WEDNESDAY, JULY 7, 2010


KLMNO OBITUARIES


CESARE SIEPI, 87 Acclaimed opera singer in Europe and U.S.


by Anne Midgette Cesare Siepi, 87, one of the


greatest operatic basses of all time, died July 5 at a hospital in Atlanta. He died of respiratory failure, after having a stroke sev- eral days ago, according to his son, Marco. Warm, deep, resonant and melting, Mr. Siepi’s voice was a defining sound in opera in the 1950s and 1960s on the world’s stages and, fortunately, in many recordings. For years, he was the reigning


bass at the Metropolitan Opera, and a regular fixture at London’s Covent Garden and many other houses around the world, sing- ing virtually all the staple roles of the bass repertory: King Philip II in Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” Boris in Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov,” and, perhaps most memorably, the title role of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” Tall and handsome, he was one of the few Giovannis who could both sing with the sensuous, se- ductive ease the role requires and look the part of the irresist- ible seducer. He owned the role for decades, even making a film of the opera, released in 1955, un- der celebrated German conduc- tor and composer Wilhelm Furt- wängler.


Cesare Siepi was born Feb. 10, 1923, in Milan. His father was an accountant and his mother a homemaker. His father died when the boy was 16, and a half brother was killed during World War II on the Russian front, leav- ing him alone with his mother for much of his life.


While he initially hoped for a career in the boxing ring, he gave it up after several amateur bouts when his mother grew worried over his cuts and bruises. Vocally, he was a natural tal-


ent. He began singing with a madrigal group at 14, made his concert debut at 17, won a schol- arship to a music academy in Mi- lan, and in 1941 made his operat- ic debut singing Sparafucile in Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” an awfully low role for your average teen-


ARNOLD FRIBERG, 96


Painted ‘Prayer at Valley Forge’ and other scenes by T. Rees Shapiro


Arnold Friberg, 96, an illustra- tor best known for his patriotic portrait of George Washington kneeling in prayer beside his horse in the snowy woods near Valley Forge, Pa., and whose paintings of religious subjects in- spired many scenes for Cecil B. DeMille’s film “The Ten Com- mandments,” died July 1 at a Salt Lake City rehabilitation center. He had recently broken his hip


and never recovered. Mr. Friberg began his career as


an artist in his late teens and worked well into his 80s. The re- sult was an immense body of work that included scenes from the Mormon bible, college foot- ball games, wagon trains roaming the Old West and portraits of Brit- ish royalty. Mr. Friberg was known for painting epic scenes with rich col- ors and sharp details — often por- traying central male figures with beefy physiques aboard toned, snorting steeds. Mr. Friberg’s goal as an illustra- tor was simple. “I want my art to be perfectly understood,” he told Meridian Magazine, a Latter-day Saints publication. “I hope no one ever has to explain my pictures.” In order to capture the realistic


setting for his 1975 painting “The Prayer at Valley Forge,” Mr. Frib- erg studied Washington’s uniform at the Smithsonian Institution and later hiked to the Pennsylva- nia banks of the Schuylkill River in the middle of February. To “recall the pain, and the cold


of that cruel winter,” he removed his gloves and sketched the snow- covered tree limbs until his fin- gers froze. “I did that to pay tribute to


Washington, to portray the bur- den that fell upon one lonely man,” Mr. Friberg told the Salt Lake Tribune in 2000. “I’m a hero worshiper. I have to respect, al- most idolize, whatever I paint.” “The Prayer at Valley Forge” is among the most reproduced paintings in the world, and a copy of it was displayed in the White House during the Reagan admin- istration. The original was recent- ly valued at more than $12 million and is on exhibition at the first president’s home at Mount Ver- non. Mr. Friberg first achieved wide recognition in the early 1950s af- ter painting a series of 12 pictures inspired by the Book of Mormon, the religious text of the Church of


LOUIS MELANCON/METROPOLITAN OPERA ARCHIVES


Cesare Siepi portrays the title character in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” in this 1957 photo.


ager.


Shortly thereafter, he fled to Switzerland to escape the fascist regime and did not return to Ita- ly until the war had ended. His Italian career took off al- most immediately. He quickly es- tablished himself as a regular at La Scala in big roles: Zaccaria in Verdi’s “Nabucco,” the title role in Boito’s “Mefistofele,” under Ar- turo Toscanini.


