What is the probability that a little black girl singing in her father’s church in 1950s Arkansas would someday sing opera on the greatest stages on the planet? And yet some 15 years later the Metropolitan Opera rang with the sound of her voice.
This statement from Barbara Hendricks’s memoir “Lifting My Voice” might be the best description of the lyric soprano’s life: “The mathematician in me is very attracted to string theory, sometimes called the theory of everything. It implies that all matter can be reduced down to a string that oscillates. I like to think that there was one original chord that was dispersed by a big bang into a multitude of smaller chords that are continually searching for their source, for their truth.”
