Classically Trained Soprano Celebrates a Century of Hitting the High Notes
A few weeks ago, many friends and admirers gathered to celebrate Lower Manhattan resident Claire Procopio’s 100th birthday. “She’s a local treasure,” her friend Lucy Kuhn told the Broadsheet. “She’s had four-plus parties in past few days, and more to come. Her birthday was celebrated at our local church Our Lady of Victory, too. Pastor Jarlath Quinn asked her if he could say her age. When she said “YES, I’m 100!”, the entire church burst into a roar and round of applause!”
Between the parties, church attendance, strolls around Lower Manhattan, yoga, book club, political fundraisers, drinks with friends at local watering holes, and many more activities, Ms. Procopio – who lives alone in Battery Park City, with her children and grandchildren nearby – does not stop moving.
The other day, however, she did slow down long enough to speak with the Broadsheet.
Claire Procopio first set foot in America in 1928, when she was three years old. “My father had been living in New York for years,” she recalled. “He would come back to Italy only when he could. On one of these trips, his family and my mother’s family fixed them up. They got married when she was 15. He would visit Vittorito, where the two families lived, in the Abruzzi region, on the Adriatic coast of Italy, once every few years. My sister was born after once of these visits. And I was born after another.”
Once her father had earned citizenship by serving in the U.S. Army, “he sent for us,” Ms. Procopio said. “So we sailed for America, and moved into an apartment on Mulberry Street, because in those days, when you came from someplace else, you moved in next to other people who were from where you were born. When we finally lived in the same home, I barely knew my father, because I had met him only a few times.”
“We struggled during the Depression,” she remembered, “but my father had a ‘paisano,’ who helped get him jobs now and then. We survived because my mother had learned to sew in Italy, and found a job in a New York coat factory. She worked even when my father didn’t, because there was always demand for a good seamstress.”
“My mother was eventually able to save up $3,000 for a downpayment on a house, and we moved across the river to the Italian section of Elizabeth, New Jersey,” she said. “And I enrolled in Lafayette Junior High School. That’s when I heard that a graduate student from Columbia University was coming to our school. For his Master’s Degree, he had translated the opera ‘Carmen’ into English, and had to stage a production as his thesis project. The whole school was invited to take part.”
“I had been singing since the time I could talk,” Ms. Procopio said. “But mostly I sang Italian songs I heard from my parents. When I auditioned, however, they gave me the part of Carmen. That was the start of my dream to become a professional opera singer.”
From that point, Ms. Procopio was off to the races, studying with professional vocal coaches in New York, and “working up the nerve” to apply to Juilliard, where she was accepted. It was there, while majoring in voice, that she met her future husband, Luke, who was studying trumpet at Juilliard while also working on a degree in music at Columbia University.
After graduating, they followed parallel paths into the arts: He earned a place in the orchestra of legendary bandleader and songwriter Sammy Kaye, and she was cast in productions at Radio City Music Hall and the highly regarded off-Broadway Paper Mill Playhouse, and also worked as a singer in New Jersey’s Lambertville Music Circus. Her first brush with fame came with a spot on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts television and radio program in the mid-1950s. “I wanted to sing ‘Torna a Surriento,’” she recalled. “They told me to translate it into English, but the words don’t carry as much feeling if they aren’t in Italian. So they let me sing the original version.”
Remembering the moment, she broke into a gently reflective a cappella rendition: “Guarda il mare com’e bello, spira tanto sentimento, come il tuo soave accento, che me desto fa sognar, senti come illeve salle, dai giardini odor d’aranci.” These lines translate as, “look at the sea, how beautiful it is, exuding so much feeling, like your sweet accent, that makes me dream when I’m awake; feel how the salt rises; from the gardens the scent of oranges.”
“It’s a song about leaving Italy behind, and promising to return, knowing that a part of you will never fully leave,” she said.
The performance on the Arthur Godfrey show was followed by more offers, “but I always knew that I wanted to work in opera,” Ms. Procopio says. She was cast in productions at the City Center, and had a long affiliation with Lower Manhattan’s Amato Opera company.
As Luke Procopio moved up in the Sammy Kaye orchestra, eventually becoming its manager, “we started a family, and moved to New Jersey,” Ms. Procopio said. “I performed less and less, but I never lost my love of opera.” When her husband died in 1998, and her mother died in 2004 (at age 97), “I had to figure out what was next. My three adult children were living in New York, and I felt very isolated in our house in New Jersey.”
Deciding to move back to Lower Manhattan in 2005 “was the best thing I ever did,” she said. This led to a new affiliation, with the Village Light Opera Group, on Varick Street.
After a decade-plus of leading roles in more than a dozen productions such as ‘Scrooge,’ ‘Kiss Me Kate,’ ‘Carousel,’ ‘Mikado,’ ‘Oklahoma,’ and ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ Ms. Procopio reluctantly decided to dial back her involvement, if only slightly. “I am still performing at summer concerts,” she allowed, “but no longer in full productions, which require months of rehearsals and then working seven nights a week. I guess I’ve slowed down, just a bit.”