Noted Opera Singer Had Deep Hamilton Roots

BY RICHARD O JONES

TO LOCAL MUSIC lovers, she was known as Cyrena Pocock, a Camden girl with deep Hamilton ties, but to the world of opera, she was called “the Stradivarius of voices” and her professional name, Cyrena van Gordon.

Her mother was Cora Murphy, whose father was one of the founders of the Miami Valley National Bank in Hamilton, which consolidated with the First National Bank. Her mother was from the pioneering van Gordon family and her brothers were Clarence Murphy, a long-time Butler County Common Pleas Court judge, and William E. Murphy, who had been an Ohio Legislature representative from Preble County. In 1872, Cora married Oscar Pocock at the First Methodist Church on Ludlow Street, and settled in Camden, just over the Preble county line north of Seven Mile.

On September 4, 1892, the Pococks had their only child, Cyrena van Gordon Pocock.

As a child, Cyrena began singing in the choir at the First Methodist Church and soon became a featured soloist there, at the Presbyterian Church, and recitals all over Hamilton, Oxford, and Preble County. At the age of 15, Cyrena enrolled at the Cincinnati College of Music as a piano student. One day, she was practicing the piano and singing along. “Her voice so rich, clear, and powerful” that the college’s famed voice teacher, Mme. Dotti overheard her and immediately took her under her wing, according to a Cincinnati Enquirer feature. “Renowned, even in her student days [she] was destined to become in later years one of the foremost singers of operatic roles.”

She graduated from Camden High School in 1910, then in 1912, a “childhood romance” compelled her to elope to Greensburg, Ohio, to marry Shirley B. Munns, an Oxford ear, nose, and throat specialist, but she continued her operatic training and singing performances.

In the spring of 1913, the famous Italian conductor Cleofonte Campanini, then the artistic director of the Chicago Opera, saw Cyrena performing at “The Pageant of Dark and Lightness” in Cincinnati. “He pronounced her voice the most promising contralto that he had heard in this county,” the Evening Journal would report on her Chicago debut. She spent the summer mastering ten different roles and studying with linguists to learn Italian pronunciation in preparation for her first season with the Chicago Opera Company. She did not begin her career with minor roles but as a star.

A dozen or so Hamilton residents trekked to Chicago that November when Cyrena made her debut there as Amneris in “Aida,” which left the Chicago critics amazed: “She is vocally and physically well adapted to take the heroic roles in grand opera impressively. She is statuesque in style and temperamentally brilliant... She is more than commonly tall [about six feet, according to other reports], splendidly well-proportioned, graceful, and good-looking woman.”

In 1919, Cyrena went to the East Coast and performed Amneris for an audience of 30 or 50,000 at a racetrack in Sheepshead Bay in August and made her New York debut in October at the Aeolian Hall, where she was again the darling of big-city media. The New York Tribune wrote: “Miss van Gordon has many things in her favor. There are few women as handsome either in face or figure who are before the public today, and few with more beautiful and none fresher, voices. It is a voice of truly luscious quality, sufficiently powerful, and possesses no breaks throughout its scale.”

More than 300 Hamilton residents, dubbing themselves “Cyrena’s Own,” took the train to Cincinnati Music Hall on March 18, 1921, for the first of three performances of “Lohengrin,” Cyrena’s first homecoming performance. The local press estimated the event garnered some $1,600 in Hamilton ticket sales.

“Her ascent in the field of grand opera although her success was practically instantaneous,” the Evening Journal noted when she came to Cincinnati again in 1925 in “La Gioconda,” sadly noting that her role as Laura was not among her “most important,” although her voice was “marvelously rich and flexible.” When she returned in 1926 to sing the role that made her famous, the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune gave a particularly glowing review: “Cyrena van Gordon, opulent of voice and picturesque to see, was an almost ideal Amneris.”

She made several recordings for Columbia Records and many highprofile performances in New York (including the prestigious Metropolitan Opera Company), Philadelphia, and San Francisco. In 1922, she sang six concerts at Wrigley Field in Chicago on a platform built over the baseball diamond, the conductor on the pitcher’s mound. Producers installed electric lighting for the event, 66 years before the stadium would install a permanent system. In 1933, she sang “The Star Spangled Banner” for the opening of the Chicago World’s Fair. In 1935, she performed for Eleanor Roosevelt at a White House luncheon.

While she traveled the world with opera companies, Dr. Munns maintained his medical practice, first in Oxford and then in Chicago, but that union ended in August, 1931, in a publicized divorce. Cyrena claimed that Dr. Munns had become abusive and had struck her twice, once in January “after a social gathering,” and once in June, when “Dr. Munns knocked her unconscious to the floor at their home.” The doctor did not contest the charges and she asked for no alimony because she was “self-supporting.” The following year she married Howard Smith, a millionaire with homes in New York and San Francisco.

Cyrena did not perform in Hamilton after her days as a church soloist, but in November 1935, the city got quite excited when a front-page story announced a recital at Hamilton High School in a benefit for the Musical Arts Club. Sadly, the concert was canceled at the last minute, no cause given.

She died at the age of 67 in New York’s Bellvue Hospital, and her body was returned to Camden to be buried beside her parents.