Florence Louise Pettitt - Biography

Biography

Florence Louise Staples Pettitt was born in Massachusetts in 1918.

Her father—Charles Albert Staples—was a classical cellist who played in various New England orchestras. He took Louise to countless rehearsals during her childhood. The two also performed in local theaters.

She was a high school valedictorian and mastered the cello, like her father.

She was lucky to come from a school with a very strong music program. Opera star Robert Rounseville and BSO violinist Sheldon Rotenberg were taught by her music teacher. Rounseville came back to honor and commemorate this teacher years later, in 1953, after making the internationally renowned film version of the "Tales of Hoffman".

Even in high school, Louise Pettitt was promoting opera. She and her close friend, violinist Sheldon Rotenberg, tried to create an opera club at their school.

This enthusiasm for opera never left her.

As a young woman she shifted from cello to classical singing, and sought the best training available in Boston, New York, and Providence, Rhode Island.

She trained with Gladys Childs Miller in Boston, Massachusetts, at the New England Conservatory from 1939 to 1941. Several of Miller's students went on to sing for the Vienna, Paris, and New York Metropolitan opera companies. One of them, Lillian Johnson, also came to sing for Louise in the Chaminade Opera Group. Louise also received instruction from Margaret Armstrong Gow of the Harvard Musical Association, Gertrude Erhardt, and others. She gradually became a leading soprano in the Boston area.

She sang professionally for many of Greater Boston's better known churches. One of her most prominent recurring performances was the regular weekly recital at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She later also sang at Tanglewood in the summers. And eventually, she became a member of the National Association of Teachers of Singing.

Although she devoted more hours over her long life to the production of opera than to her own singing career, and though she was eventually better known as a teacher and director, she always considered herself to be a singer, and continued to give solo vocal performances into the 1970s. During her many years of opera work, she devoted time in every week to her voice students, and she continued to sing, generally in support of Chaminade.

She also gradually gained some stage and drama experience in small local theatrical productions, and Gilbert and Sullivan; but in Massachusetts in the thirties and forties, there were few opportunities for young performers to try their hand at serious, fully staged opera.

The only fully staged operas in Boston then were generally done by New York's Met on tour at the Huntington Avenue site. Opera "scenes" were done at NEC by Goldovsky and others in Jordan Hall. There were very few opera companies in existence then, compared to the 1970s.

When Louise was finishing her studies at New England Conservatory in 1941, "..opera was then in eclipse...".

Goldovsky, when he arrived in 1942, found the opera situation in Boston "dormant". At Tanglewood, "the war shut down opera and nearly everything else..," though Goldovsky predicted "a growth in operatic productions similar to the great recent growth in symphonic performances and numbers of orchestras."

Louise performed in small theatre, opera scenes, and light opera nonetheless.

One of her earliest acting credits was a minor local production called Aunt Emma Sees It Through ( performed January 24, 1936 ).

When the faculty of Wheaton College ( Norton, Massachusetts ) formed its own Gilbert and Sullivan troupe in 1945, she became a perennial female lead for about 15 years, and never left the group.

Her later ability to conduct opera was most likely complemented and improved by her concurrent responsibility as conductor/director for that group, beginning in 1961.

She played soprano roles in other Gilbert and Sullivan productions in eastern Massachusetts in the 40s and 50s. She and her husband performed a consistent repertoire of G & S scenes professionally for various civic women's clubs (Foxboro, Framingham, Boston, etc ) under contract to "Flora Frame" of Boston in the 1950s and early 1960s.

She gave regular solo performances of arias in Boston and elsewhere. She performed in many area churches and other venues as a classical soloist in oratorios, light opera, and mixed programs. She sang at Old South Church, Trinity, St Paul's and many others.

This experience, along with her classical musicianship and vocal training prepared her for her eventual role as opera conductor.

When interest in opera grew in the late 1950s, her experience enabled her to make a vital, pioneering contribution.