WILLIAM PARKER

BARITONE

A gifted American singer of opera and art songs, Parker contracted HIV and wondered why there were so many songs about grief, separation, and death, but none about AIDS. He commissioned a cycle called the AIDS Quilt Songbook.

Born in the mid-1940s, William Parker began singing as a child in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he grew up. After graduation from Princeton in 1965, he was drafted and spent five years in the Army Chorus. Discharged in 1970, he won the Baltimore Opera Competition and studied with the famous soprano Rosa Ponselle. He won the Joy in Singing Competition in 1976 and a competition for excellence in American music in 1979. In 1983 he joined the New York City Opera. His voice was not big enough for theaters the size of the Metropolitan Opera, but in smaller houses in the United States and Europe, he sang baritone leads in such operas as La Bohème, Così Fan Tutte, Manon, and The Magic Flute, in which he performed the role of Papageno the bird catcher 100 times.

In 1988, Parker was diagnosed HIV-positive. He soon had fullblown AIDS, but despite infections and the loss of 35 pounds, his voice was not affected much. He went public with his disease, continued to sing, and asked a number of composers to write songs about AIDS. When he had 18 of them, they made a cycle, which he performed in Alice Tully Hall in New York, June 4, 1992, with three baritone friends, Kurt Ollmann, William Sharp, and Sanford Sylvan. The cycle was named for the AIDS Memorial Quilt (see card 106), and it was intended that just as new panels are added to the Quilt, new songs will be added to the AIDS Quilt Songbook. Next Card 39: ANTHONY PERKINS: Actor

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AIDS AWARENESS: PEOPLE WITH AIDS