Soon, he was singing in opera and concert appearances around Europe: the Verdi and Mozart re- quiems in Edinburgh, and even a debut at Covent Garden in 1950 in the relatively small role of Pis- tol in Verdi’s “Falstaff,” when La Scala visited the house on tour. In 1950, Rudolf Bing took over


as general manager of the Metro- politan Opera, hoping to bring in more stage directors from the world of theater, open the house up to television and find singers who were able to act.


Bing began his tenure with a


production of an opera that hadn’t been done at the Met in 30 years, Verdi’s “Don Carlo.” The Bulgarian-born opera singer Bo- ris Christoff, then living in Italy, was scheduled to sing King Phil- ip II but was inexplicably unable to get a visa; Bing brought in Mr. Siepi on a few weeks’ notice to take the part. Mr. Siepi attracted widespread


critical praise. “Clearly a fine mu- sician and an artist,” wrote the composer and critic Virgil Thom- son in the New York Herald Trib- une. “His rich bass voice, more- over, is both vibrant and warm. It is a beautiful voice and seems to be thoroughly schooled. Mr. Sie- pi’s dramatic performance was no less distinguished than his vo- cal work.” Mr. Siepi immediately became


aMet fixture, as well as a regular item in New York gossip col- umns. The Met saw a number of


firsts: “Boris Godunov,” in Eng- lish, as well as Mr. Siepi’s first “Don” Giovanni in 1952. The fol- lowing year, he performed it at Salzburg in a performance that was later documented on film. Other career highlights in- cluded Padre Guardiano in “La Forza del Destino,” Oroveso in “Norma” and the bass part in the Verdi Requiem. While Mr. Siepi was celebrated around the world, the Met remained a home of sorts; he continued singing at the house until 1973, in more than 400 performances. The Met provided a family in more senses than one: In 1962 he married Louellen Sibley, a danc- er with the company. Besides his wife, survivors include two chil- dren, Marco, of Saronno, Italy, and Luisa, of New York; and two grandchildren. Mr. Siepi’s repertory wasn’t limited to opera. In addition to recitals in four languages, he — like Ezio Pinza, widely seen as his artistic forbear — made forays onto Broadway, starring in the 1962 musical “Bravo, Giovanni” and the 1979 “Carmelina,” which ran for only a couple of weeks. But it was in opera that he best showed his ability to bring sing- ing characters to life. “Siepi stopped the show every time he finished an aria,” the New York Times reported of his Philip II in 1952, “for his portrayal . . . was a human experience. His singing, always a joy, has rarely surpassed the heights of richness and elo- quence it reached last night.” midgettea@washpost.com


ROBERT N. BUTLER, 83


‘The father of modern gerontology’ pioneered aging-research initiatives


by Emma Brown Robert N. Butler, 83, a Pulitzer


Prize-winning author, psychia- trist and expert on aging who helped illuminate the “quiet de- spair, deprivation, desolation and muted rage” that he said charac- terized the act of growing old in America, and who co-wrote a best-selling sex manual for senior citizens, died July 4 at Mount Si- nai Medical Center in New York. He had leukemia. For more than half a century,


Dr. Butler was a leading advocate in academic and policy circles for the dignified treatment and care of the elderly. He coined the term “ageism” to describe systematic discrimination against older peo- ple and challenged lawmakers, scientists and medical students to consider how to create a health- care system in which Americans could grow old gracefully. “Bob was certainly the person, more than any other single indi- vidual, who helped create the modern notion that aging is a time of choice, of opportunity, of growth,” said Dan Perry, who leads the Washington-based Alli- ance for Aging Research. “He was really the father of modern geron- tology.” Dr. Butler was appointed the


first director of the National In- stitute on Aging, part of the Na- tional Institutes of Health, in the 1970s. Later, he established a geri- atrics department at Mount Sinai, one of the first such comprehen- sive departments at an American medical school. At the time of his death, he was president and chief executive of the International Longevity Center-USA, a New York-based nonprofit research or- ganization he founded in 1990. He was perhaps best known by


the general public as the co-au- thor — with his wife, social work- er Myrna I. Lewis — of the manual “Sex After 60,” first published in 1976. The book, republished since as


“Love and Sex After 60,” offered advice for dealing with everything from the complicated emotions of remarriage to the mechanics of aging bodies. (Can’t hear what your lover is saying? Just sit clos- er, the authors advised.) “Love and Sex After 60” was for


several years in the 1990s the na- tion’s best-selling large-print book.


