Curtin. In 2007 VAI released a DVD featuring Curtin in the soprano role (i.e., the Latin text) in Britten's War Requiem. This 1963 performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Erich Leinsdorf at Tanglewood was the work's American premiere. Tributes In 1976, President Gerald Ford invited her to sing for a White House dinner honoring West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Curtin served on the National Council for the Arts, and in 1994 was designated a U.S. Ambassador for the Arts, a new honor given former council members. She received Wellesley College's Alumnae Achievement Award and BU's College of Fine Arts Distinguished Faculty Award. She also held a number of honorary degrees in music and the humanities, including an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from West Virginia Wesleyan College awarded in 1985. The Paley Center for Media in Manhattan showed the 1956 NBC-TV production of Così fan tutte on January 19, 2008, 50 years after its original 1958 airing. Curtin sang Fiordiligi in this production. The screening was followed by a conversation with the soprano and music critic Martin Bernheimer. In 2017, a portrait of her was unveiled at a dining hall in Branford College, which previously only had portraits of men. References 1921 births 2016 deaths American operatic sopranos Boston University faculty New England Conservatory alumni People from Clarksburg, West Virginia Singers from West Virginia Wellesley College alumni Yale University faculty 20th-century American women opera singers American women academics 21st-century American women Academics from West Virginia