Sarah Bryan Miller
In the wee hours of Saturday morning, my older sister and only sibling Sarah Bryan Miller passed away, after a ten year long, tortuous battle with cancer. She was 68 years old.
She was a stalwart of the Episcopal Church and a vocal star wherever she sang. Her musical ability was so overwhelming, even as a child. that she got most of the solos in any concert, and fumed in frustration when anyone else got a solo, because so far as she was concerned, that was HER solo that had been stolen from her.
And she was right, she always outsang everyone else. But sharing well with others was not part of her nature.
In the manner of a certain social class in South Carolina - which would be "the genteel poor," or "French Huguenot decayed aristocracy," which my mother preferred - Bryan went by her middle name, because we're kin to a Revolutionary War Founding Father with that last name.
In the South Carolina lowcountry that is - or at least was - considered important information to convey, so lots of girls there have last names for first names, at least those named by my parents' generation.
I'm just glad that I got a good family name, same deal on my dad's side, kinship to somebody important. If I'd gotten a name from my mother's side I would have probably been named "Sedgwick" - I had both a cousin and uncle named Sedgwick; I only escaped by a whisker!
But in the Kansas City and later Chicago suburbs, nobody does that. So in the towns where we actually grew up, from a very early age Bryan was set apart from her peers with her oddball name. But instead of trying to get by with a feminine-sounding nickname, part of her reaction was to seek absolute perfection in everything. She was kind of an absolutist to begin with, and she grew ever more so.
Bryan's first job interview after she graduated from college was to audition for the Lyric Opera of Chicago. She hadn't majored in music - she was a history major with a minor in Elementary Education - but she had the voice and she was an excellent sight reader, so she got hired.
She stayed with the Lyric Chorus for 25 years, touring in Europe, singing in La Scala three or four times. La Scala is to opera singers and fans is like what Mecca is to Muslims. It's considered a very big deal.
Bryan was quite petite and a blue eyed natural blonde, and her power range was as a mezzo-soprano. All of which are sought-after characteristics for the "pants roles" in opera, like Cherubino in "The Marriage of Figaro." Women playing the roles of young boys. Bryan was perfect for that.
As a female Roman warrior in Verdi's "Attila":
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As something else in some other opera:
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At a big house like the Lyric all of the pants roles are filled by famous touring opera stars. But there were a couple of largely amateur companies in the Chicago area, so Bryan was able to sing pants roles with the Chicago Opera Theater, and did a fine job.
Backstage, things got interesting sometimes. Bryan was pinned to the wall and groped by the famous Luciano Pavarotti, who held her in place with his immense stomach, groped her with both hands and was raining kisses all over her face while trying to slip his tongue into her mouth.
Luciano Pavarotti
With his enormous gut he pinned Bryan up off the floor, with the tips of her toes dangling an inch or so above.
Add to that the fact that Pavarotti had what Bryan called "a Mediterranean approach to personal hygiene," and it was not a pleasant experience at all. She finally got away by stomping on the top of his foot as hard as she could.
She complained to management and they told Pavarotti to knock it off and leave the women in the chorus alone, so he never pestered her again.
Gosh, who
wouldn't want to be pinned to the wall by a smelly 350 lb. tenor and groped with both hands?
Bryan's other interesting opera story was her encounter with the magnificent singer but vile human being Kathleen Battle. If Bryan had difficulty accepting it when other kids got vocal solos, take that impulse and multiply it by a thousand for Kathleen Battle.
Kathleen Battle
During a scene where Battle was singing and the chorus stepped forward to sing their choral part, Battle decided that Bryan was blocking the audience from seeing her well enough, so she sucker-punched Bryan in the kidney, and nearly sent her toppling into the orchestra pit.
It wasn't my sister alone who aroused that sort of tyranny from Kathleen Battle; she acted that way so often that a couple of years later the Lyric announced that she was no longer welcome on the Lyric's stage. Which had a huge impact at the time, asking a big deal opera star to act like a normal, responsible human being.
After 25 years at the Lyric, Bryan was offered the job of the classical music critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Which was something she excelled at, and was actually kind of a pioneer in the field.
With Her Colleagues At The Post-Dispatch
Then came the drastic cutbacks at newspapers all over the country.
Bryan was a survivor, and once Craigslist killed newspapers by providing free classified ads where the newspaper ads were kind of costly, the journalist ranks got thinned out considerably.
Which is what happens when you take away most of the profit-generating product that pays for everything else...
Despite three rounds of major bloodletting at the Post-Dispatch, firing people left and right, Bryan managed to stay hired until the day she died. Which for a classical music critic in this day and age is actually kind of astonishing. But she was canny as well as very smart, and played her cards right every single time. (Part of that canniness was to write anything they asked her to write.)
I didn't want to get off into minutia about my sister, but I thought some of you might be interested in her depth, high intelligence and her many accomplishments. She leaves behind her two daughters Louisa and Eleanor, both of whom got much better family names than Bryan got.
My daughter flew down to St. Louis a week ago to spend some time with Bryan before she died. Bryan was one of her godmothers, and the two always had a special relationship.
Particularly when she was a young child, our second born child looked just like Bryan at that age, both of them with the palest blond hair imaginable. With some of our family photos I've had to think: "Okay, is that Bryan or our kid in that picture?"
Anyway, Bryan was an extraordinary person, and I'm missing her already.
Wade Hampton Miller
or, as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch put it in their obituary, my full name:
Thomas Wade Hampton Miller IV
Goodbye, dear sister:
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Here's what the St. Louis Post Dispatch had to say about her:
https://www.stltoday.com/entertainme...12c3a7627.html
https://www.stltoday.com/entertainme...db4c1f723.html