Lucy Shelton ’65 takes to the famous stage for the first time at age 82.
Photo by KARJAKA STUDIOS
When soprano Lucy Shelton ’65 celebrated her 75th birthday in 2019 with a special concert in Manhattan’s Merkin Hall, she thought it might be her last public performance. Shelton, who is internationally acclaimed for her work in contemporary music, performed that night with more than a dozen colleagues and former students and sang several pieces that had been written especially for her over the years.
It could have been a fitting finale to an extraordinary career. But that’s not how it turned out. Since 2021, Shelton has sung on stages around the world—in Aix-en-Provence, Helsinki, London, Amsterdam, San Francisco and Adelaide—as The Teacher in Kaija Saariaho’s final opera Innocence and, in 2024, in a role tailor-made for her in the world premiere of Laura Kaminsky’s chamber opera Lucidity.
When Innocence, which tells the story of a school shooting and its aftermath, premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in April, Shelton made her debut at that hallowed institution at the age of 82.
Shelton’s explanation for her career’s longevity? “I simply love making music.” Beyond that, she thinks she is still able to sing “because I’ve used my voice in many different ways over all of these decades and always found ways to meet the various challenges of the repertoire.”
The distinctive feature in her dramatic role in Innocence is that it primarily uses sprechstimme (speechsong) rather than traditional operatic singing. Shelton is renowned for this expressive style developed in the early 20th century. Saariaho knew of her mastery of sprechstimme and had Shelton in mind when composing the role.
Lucy Shelton ’65 as The Teacher in Innocence
Shelton grew up in Claremont (her father was a Pomona College geology professor and grad) and music was a frequent family activity—her parents met at a music camp in Massachusetts. All five children took piano lessons and studied another instrument as well. Shelton remembers “singing rounds and Bach chorales and silly versions of Christmas carols, where we experimented with sliding between pitches and making weird dissonances. Even as a kid I loved the tension of dissonance and the beautiful release of the consonance that followed!”
After attending Vermont’s Putney School, a high school with an “extraordinary music program,” Shelton entered Pomona College. “I knew how wonderful music at Pomona was, having attended concerts at Big and Little Bridges all my life. Bill Russell, Doc Blanchard and Karl Kohn were all family friends and neighbors.”
While a music major at Pomona, Shelton played flute in the band and orchestra and sang in Choir and Glee club. She took leading roles in the annual Gilbert and Sullivan productions, garnering admiration from fellow students including Deb Hunter ’65. “I followed her because she was quite a star,” says Hunter. “She was just very special even then.”
Hunter, along with 37 other members of the Class of ’65, attended the Met production of Innocence, celebrating their classmate with a reception and dinner after the matinee performance. “I intended to go myself,” says Hunter, “and just threw out the idea at our 60th reunion.”
Debuting at the Met was never a goal for Shelton, whose calendar was already filled with exciting performing opportunities. “It was never something I had imagined or even hoped for,” she says. “I’m delighted—it is a big deal, obviously! But the main big deal is that this opera is such a stunner.”
After all those performances around the world (and she will again sing the role in Paris in November of 2027), Shelton still finds herself moved by the opera. “It is a sublimely devastating drama with astounding music from Saariaho. It still gets me.”