THEN &NOW THE SANTA FE OPERA By Emmaly Wiederholt
LEFT Anna Christy in ‘Lucio Silla’ photo by Ken Howard for the Santa Fe Opera; ABOVE Regina Sarfaty Rickless as Baba the Turk in The Rake’s Progress, 1957 opening season of the Santa Fe Opera; BELOW Regina Sarfaty Rickless, photo by Linda Carfagno
Then: A Cannon Went Off in the Opera World
R
egina Sarfaty Rickless, now an elegant octogenarian, was once an international opera star. She sang in all the big cosmopolitan cities: New York, London, Paris and Zurich. But before that, Regina was a student at Juilliard who just so happened to be selected to sing in the first season of the Santa Fe Opera. John Crosby — developer, founder and first general director of the Santa Fe Opera — played the piano for the opera department at Juilliard while Regina was a student. “I had no idea who he was,” she recalls. “He came to me one day and told me he was developing an opera company in Santa Fe and he wanted me to become a member. I said, ‘Where is Santa Fe?’” This was in 1957. Three months later he came to her with a contract: five operas, five parts. She was 22 years old and hadn’t yet graduated, but Crosby had confidence in her. “We rehearsed on the grass in the sunshine. There were no rehearsal facilities whatsoever,” Regina recounts. “Nobody told me it was a dry climate at
a high altitude. My nose was bleeding, my lips were cracked and I couldn’t breathe. Little by little I adjusted. I was so busy thinking about my notes and words, I didn’t have time to think if we would be successful. By the way, we sang everything in English back then, and doing operas in English is not easy. There was no such thing as the electronic libretto in those days.”