“Some might mistake it for a simplistic how-to book, and it cer- tainly does contain a treasure trove of helpful hints,” wrote au- thor Natalie Davis Spingarn in her 1994 Washington Post review. “But it is much more than that. It is a book with a message that comes through loud, clear and passionate: Our increasing num- bers of older people are as entitled to the same pleasures and fulfill- ment as other adults.” Dr. Butler’s career began in 1955, when as a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health he helped conduct one of the first long-term studies of older people.


DESERET NEWS ARCHIVES VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS


Arnold Friberg poses in front of one of his most famous paintings, “The Prayer at Valley Forge,” at his studio in Utah.


Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His art eventually caught the


attention of DeMille, who hired Mr. Friberg to help visualize scenes for his 1956 movie “The Ten Commandments.” The director and the artist be- came great friends during the film’s production, and Mr. Frib- erg’s conceptual renderings pro- vided the basis for many of the movie’s visual elements, including Charlton Heston’s red, white and black robe worn for the role of Moses. For his efforts, Mr. Friberg was nominated for an Academy Award for costume design in 1956. The movie project had a trans-


formative effect on Mr. Friberg, who made his allegiances clear with a sign that hung in his studio next to his personal set of the film’s trademark stone tablets: “I believe in God and DeMille.” Arnold Friberg was born Dec. 21, 1913, in Winnetka, Ill., and grew up in Arizona as a member of the Mormon faith. As a teen, he made extra money painting signs for local businesses and perfected his skills as an illustrator by draw- ing his own comic strips. After high school, he went to


the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and later moved to New York, where he attended night classes at the Grand Central School of Art alongside Norman Rockwell. He served in the Army during


World War II and turned down the option to be a military illus- trator to fight in the infantry in


Europe. Mr. Friberg moved to Salt Lake


City in 1950 to take a job as an art teacher at the University of Utah. His first wife, Hedve Mae Baxter, died in 1986. Survivors include his second wife Heidi Groskopf Frib- erg of Salt Lake City; two children from his first marriage, Frank Friberg and Patricia Friberg; two stepsons, Peter and Izzie Dominy; 10 grandchildren; and 13 great- grandchildren. In 1978 Mr. Friberg flew to Buckingham Palace to paint a portrait of Charles, the Prince of Wales, and Centennial, the royal family’s favorite bay horse. The royal family was so pleased with the painting that Mr. Friberg returned to Buckingham Palace in 1990 for a portrait of Queen Eliza- beth II with the same horse. Mr. Friberg’s other work in- cluded a series of paintings for General Motors celebrating the history of college football, more than 300 paintings of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and dozens of Western scenes for the owner of a Las Vegas casino. Despite his work for the Church


of Latter-day Saints, Mr. Friberg resented being labeled as a “Mor- mon artist” and said critics who characterized his popular art business as “selling out” were be- ing unfair.


Besides, he said in 2000, “I


don’t belong in the art world at all. I’m a storyteller.” shapirot@washpost.com


Among that study’s ground- breaking conclusions was that se- nility is not an inevitable conse- quence of age and that psychiatric care is not wasted on the elderly, as was commonly believed. The researchers also found that older people were more contented and tended to live longer when their lives were filled with goals, struc- ture and a sense of purpose. Through his work as a clinician and researcher, Dr. Butler saw firsthand how difficult it was for


Scotte H. Manns NEWSPAPER ADVERTISING


EXECUTIVE Scotte H. Manns, 73, an adver-


tising executive at The Washing- ton Post who became one of the highest-ranking female managers on the business side of The Post, died June 18 at a hospital in Greensburg, Pa. She had multiple myeloma, a form of cancer. Mrs. Manns joined The Post in 1963 as a junior clerk on classified advertising and within 10 years had advanced to manager of clas- sified advertising. She was the newspaper’s direc- tor of advertising sales from 1984 until her retirement in 1992. Her responsibilities included oversee- ing automotive, real estate and help-wanted ads, and she helped build The Post’s classified section into one of the largest in the coun- try, according to Donald E. Gra- ham, chairman of the board of The Washington Post Co. In 1989, Mrs. Manns received the Eugene Meyer Award, The Post’s highest honor for excel- lence. Scotte Harris was born in Phi- lippi, W.Va., and raised in Eliza-


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LARRY BARNS/MOUNT SINAI MEDICAL CENTER


Robert N. Butler coined the term “ageism” and founded organizations dedicated to the research and care of senior citizens.


the elderly to find adequate health care and live with dignity. They were treated by society as useless, warehoused in nursing homes staffed by woefully un- dertrained caregivers and seen by doctors who knew little about the unique needs of people in the lat- ter stages of life. Dr. Butler compiled those ob-


servations in his 1975 book “Why Survive? Being Old in America,” which won the Pulitzer for gener- al nonfiction in 1976. “We have shaped a society which is ex- tremely harsh to live in when one is old,” he wrote. “The tragedy of old age is not the fact that each of us must grow old and die but that the process of doing so has been made unnecessarily and at times excruciatingly painful, humiliat- ing, debilitating, and isolating through insensitivity, ignorance, and poverty.”


