She opened her mouth, and music came out
To her surprise, poor teen found opera inside her

Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe, April 25, 2004

"Barbara Quintiliani feels that her life was saved by a talent for singing she didn't know she had until she was 16.

"Born in Quincy, the soprano grew up on the move and under difficult circumstances. There was very little money, sometimes no electricity or telephone, and there were family problems.

"In high school my shoes were taped together and I was fat," Quintiliani recalls. "I never did anything I was good at, and I was lucky not to become another statistic, a 16-year-old pregnant woman on welfare. That's right where I was headed."

"Instead Quintiliani found her voice, thanks to a high school chorus teacher in Virginia. "I needed a fine arts credit to graduate, so they put me in the chorus. I was really peeved about that, and spent my time passing notes. But then the teacher made some of us learn the solo in the Faure Requiem in order to get a passing grade.

"I had never heard that kind of music, and about the only soprano singing I had ever heard was on a cartoon soundtrack, so I just went in and mimicked that sound. I thought everyone would die laughing. Instead someone asked me who I studied voice with. I didn't know you could study voice."

"Quintiliani was taken to see the Virginia Opera's production of Carmen."I was blown away; the heavens opened and the angels sang. They let me into the School for the Performing Arts, and I was on my way. Singing brought me positive responses the way nothing else in my life ever could have."

"Just over a decade later, Quintiliani seems on the cusp of a major career. Now 27, she has sung a leading role in Mozart's Idomeneo opposite Placido Domingo at the Washington Opera; she sang for Domingo's birthday at a party in the Red Room at the White House; she is one of the recitalists being helped and promoted by the Marilyn Horne Foundation. Next year she will sing a FleetBoston Celebrity Series recital in Jordan Hall. Her debut recording is out -- Griffes's Three Poems of Fiona McLeod with the Buffalo Philharmonic under JoAnn Falletta.

"An even surer sign of incipient divahood is that a pirate recording of a recital she sang in Chicago is for sale on the Internet.

"Up to this point, she has sung recitals and engagements with community orchestras around Boston, but her only operatic role here has been offstage -- the unseen Priestess in Aida for both the Boston Lyric Opera and Boston Bel Canto Opera. This week she returns in the title role of Verdi's Luisa Miller with Opera Boston.

"Falletta describes Quintiliani's voice as "creamy," "golden," and "effortless." "She works very hard, and she is like a sponge when she is around more experienced musicians, but she also has all the things that no one could have taught her -- an instinct for how to sing, a belief in her own talent, and a basic instinct for phrasing and for music. She is living a dream and not quite sure about how it all happened to her."

"In conversation, Quintiliani projects an unusual and appealing persona: street-smart, tough, and vulnerable. She knows she has the pipes for a career as a front-rank dramatic coloratura soprano. She also knows that developing her artistry is a process, not something that will happen overnight.

"Right now, Verdi is the composer who feels the most comfortable for my voice," she says, in a typically self-aware and realistic observation. "I don't have to work for anything -- it just comes."

"Quintiliani spent her college years at the New England Conservatory, a period she regards with mixed feelings, though she is grateful for those who believed in her, like her first major teacher, Kathleen Kaun.

"She said to me, `Opera is for grown-ups,' so we started out with songs, working on communicating the text."

"During a few of those years, Quintiliani lived with her grandmother in Quincy. She also held down as many as three jobs at a time to pay the bills -- among them, selling handbags in the Prudential Center and cleaning bathrooms in the conservatory dormitory. Often she was too tired to work on her voice.

"Her time in the opera program was brief because she found herself sewing buttons on costumes instead of singing.

"The good news was that the conservatory is where she met her husband, Stewart Schroeder, then a bassoonist, now a health fund administrator in Washington, D.C., "where he works 9 to 5 to support my singing habit," Quintiliani says. And she found her teacher in fellow student Anna Gabrieli, who in her very first lesson helped release the high C that Quintiliani and her former teachers had never been able to find.

"The most dramatic event in Quintiliani's Boston years was a catastrophic fire in the Dorchester building where Quintiliani and Schroeder lived.

"We were eating dinner when the battery alarm went off. I opened the door, and there was a wall of smoke. I went to call 911 and the phone went dead. The Fox 25 news van was there before the fire department, and they didn't have any ladders. Finally a truck with a ladder came. We were lying on the floor and saying `I love you' to each other when a fireman found me by stepping on me and breaking my foot!

"We went to the station a few days later to take some flowers and say thank you, and I told the fireman he had my permission to call himself Superman. All I had to my name was a pair of unmatched shoes and a sweatsuit the Red Cross gave me -- but we were alive, and that was all that mattered."

"After Boston, Quintiliani went to the Houston Grand Opera, where she studied in its program for young artists. Then she moved on to the young artists' program at the Washington Opera, where she sang Donna Anna in Don Giovanni and Elettra in Mozart's Idomeneo.

"I loved that experience. Idomeneo was the first time I actually sang a role with arias onstage. The company didn't treat its young artists as apprentices, but as professionals who were there to do a job. I was in the second cast, but they did give me a stage rehearsal, and Placido Domingo himself came in to work with me on our scenes together. It was a sink-or-swim situation, and it brought me up to the next level."

"Quintiliani -- who is short (5-foot-3) and solidly built, but by no means "fat" any longer -- has already suffered from the phenomenon she calls "lookism" in opera. She was dropped from a Wagner production in Washington because the director didn't think she looked like a Valkyrie.

"But she is characteristically unfazed. "What can I say? I know I'm not a supermodel, but I look good in costumes and know how to move," she says. "The famous 19th-century voice teacher Giovanni Battista Lamperti said that if you thirst after beauty or wisdom, you become beautiful. I have a big voice and I am learning how to use it. There is a lot of pressure to be everything to everybody, but I have learned what I don't do well and prefer not to do it again -- what's the point of that? I just want to get out there and do my thing, and people will respond."

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