Cover story: Evelyn Mandac is the unrivaled Filipina opera diva

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Known to the opera world as “La Mandac”, she was the first and still is the only Filipina to sing major roles at the Metropolitan Opera. She broke glass ceilings in the world of opera, yet the Philippine’s greatest diva has shown that humility is class.

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On her first audition for the New York Metropolitan Opera, the obligatory aria was fortuitous. It was one of her signature favorites – “Ach ich fühl’s,” Pamina’s melancholic aria in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Auditions at the Met are formidable, requiring singing with a focused sound and the standards are sternly high on that singular yardstick.

She passed the test. And so began a career that brought Evelyn Mandac to the world’s opera stage.

I shy away from honors. It’s not important.”

Opera diva Evelyn Mandac on remaining grounded.

Writing about Mandac entails two challenges. First, the writer has to pluck her out of anonymity with which she lives her life. Second, it is like shrinking her opera world to the size of a few words when one is awed at her immense body of works. Plus, one is daunted at the prospect of interviewing an opera diva of deluxe credentials. All that went away as she quietly entered. Ms. Mandac was infinitely humble and warmly engaging. And we were right in her neighborhood as she had requested – a French resto along Broadway where she keeps residence. The waitpersons were familiar with her.

There were faint traces of hint in Mandac’s childhood on the fate of reaching world-class stature. She was born to a military family. Her father was a civil engineer, a graduate of UP Engineering. He was also in the UP Vanguard corps of cadets and decided to enter the military after graduation. Evelyn was born in the lush Mindanao highlands of Malaybalay, Bukidnon where her father was assigned to do infrastructure work. Mrs. Noemi Lorenzana Mandac, a native of Tagudin, Ilocos Sur, was a teacher.

“In opera, I haven’t met anybody who is really bad – meaning to say ‘diva.’ Not at all! In fact they are so humble. I didn’t even experience racism.”

Filipino opera diva Evelyn Mandac

After Bukidnon, Colonel Manuel Mandac was sent to Fort Benning in Georgia for studies. President Diosdado Macapagal promoted him to Brigadier General later in 1965 and he became commander of Camp Evangelista in Cagayan de Oro. The Mandac children were made to study in Manila. There was however, one indication that kept the gates open for a singing career. Both the general and his wife, who were avid church choir singers in their younger years, inclined the young Evelyn to do church solos. When the time came for her to choose college studies, she chose the University of the Philippines Conservatory of Music.

Just a saling-pusa

In Manila’s voice community of the time, the two prolific stars were the lirico-spinto soprano Conching Rosal and the coloratura soprano Fides Cuyugan Asencio, now National Artist. “I was just saling-pusa to them,” Evelyn self-deprecated to mean she was just an accidental participant. “I never thought that I’d sing opera at all. Not at all!”

But there was one voice pedagogue who had just come from studies abroad. The baritone Aurelio Estanislao (2nd prize winner, 1954 Concours International d’Execution Musicale de Genève) taught her to love art songs in French, Italian, German and Spanish. “He taught me so many things about the ‘art song,’ which is ‘lieder’ as they would say in German or the ‘kundiman’ as they would say in the Philippines.”

One Manila evening, she was invited to sing in a soiree where among the guests were US ambassador William E. Stevenson and his cultural attaché Edward Mattos. “You should be abroad. I’ll get you a scholarship,” the ambassador told her, which struck her as weird because that wasn’t in her radar. Stevenson was former president of Oberlin.

The Oberlin College’s Conservatory of Music in Ohio was the oldest continuously operating conservatory of music in the United States. And so in February 1964, Evelyn packed her bags to the United States as a music scholar.

The Oberlin had a famous choral tradition in the Oberlin Musical Union conducted by the legendary choral conductor Robert Fountain. Fountain had scheduled a performance of the Sea Symphony, Ralph Vaughan Williams hour-long work for soprano, baritone, chorus and large orchestra. There was one major problem though. Oberlin also had a tradition of sending its junior students for a year at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. There were no singers to perform. Without a by-your-leave, Fountain turned to Mandac, “You will be the soloist.”

Fountain was so pleased with her performance that he brought her to sing at a concert in Anchorage, Alaska. It was just right after the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964 and Anchorage was a scene of toppled buildings and gaping streets. It was desolation, but the show went on. That was Mandac’s first venture in professional performance. “There were Filipinos there, coming backstage. They were so sweet.”

Although she was by then taken by opera, she had her sights set elsewhere. She had wanted to take up her masters in music and Oberlin had only an undergraduate conservatory. She stayed at Oberlin for only one semester.

