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SEPTEMBER 1955  53

York, and at the Berkshire Music Center, Lenox, Massachusetts. She went to Paris in 1950 for two years' study with Pierre Bernac, on a $3,000 John Hay Whitney Opportunity Fellowship. In October 1950 she competed against hundreds of singers from four continents in the International Music Competition held at Geneva, Switzerland. The night before the finals in the competition, Miss Dobbs had sprained her ankle severely, but took nothing to assuage the pain for fear it would interfere with her singing. After winning the first prize, she sang in Paris where she was heard by S. Hurok and signed under his management.

Beginning her professional career with orchestral appearances in European capitals, Miss Dobbs gave recitals in France, Sweden, Holland and Luxembourg during the 1951-52 season. During the Holland festival in 1952 she sang a leading role in Igor Stravinsky's The Nightingale. She appeared at La Scala Opera House in Milan, Italy as Elvira in Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri on March 4, 1953. Later that month she sang the role of the Queen of the Night in Mozart's The Magic Flute at the opera house in Genoa. A tour of Scandinavian capitals was an outstanding success.

She sang at the Glyndebourne Opera Festival in England in June 1953, appearing as Zerbinetta in Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos. This resulted in her being engaged to sing three parts at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London during the 1953-54 season. She sang the Queen in Le Coq d'Or, Gilda in Rigoletto, and the Forest Girl in Siegfried.

The young singer made her New York debut on March 8, 1954 at Town Hall with Thomas Scherman's Little Orchestra. "A beautiful Negro girl, [gifted] with a gorgeous coloratura voice, stopped the show at Town Hall last night," reported music critic Louis Biancolli (New York World-Telegram and Sun, March 9), "a richly gifted Southern girl who had been garnering glory in Europe and has now returned to add her own country to her list of conquests."

Miss Dobbs' performance at Covent Garden in July 1954 was an intermingling of drama and tragedy. The Royal Opera Company sent her to appear in Le Coq d'Or, as it was to be a performance attended by British and Swedish royalty. Miss Dobbs, who had been scheduled that same night to sing at the Glyndebourne Opera Festival, rushed to London to rehearse for what was to be the high point in her musical career. Four days before the performance, her husband, Luis Rodriguez, a Spanish journalist and radio script writer, died. They had been married only a year. Miss Dobbs, upholding the tradition that the show must go on, sang the leading feminine role of the Queen of Shemakhan. As the final curtain fell, Miss Dobbs was summoned to the Royal Box and was decorated by King Gustaf VI with his country's Order of the North Star.  
   
During the 1954 fall season at Convent Garden Miss Dobbs added the role of Olympia in The Tales of Hoffmann to her repertoire. She also sang in concerts in Paris, Belgium, Holland and London, and returned to the United States to sing again in New York at Town Hall, on 
 
[[image - photo of Mattiwilda Dobbs]]                                   [[credit]] Iris, Paris [[/credit]]
[[caption]] MATTIWILDA DOBBS [[/caption]]

January 23, 1955.  The New York Times reported the next day that "the total impression was of an event in which a charming young woman displayed a light, beautiful voice, which was ever so agile and always fresh, clear and ravishing in its tonal purity....  She sang two sets of French art songs and two groups of German lieder; the Werner Egk Variations formed her chief display piece, and here her skill as a coloratura singer was exhibited most brilliantly. Not only could she negotiate all its intricate difficulties with accuracy and élan, but every note of it was pretty."
   
"There is more technical work to be done before Miss Dobbs can realize her amazing potentials," commented Musical Courier (February 15, 1955), "but these seem limitless.  Enunciation was frequently faulty; however, an innate sense of style and proportion was in evidence, and a gift for stage and interpretation helped the artist greatly in pleasing presentations of her numbers."
   
Irving Kolodin, commenting on her Town Hall concert in the Saturday Review (February 5, 1955), praised her ability to "sing any sequence of high, fast-moving notes with dazzling purity of sound and persuasive ease," but suggested that "if Miss Dobbs is to have more than a short, spectacular success and a swift decline, she should look to the building of her middle and low voice, acquire a more subtle command of languages, and, in a word, put a solid foundation under her artistic penthouse."
   
In March 1955 she sang again with the Little Orchestra Society in Town Hall and then she embarked on a tour of the Caribbean and Central America, a tour of Western Europe, and a three-months series of concerts in Australia and the Far East. On her earlier concert tour, which included the West Coast, Albert Goldberg of the Los Angeles Times