By Laurie Rodwell ’84
As a toddler, Susan Dunn would stand, fascinated, with her nose pressed against the television whenever classical musicians performed on the little screen. Even then, the interest and talent that would take her from Bauxite, Ark., to the Metropolitan Opera were easy to see.
Today, Dunn, Hendrix Class of 1976 and a 1988 Hendrix Distinguished Alumna, is a soprano who has demonstrated her extraordinary gifts on the world’s most challenging stages. She is Professor of the Practice in the music department at Duke University, where she heads the vocal program, teaches voice and directs the Opera Workshop.
She’s come a long way from her precocious beginnings as a tiny vocalist in Bauxite. Dunn remembers singing in church and at school from a very early age: her first solo was in Bible School at the age of 5. When she was in sixth grade, she talked her parents into buying a piano for her. “Every Saturday, for the next four years, we went to Benton, Ark., for piano lessons,” she laughs. From that point on, Dunn sang and played piano in church.
Dunn’s parents, A.C. and Cynthia, were determined that their two children would attend college and receive the finest education available to them. First generation college students, Susan and her sister, Phyllis Dunn Jankowski ’81, both attended and graduated from Hendrix. The Dunn’s Methodist connections through their church, New Hope United Methodist Church, and the outstanding reputation of Hendrix College made the choice to attend Hendrix an easy one.
English or opera?
A graduate of Bauxite High School, Dunn planned to major in music when she arrived at Hendrix. “I began as a music major, and then I chickened out,” she says. “I couldn’t imagine that someone born and raised in Bauxite, Ark., would ever sing at the Met!” She switched her major to English, making a very practical decision to prepare to be an English teacher. “I thought I should be realistic, and be a teacher, not a performer,” Dunn explains. As a junior, she opted out of English and returned to music as her major.
Other than television performances, her exposure to classical music during her youth had been limited. She remembers attending a performance of the Messiah in Little Rock during high school and seeing a Manatti opera as a freshman at Hendrix. “I was always checking out records of performances from the record library in Trieschmann and listening to them,” Dunn says.
“I had a work-study job with Dr. Moffett in the English department. He was very supportive of my decision to switch my major back to music,” Dunn says. She sang in the Hendrix College Choir under the direction of Robert McGill and took voice lessons every term, her first ever.
Harold Thompson: mentor and friend
But it was Professor Harold Thompson, a member of the Hendrix music faculty from 1954 to 1992, who encouraged Dunn to follow her dream of becoming an opera singer.
Dunn met Thompson when she auditioned at Hendrix as a freshman. “He became my mentor and most enthusiastic supporter at Hendrix,” Dunn says. “He gave me a great technique, and he was always encouraging.” Seeing Thompson perform in Susanne is one of her fondest memories.
An influential figure in the music department at Hendrix, Thompson was one of the organizers of the Conway Symphony Orchestra, formerly known as the Conway Civic Orchestra. It began as a joint venture of the Hendrix and UCA music departments and performed its first concert in 1984.
“Harold Thompson taught generations of Hendrix students how to sing,” says Dr. Nancy Fleming, professor of music and director of the choir. “He was immensely popular with his students.” Thompson passed away on March 25, 2000.
Thompson’s vision for the College, however, continued with a gift from his estate that established the Harold Thompson Recital Series. Dunn, as one of his best-known students, presented the inaugural performance in the recital series on March 9 in Staples Auditorium at Hendrix.
She credits Thompson with giving her a start as an opera singer. “The great thing about Hendrix is the relationships that you form,” Dunn says. “Mr. Thompson was my teacher and my mentor, but he became a lifelong friend and supporter. He took a continued interest in my career.”
After graduating with her bachelor’s degree in music from Hendrix, Dunn went on to Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind., where she received her master’s degree. “Mr. Thompson went to Indiana,” Dunn says. “He encouraged me to audition there; I did and I was accepted.”
Follow your dream
When Dunn finished her studies at Indiana, she wasn’t sure if she had the courage to perform. She remembers calling Thompson on the phone to express her reservations. “He told me that if my dream was to perform, then I owed it to myself not to stop now. He said, ‘Follow your dream now. Follow it as far as it will go.’”
Dunn took his advice to heart, and with his and her parents’ support, she went to the University of Illinois, where she was later named a University of Illinois Distinguished Alumna. There, she studied privately with the renowned coach and accompanist John Wustman, who had worked with Thompson at Meadowbrook.
“I worked part-time. Eventually, I started to make a living as a singer,” Dunn exclaims. During the final years of her studies with Wustman, she began winning prestigious awards, including the the D’Angelo Young Artist Competition, the Metropolitan Opera National Council Award and the Opera Company of Philadelphia/Luciano Pavarotti International Vocal Competition. In 1983, she won three major honors: The Richard Tucker Award, Chicago’s WGN-Illinois Opera Competition and the Dallas Morning News - G.B. Dealey Award.