“I was a Lilliput, an unknown among these great stars. Nothing like singing with big singers and big conductors. The quality of expectation is very high. So you have to really give your best, to be at par.”

Filipino Opera diva Evelyn Mandac on working with opera greats

A full Rockefeller scholarship at Juilliard

Mandac wanted to try her luck in the Juilliard School of Music or in Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music because both had good opera theaters. She was accepted in both. Carlos P. Romulo, who was the president of UP (1962-1968), heard of this UP music alumni’s plans. He got her a full Rockefeller Scholarship for Juilliard.

She was now in the cream of all music schools in the US. But first, there was the obligatory audition. When Juilliard’s professors heard her sing, they asked her, “Are you European trained?” She replied, “No, it’s local training, in the Philippines.” She credits that to Aurelio Estanislao.

The allure of opera obsessed her more at Juilliard. Perhaps this was her time, she mused. She badly wanted to audition for the opera stage. The director however, had bad news. She was told she could not be hired that semester because there were too many sopranos. “Try again next semester,” he said. And that, she thought, was the end of her dreams, of her life even. Little did she know of what was to come.

“I was just a student of the Masters for Vocal Performance. West gave me everything. I was like a sponge. I had a voice, but I didn’t even know if I could act. I was very shy on stage. West trained me.”

Opera diva Evelyn Mandac on director Christopher West

The girl slated to take the lead role had just graduated. Lo and behold, the role was passed on to Evelyn, an unknown. It was the role of Pamina in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. When she did so well, the director then gave her another role, Mimi in Puccini’s La Boheme. And after that another one, and so forth and so on.

The man responsible for picking that unknown student was director of the Juilliard Opera Theater, Christopher West. Fame had preceded West as the British stage director of the Royal Opera House at London’s Covent Garden.

“I was just a student of the Masters for Vocal Performance. West gave me everything. I was like a sponge. I had a voice, but I didn’t even know if I could act. I was very shy on stage. West trained me.”

Following her Juilliard graduation, Evelyn made her professional debut as lyric soprano in the Carl Orff cantata Carmina Burana in Mobile, Alabama in 1968. Again, fortune followed that debut. A year later, in 1969, RCA Gold Seal Records recorded her Carmina Burana performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the baton of the Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa of multiple accolades fame. Today, her voice can be heard on YouTube rendering Stetit Puella, Dulcissime, In trutina, and Tempus est iocundum.

Conquering the Metropolitan Opera

And then came the break that was to bind her to stellar status – the New York Metropolitan Opera. The audition was for the lead role of Lauretta in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi and she got accepted. That was the signal introduction to what turned out to be a luminous career in world opera. Until today, no other Filipina opera diva has sung at the New York Met. It is a record that persists as unrivaled. The Met was also home to Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi. It is said that the American soprano Beverly Sills had to wait until the latter part of her career before her voice was heard on the Met’s stage.

As the 1960s was merely a vinyl world compared to today, her reputation rose to fame even among fellow opera stars. Singing as the slave girl Liu in Puccini’s Turandot in Vancouver with the tenor Bernabé Marti who played Prince Calaf, she caught chicken pox during rehearsals. There were only three performances and she missed the first two, doing only the last night. Marti’s wife, Spanish soprano Montserrat Caballé, called her to commiserate. “This is Montserrat. I heard you got sick. My husband tells me you sing like an angel,” Caballé comforted her.

“I was a Lilliput, an unknown among these great stars. Nothing like singing with big singers and big conductors. The quality of expectation is very high. So you have to really give your best, to be at par.”

The Evelyn Mandac repertoire is formidably extensive. She has played Ines in L’Africaine with Placido Domingo and Shirley Verrett at the San Francisco Opera (which has a live performance recording); Liu in Turandot with Birgit Nilsson at Seattle Opera and with Birgit Nillson and Richard Tucker at the San Antonio Opera; Almirena in Handel’s Rinaldo with Marilyn Horne at the Houston Grand Opera; Zerlina in Don Giovanni, and Gretel in Hansel und Gretel at the New York Metropolitan Opera; Mélisande in Pelleas et Mélisande at the Santa Fe Opera and at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma; Mimi in La Boheme at the Washington National Opera and Seattle Opera; Anne Truelove in The Rake’s Progress at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC and Jules Massenet’s Manon with the Washington National Opera; Pamina in Die Zauberflöte with the Lyon Opera in France; Gilda in Rigoletto at the Geneva Opera; Norina in Don Pasquale at the Holland Opera Festival; and Susannah in Le Nozze di Figaro with Kiri Te Kanawa, and Despina in Cosi fan tutte at the Glyndebourne Opera Festival conducted by John Pritchard. At the Salzburg Festival in Austria, she was conducted by Herbert von Karajan, generally regarded as one of the greatest conductors of the 20th century. She had also sung in Mahler’s 2nd for the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by the renowned Eugene Ormandy. The reader is warned that this list is not even complete.

