Lois Hunt
Encyclopedia
Lois Hunt was an American
lyric soprano
who had spent some of her earlier career performing at New York City
's Metropolitan Opera
and later spent four decades performing and recording classical music and musical theater numbers nationwide together with baritone
Earl Wrightson
.
as Lois Harriet Marcus. She began singing while in elementary school and began a professional career after working with opera coaches in Philadelphia. She had been singing professionally for three years when a Metropolitan Opera
assistant manager who had seen her sing in a performance in Colorado
of Ludwig van Beethoven
's only opera, Fidelio
, convinced her to head to New York City
. There she earned a contract with the Met after her participation in the opera company's 1949 Auditions of the Air competition.
by Johann Strauss II
, Papagena in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
's The Magic Flute
, as well as Musetta in La bohème
and Lauretta in Gianni Schicchi
, both written by Giacomo Puccini
. She sang the role of Adele in a 1953 presentation of a 90-minute version of Die Fledermaus on television, the first created by the Met for the new medium.
She appeared on Earl Wrightson At Home in the early 1950s, having been a listener of the host's radio show when she was a teenager. She became a frequent performer on the show and developed an intimate personal relationship with Earl Wrightson that lasted for decades. The two appeared on television in the mid-1950s on The Robert Q. Lewis
Show, a variety program. They went on tour around the United States, performing musical numbers and operettas at nightclubs and concert venues. They recorded musical selections on several albums for Columbia Records
, including numbers by Jerome Kern
and Sigmund Romberg
recorded with the Percy Faith
orchestra. Their final performances together were in a 97-city tour over six months in 1979 and 1980 of The Sound of Music
, in which Hunt proudly stated that they "were the only two members of the cast whose understudies never went on", reflecting their "great pride in our professionalism and integrity".
While performing at the Shoreham Hotel
in Washington, D.C.
in the early 1960s, they received an invitation sent on behalf of Lady Bird Johnson
to perform at her home for the wives of a group of Japanese government officials who would be attending meetings at the White House
. While visiting the Johnsons' residence the evening before their performance, Hunt and Wrightson were invited upstairs to meet the vice president. Lyndon Johnson, suffering from a cold, greeted them "in his green silk pajamas with his initials, LBJ, embroidered from just below his shoulder to just above his ankle". She later joked about their having met the future president for the first time while he was in his pajamas.
at the time of her death, Hunt had earlier lived in Roosevelt, New Jersey
, having moved there in 1997 from Oyster Bay, New York
. Hunt enjoyed the culture of Roosevelt, and its "many artists and musicians". She died at age 84 on July 26, 2009, in Manhattan
due to complications of cardiac surgery
. She was survived by a son. Her marriage to Morton M. Hunt had ended in divorce, while her relationship with Wrightson ended with his death in 1993.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
lyric soprano
Lyric soprano
A lyric soprano is a type of operatic soprano that has a warm quality with a bright, full timbre which can be heard over an orchestra. The lyric soprano voice generally has a higher tessitura than a soubrette and usually plays ingenues and other sympathetic characters in opera. Lyric sopranos have...
who had spent some of her earlier career performing at New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
's Metropolitan Opera
Metropolitan Opera
The Metropolitan Opera is an opera company, located in New York City. Originally founded in 1880, the company gave its first performance on October 22, 1883. The company is operated by the non-profit Metropolitan Opera Association, with Peter Gelb as general manager...
and later spent four decades performing and recording classical music and musical theater numbers nationwide together with baritone
Baritone
Baritone is a type of male singing voice that lies between the bass and tenor voices. It is the most common male voice. Originally from the Greek , meaning deep sounding, music for this voice is typically written in the range from the second F below middle C to the F above middle C Baritone (or...
Earl Wrightson
Earl Wrightson
Earl Wrightson was an American singer and actor best known for musical theatre, concerts and television performances. His regular singing partner was the soprano Lois Hunt.-Early life and career:...
