Eleanor Steber (July 17, 1914 – October 3, 1990) was an American soprano and voice teacher. She was particularly celebrated for her performances in the operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Strauss. A native of West Virginia, she was educated at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston where she began her performance career in the 1930s. She made her opera debut in 1936 at the Boston Opera House as Senta in Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman.
In 1940 Steber won the Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air competition which garnered her a contract with the Metropolitan Opera ("the Met"). She was a leading soprano at the Met for 22 continuous years during which time she gave more than 400 performances in more than 30 roles. Disagreements between Steber and the Met's director Rudolph Bing led up to his decision not to renew Steber's contract after a December 1962 performance as Donna Anna in Don Giovanni. She later returned to the Met in 1966 for a final opera appearance as Minnie in Puccini's La Fanciulla del West.
Steber's career was mainly based in the United States, and she only made a relatively small number of appearances abroad. These included performances at the Bayreuth Festival, the Edinburgh Festival, the Glyndebourne Festival, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, and the Salzburg Festival. She was a charter member of the Lyric Opera of Chicago when it was founded in 1954. She performed the title role in Puccini's Tosca during the company's first season, and performed regularly with the company during the 1950s. She also worked as a guest artist with other American opera companies into the 1970s; including performances with the San Francisco Opera and the Santa Fe Opera. She was a prolific recording artist; performing on more than 100 albums.
Steber was the head of the voice department at the Cleveland Institute of Music from 1963 to 1972, and later taught voice on the faculties of the Juilliard School and Brooklyn College.
The daughter of William Charles Steber, Sr, and Ida Amelia (née Nolte) Steber, Eleanor Steber was born in Wheeling, West Virginia on July 17, 1914. Her paternal grandfather anglicized the family name from Stuber to Steber. Her father was a bank teller. She was the oldest of three children in the Steber family; with her siblings including William Charles Jr. (born 1917) and Lucile (born 1918). For the first three years of her life she lived above the general store owned and operated by her grandparents in Wheeling. When she was four years old the Steber family moved to Warwood, West Virginia.
As a child, Steber studied piano and singing with her mother who was a music teacher and church musician. Her mother performed locally as a soprano, pianist, and church organist. She sang her first church solo at the age of 4, and attended Warwood High School (WHS) where she performed in school plays. She obtained her first paid job as a singer while in high school; working as the resident soprano at Second Presbyterian Church in Wheeling from the age of 16. She graduated from WHS in 1931, and then spent the next two years studying drama at the Idabel Waggoner School of Dramatic Art in Wheeling.
New England Conservatory and first marriage
Steber's mother was responsible for pushing Eleanor into a more competitive conservatory outside of West Virginia; an academic pursuit her father opposed. It was her mother who selected the New England Conservatory of Music (NECM) in Boston, and encouraged her daughter to pursue training as a concert pianist at that school. After successfully auditioning for Charles Dennée, Steber was admitted as a piano major at the NECM in 1933. Her parents paid her tuition for her first year of study, and she paid for her remaining education through of a combination of scholarships and money she earned working as an accompanist.
In her first year at the NECM, Steber was a piano student of Dennée and also studied voice with William L. Whitney. With Whitney's support she switched to being a voice major. Whitney was the head of NECM's voice department and had studied singing with Luigi Vannuccini in Florence. Steber credited Whitney with grounding her in a solid bel canto technique. In 1936 she performed in the world premiere of Keith Crosby Brown's operetta Who Discovered America? which was performed by students of the NECM in a national radio broadcast. She graduated from the NECM in 1938.
Steber married fellow singer and NECM student Edwin Lee Bilby in September 1938. The marriage ended in divorce in 1954. They did not have children.
Steber began her performance career while a student at the NECM as a soprano with the Barnstormers, a Boston group that performed concerts at high schools in Boston in the surrounding region. She also worked as a church musician at Tremont Temple (TT) and Union Congregational Church in Boston, and Eliott Church of Newton, Massachusetts. In January 1936 she was the soprano soloist in Felix Mendelssohn's Lobgesang at Jordan Hall under conductor Ernst Hoffmann in a concert sponsored by the Works Project Administration (WPA). She made her professional opera debut the following September under Hoffmann's baton at the Boston Opera House as Senta in Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman in a production mounted by the WPA.
In her early career Steber worked as a radio singer on a variety of programs out of Boston; one of them being the I. J. Fox Fur Trappers Radio Show. In March 1937 she performed in another WPA concert at Sanders Theatre at Harvard University as the soprano soloist in Felix Mendelssohn's Elijah with conductor A. Buckingham Simson. She returned to that theatre the following December as a soloist in another oratorio by Mendelssohn, St. Paul. That same month she was the soprano soloist in Handel's Messiah at the TT under conductor George Sawyer Dunham. In 1938 she performed with the Boston Pops at Symphony Hall singing the aria "Pace, pace, mio Dio!" from Verdi's La forza del destino.
In May 1939 Steber won second prize in the national music competition given by the National Federation of Music Clubs with first prize going to Martha Lipton. Shortly after this competition win she moved to New York City to pursue further training after being advised to do so by her teacher, William L. Whitney. She studied with tenor Paul Althouse in New York. In November 1939 she won the first round of the Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air (MOAA) contest by which time she was working as a resident soprano at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew (CSPSA). She worked as a singer at CSPSA on an intermittent basis for the remainder of her career. In March 1940 she won the finals of the MOAA competition which earned her a contract with the Metropolitan Opera ("the Met"). The press from this win led to her giving a 1940 concert tour of the United States; the first of many such tours she gave during her career.
Steber made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera House on December 7, 1940 as Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier. The Met became her artistic home, and she sang their annually for 22 years; performing 33 different characters in more than 400 performances. In her first season with the company she performed the roles of the Forest Bird in Siegfried, Woglinde in both Götterdämmerung and Das Rheingold, a Flower Maiden in Parsifal, and Micaela in Carmen.
At the Met Steber became celebrated for her lyrical interpretations of characters in operas by Mozart; portraying such parts as Countess Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro, Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte, Pamina in The Magic Flute, and Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni. In 1946 she performed the role of Constanze in the Met's first staging of Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. She was also much admired at the Met for her performances in the operas of Richard Strauss. In 1955 she sang the title role in the United States premiere of Strauss's Arabella at the Met. Her other important Strauss character was the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier which she added to her repertoire as her voice grew in size.