page_title: Frederica von Stade
section_title: Childhood
hierarchical_section_title: Frederica von Stade / Early life / Childhood
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Österreich, Salzburg, Großes Festspielhaus English: Austria, Salzburg, Großes Festspielhaus Русский: Австрия, Зальцбург, Фестивальный комплекс Français&#160;: Autriche, Salzbourg, Grand palais des festivals Festspielhauskomplex vom Mönchsberg aus gesehen, vorne das Große Festspielhaus
context_page_description: Frederica "Flicka" von Stade Gorman is a semi-retired American opera singer. Since her debut in New York in 1970, she has performed in operas, musicals, concerts and recitals in venues throughout the world, including the Met, La Scala, the Paris Opera, the Vienna State Opera, the Salzburger Festspielhaus, Covent Garden, Glyndebourne and Carnegie Hall. Conductors with whom she has worked include Abbado, Bernstein, Boulez, Giulini, Karajan, Ozawa, Solti and Tilson Thomas. She has also been a prolific and eclectic recording artist, and has made many appearances on television.
  A mezzo-soprano equally at home in lyric music and in coloratura, von Stade has assumed fifty-four operatic roles on stage and eight more in concert or on disc. She is especially associated with the Mozart, Rossini and French repertoires and with contemporary American music, particularly the works of Jake Heggie. Among her signature roles are Penelope, Rosina, Angelina, Charlotte, Lucette, Mélisande, Hanna Glawari and Mrs de Rocher, and, in trousers, Cherubino, Hänsel, Chérubin and Octavian.
context_section_description: On October 6, 1950, Sara Fuller and her children left Le Havre on the SS America to return to the United States. The Fullers divorced in 1951. Sara von Stade established a new life for herself in Washington, D. C., working for the CIA as a secretary. Von Stade remembers her early self as a "latchkey kid" with a dynamic, clever, humorous, volatile mother whose "problem with booze" did not compromise her passionate attachment to her daughter.
  Von Stade's education began at the Holy Trinity School, Georgetown, a parochial elementary school founded by Jesuits and staffed by nuns. In grades 5 to 7, she studied at the Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, a college-preparatory school near the Bethesda Naval Hospital. When she reached grade 8, her mother took her back to the Clucases' rural homeland in New Jersey, where she spent two years at the Far Hills Country Day School before returning to the care of the nuns of the Convent of the Sacred Heart at their elite boarding college-preparatory school, no longer extant, in Noroton, Connecticut.
  Each of von Stade's closest relatives had at least some enthusiasm for music. At Yale University, her brother Charles sang in the Whiffenpoof a capella chorus; her mother liked listening to operas on the radio and to popular melodies on her Victrola record player; and her father, admired by his comrades for his attractive singing, was an amateur pianist and organist who might have studied music in college if he had survived his military service. She herself began singing when she was six or seven, pleased to discover that dressing up and performing for her family helped her to cope with a shyness so extreme that the prospect of going to a party could make her physically ill. At Stone Ridge, she sang processional music and Masses under the guidance of Mother Jan McNabb. From the age of fourteen, she began taking Saturday train rides from New Jersey to New York to see the latest musicals on Broadway; she routinely bought standing passes for a matinee and an evening performance on the same day, whiling away the interval between them by loitering outside the Metropole Cafe and eavesdropping on jazz played by Gene Krupa or Dizzy Gillespie. Among the shows that she enjoyed were Peter Pan, The Sound of Music, Camelot and Tovarich, and she went ten times to hear Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun. At school in Far Hills, she made her own first appearances in musicals in productions mounted by a teacher called Betty Noling.
  When she was sixteen, her mother took her to the Salzburg Festival to hear Karl Böhm conducting Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Christa Ludwig in Der Rosenkavalier. Despite arriving at the Festspielhaus dishevelled and wet after being driven through the rain in a leaking Volkswagen, she was spellbound by what seemed to her the most beautiful thing that she had ever heard, and she still treasures an autograph that she subsequently solicited from Schwarzkopf after glimpsing her through a restaurant window. (Another fruitful consequence of her visit to Salzburg was her discovery of the nearby village of St Wolfgang in Salzkammergut, to which she returned decades later to film Christmas with Flicka.) She was introduced to much more classical music in her senior high school years in Noroton, where she sang choral works by Mozart, Handel, Palestrina, Orlande de Lassus and Josquin des Prez. But neither Richard Strauss nor any of the other composers in the classical pantheon could seduce her away from the kind of music that won her heart in her earliest years. When she entertained her friends and family at one of their gatherings, it was invariably with pop songs or show tunes that she had picked up by ear.
caption: Von Stade saw her first opera at Salzburg's Festspielhaus, where she would later often sing herself
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