bitter cold, she stopped the car, got out and went to the victim, and held her hand to give her courage,"Palladino remembers. "She took off her mink coat and spread it across the girl’s body to keep her warm, and she stayed by her side until the ambulance arrived. The scene of an opera diva, whose career depends on her voice, in the bitter cold, giving up her coat, has always remained with me."

"She’s an American treasure"

As the years passed, Munsel’s star only grew, glowing perhaps even brighter than it did during her years at the Met. Her performances in the title role of The Merry Widow broke box office records at Lincoln Center that still stand to this day. Every top television personality of the day — Dean Martin, Johnny Carson, Red Skelton, Ed Sullivan —invited her to guest star on their shows. She even hosted her own TV program for a short time, produced by her husband and featuring a star-studded lineup of personalities as guests. "She’s had an incredible career in every medium,"Palladino says. "A star of opera, television, radio, concert stage, musical comedy, Las Vegas — you name it, she’s done it all. She’s an American treasure."

Ultimately, that "American treasure" found her way to Schroon Lake, a small, popular summer resort town in the heart of the Adirondack Mountains. Now officially retired from stage and screen, but frequently called upon to give masterclasses and accept any number of awards, Munsel says she enjoys life in the lakeside home once owned by her Merry Widow co-star, Bob Wright. Fan mail still pours in from around the world, mostly through her Web site, and every fan can expect a personal response from the diva herself. "It’s part of the business of being on stage,"Munsel says matter-of-factly. She lives alone now, Schuler having passed away two years ago, but receives a steady stream of visits from the many friends she has made in the region. All of them are aware of her celebrity status, but none seem to treat her like a star. Instead, she’s just "Pat"— a vivacious character never without a smile and a kind word, the kind of person who Palladino says is "just a perfect friend."

Singing still remains her passion. Down the road and up the hill from her home is the Seagle Music Colony, which since 1913 has provided one of the nation’s most respected summer music programs for young opera hopefuls. Fifteen years ago, Munsel and Schuler began attending performances at Seagle; today, Munsel carries on as official hostess of the Colony’s annual gala and unofficial ambassador to Seagle’s young artists. "Behind the scenes, she’s mentored many of our singers, listened to them and given them important career advice,"says Colony artistic director Darren Keith Woods. "She’ll give master classes here or provide private coaching to our singers, particularly if they’re performing a role that she did."Woods, who has been friends with Munsel since he came to Seagle 14 summers ago, says Munsel’s efforts are very inspiring to the Colony artists. "I speak for a lot of people when I say that Patrice is really a remarkable person,"Woods says. "As she is with all things, she’s very giving to us with her time and her energy.”

"If you’re alive, how can you be bored? It’s not possible"

Today, at the age of 83, Munsel says she still has more than enough of that energy to go around. Brimming with energy, she always seems on the brink of a performance, a bit of that 18-year-old girl making her Met debut still alive and well inside her. Yet when she speaks, the sincerity in her words is evident. "Every once in a while, when I see someone who’s doing some sort of ordinary work, and their backs are bent, they’re bored, they’re not involved with the people around them, I want to tell them that they could go home happier if they’d reach out to the world with some energy, some enthusiasm,"she insists. "If you’re alive, how can you be bored? It’s not possible."

And it’s true. Since ordaining that she belonged in theatre at the age of five to singing at the Met at age 18 to attaining heights most people only dream of throughout years spent on the stage and happiness many people wish they had off it, Patrice Munsel has been anything but bored. By her own admission, it’s been an almost magical existence, a fairy tale, an enchanted melody that keeps on spinning out into the world and isn’t likely to cadence any time soon. "It’s been a hell of a long time," Munsel says, "and I’m still having fun." She stops, her mind racing. "And I intend to keep on having fun for as long as I can."

What are your favorite memories of Patrice Munsel?