Saunders, Arlene
Saunders, Arlene
Saunders, Arlerte, American soprano and teacher; b. Cleveland, Oct. 5, 1935. She studied at Baldwin-Wallace Coll. and in N.Y. She made her operatic debut as Rosalinde with the National Opera Co. in 1958, and in 1961 she won the Vercelli Vocal Competition and made her European debut as Mimi at Milan’s Teatro Nuovo. That same year, she appeared as Giorgetta in Il Tabarro at the N.Y.C. Opera. In 1964 she joined the Hamburg State Opera, where she subsequently sang regularly and was made a Kammersängerin in 1967; also appeared as Pamina at the Glyndebourne Festival (1966), as Louise at the San Francisco Opera (1967), as the creator of the title role in Ginastera’s Beatrice Cenci at the Opera Soc. in Washington, D.C. (Sept. 10, 1971), as Eva in her Metropolitan Opera debut in N.Y. (April 2, 1976), and as Minnie at London’s Covent Garden (1980); in 1985 she made her farewell appearance in opera as the Marschallin at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. She taught at Rutgers, the State Univ. of N.J. (from 1987), and at the Abraham Goodman School in N.Y. (from 1987). Among her other roles were Sieglinde, Nedda, Desdemona, Tosca, and Santuzza.
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire