Believe it or not, Fort Pierce enjoyed a golden age
of opera.
Beginning in 1979 and lasting three decades,
this city was home to the Treasure Coast Opera, which
produced three or four operas every winter season and
a musical or two many summers.
It endured through the efforts of Carlos Barrena, a
former opera singer who arrived here to help manage
Fort Pierce Jai Alai, and Anne Abood, up until then a
housewife and piano teacher.
Though the opera has been silent for nearly a decade,
this glorious chapter in the city’s musical history was
finally closed with the death Jan. 12 of Anne at the age
of 89. Carlos had died in 2014 at the age of 86.
Fort Pierce’s opera age started when Carlos arrived
in town in the late 1970s and was asked to give voice lessons at Indian River Community
College, now known as Indian River State College. Before long, he had more than a dozen
students, mostly music teachers or church musicians, who persuaded him to form an opera
company. One of those was Anne, then 50.
The group began producing operas in the boxy St. Lucie County Civic Center, with the first
one, La Boheme, performed on Dec. 8, 1979, featuring Carlos in the major tenor role. Initially,
Anne served as piano accompanist, but within a few years under Carlos’ vocal coaching, was
on stage performing the principal soprano roles for operas such as Elixir of Love, La Boheme,
Madama Butterfly and Die Fledermaus.
Dealing with the illness of her husband, Sheffield, and his eventual death from cancer, Anne
said opera changed her life in ways she never imagined. “Back then I was a small-town mother
of four with piano students,’’ she told me in a 2007 interview for an article appearing in one of
our first issues of Indian River Magazine. “This was a whole new world for me.’’
It was only the second act in what would become a multi-dimensional life in music. A child
piano prodigy who could sight read by the age of 4, Anne married early and sidelined her musical
ambitions as she raised her family. Return visits to her native Pennsylvania every summer
enabled her to receive her music degree from Misericordia University. Back on the Treasure
Coast, she provided private music lessons while also teaching music at St. Edward’s School in
Vero Beach and playing organ at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Fort Pierce.
The Treasure Coast Opera was just another layer in her musical life that she shared with the
wider community. Carlos brought singers from New York — he’d audition them annually in
New York — yet each opera was a genuine local effort produced with Anne, who led a corps
of volunteers helping with sets, makeup, costumes and ticket sales. The opera’s choruses were
also comprised largely of volunteers.
Carlos and Anne gave up their own singing roles after 1994 but continued to run the opera’s
administrative operations from a small office at the rear of the Sunrise Shopping Center.
They were the perfect team. Carlos was possessed of a fiery artistic temperament and had an
uncompromising vision for producing the next opera that could easily ruffle feathers while
Anne could easily smooth things over, providing the perfect counterbalance through her gift of
diplomacy and exhibition of courtesy, grace and clarity of thought.
Though most of the opera’s seasons were performed at the St. Lucie County Civic Center, a
challenging venue for such an endeavor, the opera enjoyed a few glorious seasons after the Sunrise
Theatre was renovated and reopened in 2006 after 30 years of being shuttered. But the good
times weren’t to last. As Florida’s 2008 recession approached, getting through each season was
a challenge, with funding from patrons and foundations drying up. With deficits in later years
covered by Carlos’ credit cards, the opera closed unceremoniously after the 2010 season.
You would think that was the finale in Anne’s creative life. But it wasn’t. In her mid-80s, she
returned to writing a historical novel she had begun as a young mother. It was based on the
life and love of Beethoven and Countess Marie Erdody, whom some scholars believe was the
composer’s immortal beloved.
When Anne found out our company was producing books, she called me and asked if we
would publish hers. The result was her 703-page novel, The Promethean, published in both hard
and soft cover in 2016. That such a prodigious undertaking was accomplished well into her 80s is
part of her other-worldliness, her daughter, Mimi Abood Drew, wrote in the foreword to the book.
Mimi’s foreword summarized Anne’s life better than I ever could.
“Because of her interest in the larger world, and the
touch of magic she carries, she endowed all of us with
an appreciation of the finer things in life,’’ Mimi wrote.
“Not just art and music, but a belief that we are here to
do great things, and to live our lives in trying to make
the world a better place.’’
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
4
Publisher & Editor
Gregory Enns
772.940.9005
enns@indianrivermag.com
Associate Publisher
Allen Osteen
Assistant to the Publisher
Lisa Crawford
772.466.3346
lisa@indianrivermag.com
Associate Editor
Jerry Shaw
Contributing Writers
Michelle Abaldo, Susan Burgess,
Judith Collins, Pattie Durham,
Greg Gardner, Janie Gould
Copy Editors
Pattie Durham, Gaettane A. Paul
Photographers
Anthony Inswasty
Photo Retouching
Herb Paynter
Cover Painting
Nataly Nijinsky
Design Editor
Michelle L. Burney
Advertising Representative
Sunny Gates
772.204.5043
sunny@indianrivermag.com
Distribution
Wes Holloway, Kirk Jones
To subscribe
Send a $20 check with
recipient’s mailing address to
Indian River,
308 Ave. A,
Fort Pierce, FL 34950
or visit
www.indianriverstore.com
On the Web
www.fortpiercemagazine.com
M A G A Z I N E
Fort Pierce Magazine is
published annually by
Indian River Magazine Inc.,
a locally owned company based at
308 Ave. A, Fort Pierce, FL 34950.
All material contained herein
is copyrighted by
Indian River Magazine Inc.
Member of the St. Lucie County
Chamber of Commerce.
A life of musical clarity
Carlos Barrena and Anne Abood ran the
Fort Pierce-based Treasure Coast Opera
for three decades. Abood, a longtime musical
force in Fort Pierce, died Jan. 12.
Reach Publisher and Editor Gregory Enns at
772.940.9005 or enns@indianrivermag.com.
Reach 772.466.3346 Signatures:Signatures 2/25/13 4:25 PM Page 1
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