in her earliest years. When she entertained her friends and family at one of their gatherings, it was invariably with pop songs or show tunes that she had picked up by ear. Young adulthood After graduating, von Stade was given a sum of money by her grandfather, with the advice to spend it on something better than clothes or a car. Her mother suggested using it to finance a gap year in Paris. She combined waitressing, tending bar and working as a part-time nanny to three children with studying piano at the École Mozart, although she was so embarrassed by the youth and skill of her fellow pupils that she did not persist with her lessons for long. She had happier musical experiences hearing Schwarzkopf in recital at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and Carmen at the Opéra. Once back in New York, she worked as a sales assistant in the stationery department of Tiffany's"I was terrible at it, and kept sending out orders to Houston, Wyoming and Sacramento, Nevada"and took secretarial night classes that led to a job at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut. But she also began to investigate the possibility of earning money from her voice. Offering herself as a freelance singer for hire, she found employment in cocktail bars where "customers were not expected to listen, and didn't", and she took part in a promotional industrial musical staged for the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Eventually she summoned up enough courage to begin asking for small parts in summer stock musicals. It was not an easy process for her: "You do fifty or sixty auditions and get called back five times and maybe get one job offerif you're lucky." But ultimately her persistence was rewarded when she made her professional stage debut in the Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven in 1966, playing Beauty in a children's production of Beauty and the Beast. Torn between her growing ambition, her difficulty in acknowledging it, her Catholic guilt over it and her fear of failure, she was unsure whether to commit herself to the training that would be necessary if she were to become the professional singer that she increasingly dreamt of being. Ultimately it was a friend's dare that tipped the balance and led to her approaching a conservatory that happened to be close to her East 73rd Street Manhattan apartment, New York's Mannes School of Music. Even