Martina Arroyo - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Arroyo was born in New York City, the younger of two children of Demetrio Arroyo, originally from from Puerto Rico, and Lucille Washington, a native of Charleston, South Carolina. Her older brother grew up to become a Baptist minister. The family lived in Harlem near St. Nicholas Avenue and 111th Street. Demetrio was a mechanical engineer at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and earned a good salary which enabled Arroyo's mother to stay at home with their children. His job also allowed the family to experience New York's fine cultural offerings and the family frequented museums, concerts, and the theatre. It was attending several performances of Broadway shows during the 1940s that first inspired Arroyo's interest in becoming a performer. Her mother humored her dreams and allowed Arroyo to take ballet classes. Her mother was also a talented amateur classical pianist and taught her daughter to play the instrument. Arroyo's other musical experiences as a child were largely through singing in the choirs at her Baptist church and as a student at Hunter College High School.

After finishing high school in 1953, Arroyo attended Hunter College where she earned a B.A. in Romance languages in 1956 at the young age of nineteen. While there she studied voice as a hobby in an opera workshop with Joseph Turnau. Turnau recognized that Martina was a major talent that just needed proper training, and, after the workshop ended, he introduced her to voice instructor Marinka Gurewich. Gurewich immediately took Arroyo on as a student but she did not take her training as seriously as Gurewich wanted and Gurewich eventually threatened to end their lessons. Arroyo said of the incident, "It was a real wake-up call. Up to then, I must have been, in my mind, treating singing as a hobby, a lark--something I loved that I was dabbling in." She further explained that at that point most of the major opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, had never cast a black singer, so in her mind "opera wasn't a real possibility." Gurewich's threat, however, forced her to take her studies more seriously and she continued to study with her until Gurewich's death in 1990. Another important partnership formed around this time was with concert manager Thea Dispeker who, after attending one of Arroyo's recitals, offered her services at no charge until Arroyo's career took off. Dispeker helped manage much of Arroyo's career over the next several decades.

After graduating from college, Arroyo was faced with the difficulty of working while trying to study singing. Under the advice of her mother, she became an English teacher at Bronx High School in the Fall of 1956 but found it difficult to balance her teaching responsibilities with continued training under Gurewich. She decided to leave her teaching position and take work as a social worker at the East End Welfare Center. For two years, she managed a case load of over 100 welfare recipients while continuing her voice training. Arroyo found the work fulfilling and stated of the experience, "My life had been centered on music for so long, and suddenly there I was, deeply involved in other people's problems,".

In 1957 Arroyo auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera but was not accepted. Somewhat disheartened, Arroyo flirted with the idea of becoming an academic and began working on a Masters degree in comparative literature at New York University with a dissertation on Ignacio Silone's Pane e Vino and Vino e Pane. The following year she competed in and won the Metropolitan Opera's Audition of the Air competition (pre-cursor to the National Council Auditions), earning a $1,000 cash prize and a scholarship to the Met's Kathryn Long School. She dropped out of NYU and entered the Kathryn Long School in the Fall of 1957 where she studied singing, drama, German, English diction, and fencing. While at the school, she was offered the role of the First coryphée in the American premiere of Ildebrando Pizzetti's Murder in the Cathedral to be performed at a festival in upstate New York. The concert, however, was rained out and was rescheduled for a performance at Carnegie Hall instead on September 17, 1958. The performance marked Arroyo's first professional appearance singing in an opera. The New York Times said of her performance, "Martina Arroyo is a gifted soprano who appears to have remarkable potential, and she sang with a voice of amplitude and lovely color."

In February 1959 Arroyo sang the title role in Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride in a concert version with the Little Orchestra Society at Town Hall. Shortly thereafter she made her debut on the opera stage at the Metropolitan Opera as the Celestial Voice in Giuseppe Verdi's Don Carlo on March 14, 1959 with Eugenio Fernandi in the title role, Leonie Rysanek as Elizabeth, Robert Merrill as Rodrigo, and Nell Rankin as Princess Eboli. This was the beginning of a long association with the Met and the beginning of a lengthy career on the opera stage.