Zinka milanov biography of abraham

From the Preface to Zinka: The Life of Zinka Milanov

When Rudolf Bing heard Zinka Milanov sing for the first time, two weeks to the day after his forty-eighth birthday in 1950, he was preparing to assume the position of general manager of the Metropolitan Opera within a matter of months.

Finding hers "a voice of such beauty I felt I had never heard anything like it before," he brought the soprano back in triumph to the company, which she had left under unusual circumstances three years earlier following a noteworthy but rocky decade-long “first career” there.(1)

Bing's evaluation of Milanov's gift and his candid admission of the effect she had on him was a remarkably common—and very well documented—response among her first-time hearers.

Not long after Bing's epiphany, a small boy in Los Angeles, lying in a darkened room with his eyes covered because of a sight-threatening case of measles, allowed only to listen to the radio, heard that same sound and had the same reac