Doris Doree

Doris Doree was a dramatic soprano who had sung with the Metropolitan, City Center and Covent Garden Operas. She died in New York City on October 1971 at the age of 62. Miss Doree was born in Newark. As a young girl she studied dancing and was graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Art. She appeared as a ballet dancer at the Radio City Music Hall. This led to the formation of her own dancing school, and she turned out dancers for the Music Hall and also for vaudeville units, among them the Penthouse Revels and the Broadway Revels. One evening in 1939 one of her singers became ill and Miss Doree took her place. The response was good, and she was accepted for a singing scholarship at the Settlement School of Music in Philadelphia, an adjunct of the Curtis School. She made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in Wagner's “Götterdämmerung” in the 1942 season. Howard Taubman, then music critic of The New York Times, in an article on that season's seven new singers, remarked that American ‐ born singers were scarce. He noted that Miss Doree did a solo dance, “The Dying Swan,” in Asbury Park as a child, but gave no serious thought to singing as a career until she was past 20. For two seasons Miss Doree was the leading soprano of the Covent Garden Opera and was a guest artist with the opera companies of Stockholm and Copenhagen.