Raised by grandparents Robert Neil Butler was born


Jan. 21, 1927, in New York. His par- ents separated when he was 11 months old, and he was raised by his grandparents in southern New Jersey. He served in the U.S. Maritime


Service during the 1940s and graduated in 1949 from Columbia University, where he received a medical degree in 1953. He stud- ied psychiatry and neurology as a resident first at the University of California, San Francisco and lat- er at NIMH in Bethesda. He was a U.S. Public Health


Service surgeon from 1955 to 1962. He also had a private prac- tice in the Washington area and was a researcher and gerontolo- gist at the Washington School of Psychiatry from the early 1960s until 1976. He taught at several medical schools, including those at Georgetown, Howard and George Washington universities. In 1976, Dr. Butler became the


first director of the National In- stitute on Aging, where he suc-


beth, Pa. She was a dental assis- tant in Elizabeth from 1957 to 1961. She later was a hospital cashier at the University of Ne- braska in Omaha and a clerk at the want-ad counter at a news- paper in Des Moines. In retirement, she moved to Greensburg from Arlington. She and her husband of 48 years, Don Manns, took cruises to Hawaii and western Europe.


Besides her husband, of Greensburg, survivors include three sisters.


—Adam Bernstein


Gordon B. Bottom SYSTEMS ENGINEER


Gordon B. Bottom, 87, an IBM systems engineer from 1950 to 1991, died June 24 of pneumonia at Fairfax Nursing Center. He had pulmonary fibrosis. In the late 1950s and through- out most of the ’60s, Mr. Bottom was instrumental in the installa- tion and maintenance of large- scale computer systems used by NASA for satellites and early manned space operations. Later in his career, he support- ed various private clients, includ-


cessfully pushed Congress to in- crease research funding, partic- ularly for Alzheimer’s disease. He left government service in the ear- ly 1980s to launch Mount Sinai’s geriatrics department, part of his efforts to overhaul the treatment of the elderly by improving the education of doctors. Dr. Butler was the co-founder of


what is now the Alzheimer’s Asso- ciation and the American Feder- ation for Aging Research and wrote hundreds of articles and many books about the biology and sociology of aging. His re- search led to the development of life-review therapy, in which el- derly patients use reminiscence to understand and come to terms with their pasts before dying. In 1973, he co-wrote with Lewis one of the first comprehensive textbooks on geriatrics, “Aging and Mental Health.” She became his second wife, and they were married 30 years before her death in 2005. His first marriage, to Diane


McLaughlin, ended in divorce. Survivors include three daughters from his first marriage, A. Chris- tine Butler of Washington, Carole Hall of Oklahoma City and Cyn- thia Butler of Davidsonville; a daughter from his second mar- riage, Alexandra Butler of New York; and six grandchildren. Dr. Butler said it was his grand- mother who first showed him the fortitude of older people under stressful conditions. She was nearing 60 when she was wid- owed during the Depression. Homeless and still responsible for her 7-year-old grandson, she took a job as a seamstress. A few years later, they lost everything they owned in a hotel fire. “We started again,” he wrote in


a preface to “Why Survive?.” “And what I remember even more than the hardships of those years was my grandmother’s triumphant spirit and determination.” browne@washpost.com


Gordon Bottom


ing the Na- tional Geo- graphic Society and Kiplinger, the Washington- based publish- er of business forecasts and personal fi- nance advice.


Gordon Bishop Bottom was born in Bridgeport, Conn. He served in the U.S. Army Air Forces in Europe during World War II. After the war, he received a bach- elor’s degree in engineering from Haverford College in Pennsylva- nia. He and his wife were founding members of Olney Baptist Church, where he served as a dea- con.


Survivors include his wife of 65 years, Ruth Adam Bottom of Fair- fax County; four children, Gordon R. Bottom of Silver Spring, Dee Tompkins of Grand Junction, Colo., Ruth Bullock of Ocean City and Judy Hall of Fairfax County; a sister, Doris Hallinger of Arling- ton County; nine grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. —Emma Brown


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