Home of Mary Curtis-Verna
101 Federal Street
Mary Curtis-Verna (b. 1921) is Salem’s contribution to the
world of opera. The daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Charles Curtis of Salem
(her father was a surgeon and her mother taught piano), Mary was
one of five children and apparently showed no real interest in music
as a young girl. As a teenager, she was a volunteer for the Salem
Hospital Aid Association (see S11) that
supported her father’s place of employment. After graduating
from Salem High School, Mary attended Hollins Women’s College
in Virginia and there discovered her love of music. She then went
to New York to study at the Julliard School of Music and began training
with the famous voice teacher, Ettore Verna, whom she later married.
When both of her parents died in 1947, Mary threw herself into her
music, touring with opera companies throughout Europe. Her opera
debut at the Lyric Theater in Milan, Italy, was her “big break,”
and she soon sang the role of Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello.
The next important step was her debut with La Scala in Milan, followed
by her first appearance at the Boston Opera House in 1956 in Tosca,
and her first performance with New York’s Metropolitan Opera
Company in 1957 as Leonora in Il Trovatore. Mary performed
with the Met for nearly a decade before retiring to teach at the
University of Washington. The Salem Evening News kept a close
eye on Mary’s career, describing her in 1956 as “manifesting
a marked appetite for the dramatics attendant to opera early in
life,” and that “she has been ranked among the top contemporary
dramatic sopranos as one capable of stepping into any one of more
than 25 operatic roles, including most of the compositions of the
old masters.”49 In 1954, Mary
helped the church she had attended as a child, the First Church
in Salem, celebrate its three hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary
by giving a concert. In 1957, she did the same for the Salem Hospital.
Salem Mayor Francis Collins proclaimed that day, May 4, 1957, Mary
Curtis-Verna Day. In an interview she told the Salem Evening News
that “the encouragement [of Salem people] wasn’t just
in the beginning. It was all the way through.”50
Notes
49. Salem Evening News, Sept. 27, 1956.
50. Ibid., May 5, 1957.
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