Beverly Sills Lives On In Rare Recordings Released From Ohio

Beverly Sills as Tosca (Photo: Cleveland Public Library)

"DoeHeads – those die-hard fans of Douglas Moore’s opera, The Ballad of Baby Doe – have new reason to rejoice. Among the eight live recordings of operas performed at Musicarnival in Warrensville Heights in the 1950s and 1960s soon to be available to the public is a 1958 production of Baby Doe starring soprano Beverly Sills in one of her signature roles. There’s a lot more here than Moore, who served as director of music at the Cleveland Museum of Art in the 1920s and conducted the Cleveland Orchestra in the premiere of his Four Museum Pieces in 1923. Sills, who lived in Cleveland in the late 1950s, appears in four other productions in the Musicarnival series, including the title roles in two great potboilers – Bizet’s Carmen and Puccini’s Tosca – she performed only in John L. Price’s tent theater-in-the-round. By the end of