L’Africaine is a very lengthy opera. The director was thinking of cutting Evelyn’s parts. Placido Domingo interjected, “Don’t cut her part. Cut MY part!” and she did her two arias. “In opera, I haven’t met anybody who is really bad – meaning to say ‘diva.’ Not at all! In fact they are so humble. In my experience, Jennie Tourel the mezzo soprano, Placido Domingo, Birgit Nillson, you name it, these people are generous. I didn’t even experience racism.” Richard Tucker, the American tenor, once assured her that if she felt nervous, he would just hold her hand during their scenes together in Turandot.

She was animated as she narrated her first-person brushes with these stars, as though these weren’t things of the past.

Evelyn has sung at five American premieres (one of which was also performed in Turino, Italy) and two world premieres for the opera Ines de Castro (Baltimore Opera) and Black Widow (Seattle Opera), both composed by Thomas Pasatieri specifically for her voice range and acting prowess.

Living a secluded tranquil life

For daily routines, Evelyn did musical practices that she did as a disciplined regimen. She liked learning everyone’s part, not just her own. “You do a lot of mental work. You have to internalize the essence of the character you do.”

In 1980, Evelyn Mandac, the Filipino lyric soprano of world acclaim, retired from the opera stage. Today she lives a life of secluded tranquility as a Filipino expatriate in New York City. She shares home, just a few steps away from the former campus of Juilliard near Columbia University, with her Indian husband of many years. They had met at the International House where she had boarded for her student years. Her husband was in the investment banking profession. They never had children. “How can I have children when my music is my children.”

In 2008, she went home to the Philippines to sing with her fellow conservatory alumni for the University of the Philippines Centennial Concert. She made another homecoming in 2011 and conducted two master classes for young students in Manila arranged by the Philippine Opera Company.

“How can I have children when my music is my children.”

Filipino opera diva Evelyn Mandac

It was not a breeze to find Evelyn Mandac and make her sit for an interview.

But there was one Google entry that eventually led me to her. After retirement, she established the Evelyn Mandac Music Studio. She had become a pedagogue, imparting her own brand of bel canto, the Italian vocal technique of the 18th century with its emphasis on beauty of sound and brilliance of performance, while also highlighting dramatic and emotive expression. She has also adjusted to 21st century technology, doing virtual classes online.

Among her students is the US-based Filipina Chiara Cox. Evelyn is no master at archiving all her rave reviews. “I sent them all to my mother and they are nowhere to be found after her death. I’m not very good at collecting things. I never kept the reviews.” Chiara, however, knows the cultural gem that La Mandac is as one who broke the glass ceiling for Asian women.

Says Chiara enthusiastically; “I have a treasure trove on her. I actually want to write a book on her.” That treasure trove includes not just opera photos that she had gathered from various opera houses. She has the reviews, posters, even the recordings of some of her performances. In the meantime, Chiara has compiled all these in www.evelynmandac.com

Much of the Filipino musical universe has not really matched the national cultural treasure that Evelyn Mandac is. No other Filipino has had worldwide engagements as extensive as she had had with major opera companies and symphony orchestras of the world with famous conductors and prominent opera singers. The world-class star never had a PR manager.

“I never wanted it. PR comes when you are doing it, not when you seek it.“

Filipino opera diva Evelyn Mandac on not having a publicist

The opera star repeatedly asked why I wanted to interview her and how I came to know about her. The Philippines’ top music impresario and writer Pablo Tariman articulates so well the boundaries of La Mandac’s fame and I understood why she had asked me that:

“During her time, La Mandac represented class and distinction in the opera world. In the late 1960s to the 1970s, she was The Diva in every sense of the word. She sang like one and never acted like one.”

Editor’s note: To see the list of Evelyn Mandac’s upcoming masterclass, visit www.evelynmandac.com. You can watch La Mandac’s performance of Tchaikovsky: “Queen of Spades” (PBS, 1971) on YouTube. You can also listen to her powerful voice on Spotify through Carmina Burana of Boston Symphony Orchestra and Stereomandy, Vol. 4 – Album by Gustav Mahler of the Philadelphia Orchestra.