The music world takes note
With the attention brought by the awards, Dunn’s career skyrocketed. She quickly achieved the stature of “a true Verdi soprano.” Her Wagner, Mahler, Strauss and recital singing were equally acclaimed.
Dunn captivated her audiences wherever she stepped on stage: La Scala in Milan, where she made her debut in Aïda; New York’s Carnegie Hall, where she created a sensation in a concert performance of Act I of Wagner’s Die Walküre; at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, where she appeared with the New York Philharmonic in the Verdi Requiem and Strauss’ Four Last Songs; with the Lyric Opera of Chicago as Leonora in Verdi’s La Forza del Destino; at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall in a concert performance of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra; at the Vienna State Opera as Amelia in Un Ballo in Maschera; and at the Australian Opera as Desdemona in Otello.
Dunn made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in Il Trovatore in February of 1990. She made her Italian operatic debut at Bologna’s Teatro Comunale in Verdi’s seldom heard I Vespri Siciliani. She triumphed as Leonora in Il Trovatore at the Washington Opera.
She appeared with the orchestras of Rotterdam and Amsterdam, the Berlin Radio Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the Chicago Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony and at major international festivals including Tanglewood, the Cincinnati May Festival, Ravinia, Wolf Trap, the Casals Festival, Edinburgh and Saint-Denis.
She worked with the world’s preeminent maestros, including Sir Georg Solti, Riccardo Chailly, Claudio Abbado, James Conlon, Lorin Maazel, Seiji Ozawa, Edo de Waart, Zubin Mehta and Daniel Barenboim.
Dunn was the soprano soloist on a recording of the Verdi Requiem with Robert Shaw conducting the Atlanta Symphony, which was awarded a Grammy as the Classical Album of the Year for 1989.
“It was a grand time for me,” Dunn says. “Singing and traveling! I never thought I’d be making a living like that. It was fun, exciting and new,” she says, adding that living out of a suitcase was not a sacrifice for her!
Teaching voice, and a whole lot more
Eventually, Dunn’s career slowed down. “I didn’t have a lot to do. I was working on myself, mostly,” she says. “I thought, maybe I could teach, settle down.” After the breathtaking rollercoaster ride of her stage career, settling down seemed like an attractive option to Dunn. She began applying for teaching positions and accepted a position at Duke University.
With her extensive international performances and years of experience, she began as an associate professor of music at Duke in the fall of 1994 and was promoted to full professor several years later. A full-time voice teacher, she also has 12 private students for voice lessons. Additionally, she oversees “the administrative stuff” such as assigning accompanists and spearheading grants.
She chooses, teaches and stages the operas performed by students at Duke, a process that she says can be nerve-wracking, “especially worrying about the sets, scenery and staging!” Her students stage two performances of a new show every semester. This spring, her students will be performing opera scenes from The Marriage of Figaro, The Old Maid and The Thief, and Cosi San Tutte.
“Last semester, we staged a showcase of Richard Rogers’ tunes to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth,” Dunn says. “This gave the students an opportunity to explore more of Rogers’ music – he really had two careers: musicals, such as The Sound of Music and Lady and the Tramp, and then hit songs such as Blue Moon and My Funny Valentine.”
Dunn encourages her students to see operas on tour and to attend classical music events offered in the community. “I require them to attend three vocal performance events each semester,” she says.
Teaching voice can be frustrating, Dunn says, but the flip side is that it can also be immensely satisfying. “I like teaching students life skills that don’t have anything to do with singing, such as perseverance and patience,” she says.
“Students at Duke are so facile and smart, as they are at Hendrix, and many of them have never had to learn how to persevere when something doesn’t come quickly to them,” Dunn says. She adds that she is most impressed by students who continue to work at something that’s difficult for them. “I teach vocal skills and a little music to my students, but I’m also their coach, cheerleader and psychologist,” she says. She enjoys watching her students learn how to express themselves through music. “I watch them grow up.”
Dunn still has opportunities to sing, although now it’s mostly in Master Classes and recitals. She says she misses singing with orchestras, although performing with just an accompanist allows her to be very intimate with the audience. “It’s a good life,” Dunn says, “My performance schedule keeps my voice going and satisfies my vanity urges!”
Dunn is newly married to Scott Tilley, who is a conductor and composer.
From her vantage point in life now, Dunn likes to pass along a little of Thompson’s advice to her own students at Duke: “Don’t live your life to be safe; live it to be happy. Let the cards fall where they may.”
In Dunn’s case, the cards could not have been any kinder.