Carol Vaness

American opera singer best known in her youth for her command of the Mozart and Handel repertory, and noted for the width of her vocal range and commanding onstage presence. Her career bypassed many of the mistakes that can prove fatal to operatic careers, due to her single-minded determination, professional instincts and knowing how to profit from the good advice of her colleagues. She confesses to pre-performance pressures and unwinds by watching soap operas and reading vampire novels.

Carol Theresa Vaness was one of three daughters of a security guard and his wife. Her music-loving father insisted that she take weekly piano lessons when she became a teenager, though by her own admission, she neither liked nor showed talent for the piano. She grew up in southern California and attended a Roman Catholic girls’ school for 12 years. The school’s rigorous academic demands were far ahead of public schools, so that when she got to college she, in her own words, "didn’t have to study for two years." A quick study only when something engaged her interest, she learned early that she had to be challenged or provoked into excellence.

She was nearly 20 years old before she took her first voice lessons. A student at California State Polytechnic College in Pomona, she was majoring in piano and English and working split shifts at a department store to pay for her rent and tuition. A teacher in a required voice class offered her lessons, and soon she was being paid for singing engagements in temples and churches.

Vaness entered graduate school at California State University and developed into what she thought was a mezzo. She began to study with David Scott, head of the voice and opera department, and attributes to him the credit for discovering her real identity as a lyric soprano. He also provided the encouragement she needed to undertake auditions. In 1976, one of the auditions provided entry into the Merola Opera Program of the San Francisco Opera.