OBITUARIES.(Frances Bible, opera singer)

FRANCES BIBLE, January 26, 1919 -- January 29, 2001

Frances Bible was cheated by destiny. She never quite achieved the international recognition she deserved.

Bible had it all -- a mellow, wide-ranging mezzo-soprano, an attractive stage presence, genuine theatrical flair, a probing mind and a technique that allowed her to sing bel-canto filigree one night, Verdian drama the next. She was one of the rare American singers who savor the English language. She understood the value of economy/never stooping to easy effects. Perhaps she was too versatile, too tasteful and -- dare one say it? -- too intelligent for her own good.

It may have been her misfortune to be a fixture at New York City Opera at a time when that house lacked glamour. Her colleague Beverly Sills succeeded in moving onward and upward, after some initial difficulty. Her colleague Norman Treigle did not.

Bible had to cope with formidable competition in any case. Rise Stevens and Blanche Thebom were at the Met. Her best years happened to overlap with the prime of Simionato, Barbieri, Berganza and Ludwig. Still, those who experienced her impetuous yet intense Octavian, her adorably giddy Dorabella, her virtuoso Cenerentola, her brooding Ulrica, her charmingly befuddled Nicklausse and her tragically restrained Ottavia in L'Incoronazione di Poppea will not forget her. No one really surpassed her heroic assurance and magnetic ease in trouser roles. Dignified and warm, tough only on the surface, she owned the role of Augusta Tabor in The Ballad of Baby Doe, owned it so persuasively that most observers thought she had created it. (That task actually fell to Martha Lipton.) Bible did create Elizabeth Proctor in Robert Ward's The Crucible. She sang Evadne in the U.S. premiere of Walton's Troilus and Cressida and undertook numerous modern challenges that turned out to be more difficult than memorable.

Born in Sackets Harbor, New York, Bible was trained at Juilliard under Queena Mario. She made her City Opera debut as the offstage Shepherd's voice in Tosca in 1948 and remained with the company until 1977. She enjoyed successes in Glyndebourne, San Francisco, Dublin and most of America's second-tier houses. She sang concerts everywhere, did pioneer service with NBC-TV Opera, recorded a bit (Augusta Tabor, of course) and upon retirement from the stage taught at Rice University in Houston. She spent her final years quietly in Hemet, California, at the foot of Mount San Jacinto. Her obituaries disclosed one detail uncharacteristic for a woman who seemed a stranger to vanity: she was born in 1919, not, as official biographies claimed, in 1927.

...