Rosa Ponselle

Rosa Ponselle was born to Neapolitan immigrants in Conneticut. She was a natural-born singer and launched a career first in Vaudville, where she was working in 1918, when Enrico Caruso discovered her and persuaded her to join the Metropolitan Opera. Her debut occurred in Verdi's "La Forza del Destino" as Leonora. She had had no formal training as an opera singer and for nearly twenty years thereafter managed great successes as a soprano at the Met and in other opera houses in America and Europe.

After her retirement from the Metropolitan Opera House in 1935, Louis B. Mayer offered her a contract with MGM. Ms. Ponselle was not interested, but did not say "no"; instead she asked for a very large fee, so large that Mr. Mayer is reputed to have rolled his eyes upward (to heaven perhaps) and indignantly asked her agent, "How did Miss Ponselle arrive at this figure? Did she add up all the numbers in the Los Angeles telephone Book?" Needless to say, Rosa Ponselle did not go to work for MGM.

Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Volume One, 1981-1985, pages 645-647. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1998.

Pictured on one of a set of four 32¢ US commemorative postage stamps in the Legends of American Music series, issued 10 September 1997, celebrating opera singers. Other singers honored in this issue are Lily Pons, Lawrence Tibbett, and Richard Tucker.

Inducted into the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame in 1998.