Rising star Angela Meade in Met HD telecast

February 21st, 2012

AP | The story of soprano Angela Meade’s “overnight success” at the Metropolitan Opera is well known: She wins the National Council Auditions, is hired as an understudy for Verdi’s Ernani, makes her debut when the leading lady falls ill — and a new star is born.

What’s less well known, but just as important to that story, she says, is what happened two years earlier in that same competition: She lost.

It was 2005, and Meade, then a 27-year-old music graduate student at USC, had advanced to the semifinals in New York. Out of a group of about 20, half would be chosen for the final round with big cash prizes and publicity. Meade did not make the cut.

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