.
Early life and training
She was born in York, PennsylvaniaYork, Pennsylvania
York, known as the White Rose City , is a city located in York County, Pennsylvania, United States which is in the South Central region of the state. The population within the city limits was 43,718 at the 2010 census, which was a 7.0% increase from the 2000 count of 40,862...
as Lois Harriet Marcus. She began singing while in elementary school and began a professional career after working with opera coaches in Philadelphia. She had been singing professionally for three years when a Metropolitan Opera
Metropolitan Opera
The Metropolitan Opera is an opera company, located in New York City. Originally founded in 1880, the company gave its first performance on October 22, 1883. The company is operated by the non-profit Metropolitan Opera Association, with Peter Gelb as general manager...
assistant manager who had seen her sing in a performance in Colorado
Colorado
Colorado is a U.S. state that encompasses much of the Rocky Mountains as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of the Great Plains...
of Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential composers of all time.Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of...
's only opera, Fidelio
Fidelio
Fidelio is a German opera in two acts by Ludwig van Beethoven. It is Beethoven's only opera. The German libretto is by Joseph Sonnleithner from the French of Jean-Nicolas Bouilly which had been used for the 1798 opera Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal by Pierre Gaveaux, and for the 1804 opera Leonora...
, convinced her to head to New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. There she earned a contract with the Met after her participation in the opera company's 1949 Auditions of the Air competition.
Performing at the Met and on the road
While with the Met, Hunt sang such roles as Adele in Die FledermausDie Fledermaus
Die Fledermaus is an operetta composed by Johann Strauss II to a German libretto by Karl Haffner and Richard Genée.- Literary sources :...
by Johann Strauss II
Johann Strauss II
Johann Strauss II , also known as Johann Baptist Strauss or Johann Strauss, Jr., the Younger, or the Son , was an Austrian composer of light music, particularly dance music and operettas. He composed over 500 waltzes, polkas, quadrilles, and other types of dance music, as well as several operettas...
, Papagena in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music...
's The Magic Flute
The Magic Flute
The Magic Flute is an opera in two acts composed in 1791 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to a German libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. The work is in the form of a Singspiel, a popular form that included both singing and spoken dialogue....
, as well as Musetta in La bohème
La bohème
La bohème is an opera in four acts,Puccini called the divisions quadro, a tableau or "image", rather than atto . by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, based on Scènes de la vie de bohème by Henri Murger...
and Lauretta in Gianni Schicchi
Gianni Schicchi
Gianni Schicchi is a comic opera in one act by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Giovacchino Forzano, composed in 1917–18. The libretto is based on an incident mentioned in Dante's Divine Comedy. The work is the third and final part of Puccini's Il trittico —three one-act operas with...
, both written by Giacomo Puccini
Giacomo Puccini
Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini was an Italian composer whose operas, including La bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot, are among the most frequently performed in the standard repertoire...
. She sang the role of Adele in a 1953 presentation of a 90-minute version of Die Fledermaus on television, the first created by the Met for the new medium.
She appeared on Earl Wrightson At Home in the early 1950s, having been a listener of the host's radio show when she was a teenager. She became a frequent performer on the show and developed an intimate personal relationship with Earl Wrightson that lasted for decades. The two appeared on television in the mid-1950s on The Robert Q. Lewis
Robert Q. Lewis
Robert Q. Lewis was an American radio and television personality, game show host, and actor. Lewis added the middle initial "Q." to his name accidentally on the air in 1942, when he responded to a reference to radio comedian F. Chase Taylor's character, Colonel Lemuel Q...
Show, a variety program. They went on tour around the United States, performing musical numbers and operettas at nightclubs and concert venues. They recorded musical selections on several albums for Columbia Records
Columbia Records
Columbia Records is an American record label, owned by Japan's Sony Music Entertainment, operating under the Columbia Music Group with Aware Records. It was founded in 1888, evolving from an earlier enterprise, the American Graphophone Company — successor to the Volta Graphophone Company...
