Word: flicka
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Flicka's current range of roles is in some ways limited. Her voice carries like a laser beam into the farthest reaches of an opera house, but because it is not large she shies away from the heavy Verdi and Puccini, not to mention Wagner. She may be ready for some of that music in five to ten years, although she herself doubts it. For now it is enough that she sings Mozart (Cherubino in Figaro, Dorabella in Cost fan Tutte) with exquisite taste, control and sheen. Or that she can blend the impetuous and the spiritual so deftly...
That she does. Growing up in Somerville, N.J., Flicka was a tomboy. Horses were a special passion, and her nickname came from her fondness for the popular novel about a horse, My Friend Flicka. Her father, who was killed in action in World War II, came from a family of polo players. Her mother traces her ancestry back to Jonathan Trumbull, an early governor of Connecticut. At one point after she was widowed, her mother ran a combination restaurant and catering service with the help of Flicka and her brother. Flicka now easily throws together an impromptu meal for dozens...
Real Bitch. Still a devout Catholic. Flicka went to convent schools. At 18 she hired on as a nanny in Paris to learn French, later worked as a salesgirl at Tiffany. In those days, and even when she attended the Mannes College of Music, she was more interested in the theater than in opera. "Give me Broadway any day," she said after her first visit to the Met, and she still appreciates the artistry of Barbra Streisand, Billie Holiday and Peggy...
...Flicka has said that she will take off the season of 1978-79, a lucrative period at this stage in her career. She plans to spend more time with her husband of three years, Peter Elkus, a baritone who is just getting his own career going. She wants to have children and do more lieder singing, where, she says, "you paint everything with your voice...
...against those who like her just the way she is ("She really is an angel," says Sebastian Engleberg, her voice teacher for ten years), there are others who feel that Flicka's full potential has yet to be tapped. One of those is veteran Stage Director Frank Corsaro, who worked with her at the Houston première of The Seagull. Corsaro senses a certain turbulence, even aggressiveness inside Flicka. "I would love to see her play a real bitch," he says. The most immediate possibility is the neurotic, highly sexed Fennimore in Delius' Fennimore and Gerda, which...