Cyrena van Gordon

Who was Cyrena van Gordon?

Cyrena van Gordon was the stage name of an American operatic contralto born Cyrena Sue Pocock. Sources variously list her birth date as September 4, 1893, 1896, or 1897 in Camden, Ohio; she died on April 4, 1964 in New York City. In approximately 1918 she married Dr. Shirley Munn, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist in Chicago.

After studies with Louise Dotti, van Gordon made her operatic debut as Amneris in Verdi's Aida in 1913. A principal member of the opera companies active in Chicago during her career, she also performed in New York City, Philadelphia, and as far afield as San Francisco. She left recordings for the Edison and Columbia companies.

Notable events in her career would include the following:

December 26, 1917, created the role of Papantzin in Henry Kimball Hadley's short-lived opera Azora, the Daughter of Montezuma.

October 5, 1919, first New York recital, Aeolian Hall. Her program included Handel's Come, Beloved; Carey's Pastoral; songs in English by Salter, Gretchaninov, Sturani, Kramer, Hadley, and Spross; an air by Henry Bishop; and a French air by Lenormand.

February 8, 1922, appeared as Venus, opposite the Elisabeth of Rosa Raisa, in the first production in German of Wagner's Tannhäuser at New York's Manhattan Opera House; the work had been heard there in French a dozen years before. The New York Times praised her voice as being "of genuine beauty, just as in stature she looked the goddess queen."