, including numbers by Jerome Kern
Jerome Kern
Jerome David Kern was an American composer of musical theatre and popular music. One of the most important American theatre composers of the early 20th century, he wrote more than 700 songs, used in over 100 stage works, including such classics as "Ol' Man River", "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man", "A...
and Sigmund Romberg
Sigmund Romberg
Sigmund Romberg was a Hungarian-born American composer, best known for his operettas.-Biography:Romberg was born as Siegmund Rosenberg to a Jewish family in Gross-Kanizsa during the Austro-Hungarian kaiserlich und königlich monarchy period...
recorded with the Percy Faith
Percy Faith
Percy Faith was a Canadian-born American bandleader, orchestrator, composer and conductor, known for his lush arrangements of pop and Christmas standards. He is often credited with creating the "easy listening" or "mood music" format which became staples of American popular music in the 1950s and...
orchestra. Their final performances together were in a 97-city tour over six months in 1979 and 1980 of The Sound of Music
The Sound of Music
The Sound of Music is a musical by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and a book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. It is based on the memoir of Maria von Trapp, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers...
, in which Hunt proudly stated that they "were the only two members of the cast whose understudies never went on", reflecting their "great pride in our professionalism and integrity".
While performing at the Shoreham Hotel
Omni Shoreham Hotel
The Shoreham Hotel is a hotel in Northwest Washington, D.C., owned by Omni Hotels. It is located at the intersection of Connecticut Avenue and Calvert Street...
in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
in the early 1960s, they received an invitation sent on behalf of Lady Bird Johnson
Lady Bird Johnson
Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Taylor Johnson was First Lady of the United States from 1963 to 1969 during the presidency of her husband Lyndon B. Johnson. Throughout her life, she was an advocate for beautification of the nation's cities and highways and conservation of natural resources and made that...
to perform at her home for the wives of a group of Japanese government officials who would be attending meetings at the White House
White House
The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., the house was designed by Irish-born James Hoban, and built between 1792 and 1800 of white-painted Aquia sandstone in the Neoclassical...
. While visiting the Johnsons' residence the evening before their performance, Hunt and Wrightson were invited upstairs to meet the vice president. Lyndon Johnson, suffering from a cold, greeted them "in his green silk pajamas with his initials, LBJ, embroidered from just below his shoulder to just above his ankle". She later joked about their having met the future president for the first time while he was in his pajamas.
Personal
A resident of Frenchtown, New JerseyFrenchtown, New Jersey
Frenchtown is a Borough in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, United States. As of the United States 2010 Census, the borough population was 1,373....
at the time of her death, Hunt had earlier lived in Roosevelt, New Jersey
Roosevelt, New Jersey
Roosevelt was originally called Jersey Homesteads, and was created during the Great Depression as part of President Roosevelt's New Deal. The town was home to a cooperative farming and manufacturing project...
, having moved there in 1997 from Oyster Bay, New York
Oyster Bay (town), New York
The Town of Oyster Bay is easternmost of the three towns in Nassau County, New York, in the United States. Part of the New York metropolitan area, it is the only town in Nassau County that extends from the North Shore to the South Shore of Long Island. As of the 2010 census, the town population was...
. Hunt enjoyed the culture of Roosevelt, and its "many artists and musicians". She died at age 84 on July 26, 2009, in Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
due to complications of cardiac surgery
Cardiac surgery
Cardiovascular surgery is surgery on the heart or great vessels performed by cardiac surgeons. Frequently, it is done to treat complications of ischemic heart disease , correct congenital heart disease, or treat valvular heart disease from various causes including endocarditis, rheumatic heart...
. She was survived by a son. Her marriage to Morton M. Hunt had ended in divorce, while her relationship with Wrightson ended with his death in 1993.