Fidu on a roof

MANILA, Philippines - She was the star of the indie film Niño.

A few years back, she was also in Peque Gallaga’s monumental Oro, Plata, Mata.

In the ’60s, she was in your living room TV in Sunday, Sweet, Sunday.

For a while, she was a Kapuso hosting a late-night show on Filipino music.

Now are you convinced Fides Cuyugan Asensio (the diva) has showbiz connections?

On the other side of entertainment, Fidu — as she is known to friends — is the first Filipino voice scholar accepted at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, and turns a year older on the first day of August.

That Philadelphia school has connections with leading Filipino artists who made good: Nena Villanueva del Rosario, the first Filipino piano prodigy; Cecile Licad, without a doubt the star pupil of Curtis and the country’s most celebrated pianist; and tenors Noel Velasco and Otoniel Gonzaga.

Fides recalls the music school she knew in the ’50s: “Curtis Institute of Music was, during my time, the most exclusive music school in the world. The finest teachers of every instrument and voice taught at Curtis. There were only 120 students housed in a huge mansion of the high-end main line Philadelphia. No taped auditions were acceptable. Aspiring scholars of voice and instruments had to audition in person. If you come from as far away a country as Nena del Rosario and I did, too bad if you failed the audition. One had to spend for one’s fare to get to Philadelphia.”

A celebrated friend and classmate of Fides in Curtis was Anna Moffo, Italian-American diva. She died in 2006.

Fides’ friend and classmate, Italian-American diva Anna Moffo

The surviving friend says, “Anna was a dear friend. We shared a lot of good memories. Because of financial constraints, she would bring home-cooked lunch to school where we would eat together in the basement at Curtis. She hardly ate out which my more affluent schoolmates did. In those intimate lunches (read: over baon box), there were confidences exchanged. She was madaldal, speaking with a distinct Philadelphia accent. We talked about family and boyfriends. When the boyfriend at Curtis dumped Anna, she was sadly quiet. She talked about it in low tones interspersed with tears. We had quite an operatic session. After she made it in the professional world of opera, movies and television, her personal life was not one envisioned with her school boyfriend who was a tall, good-looking piano major. Anna married a succession of older wealthy men who left her the way an opera heroine is abandoned. They died and left her with substantial finances, but she had little of the starry-eyed passion I had seen during those years at Curtis.”

In that school, Fides performed Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Telephone and the composer told her after the performance that the Filipina sang the part so well many thought the opera was composed for her.

That Menotti piece was the first opera I saw in Albay when Fides sang it at the Bicol College Gym in an outreach tour in the mid-’70s. She was as engrossing as the coquette telebabad gossip that I wrote my first rave review for opera in The Bicol Chronicle.

A few years later, I would bump into her at the Cultural Center watching Placido Domingo and Eva Marton in the San Francisco Opera production of Tosca.

Fidu, as friends fondly call her, was born in Lucena, Quezon, but her physician father, Dr. Gervasio Santos Cuyugan (personal physician-surgeon of then President Manuel Quezon) was from San Fernando, Pampanga. She got her Bicol connections from her mother, Jacinta Belza, a beauty from Buhi, Camarines Sur. Buhi town is a paradise where her family spent wonder-filled vacations next to mountain and the lake.

She was born into a music-loving family.

“My mother was always playing the piano — simplified excerpts or piano from grand opera. I guess that is where I first had an aural glimpse into the exciting world of opera.  My sister, Ceres, was the star pupil of Maestra Marcela Agoncillo. My brother, Ruben, was the star pupil of Maestro Ernesto Vallejo (the country’s first violin prodigy).”    

In a scene from the Cinemalaya 2011 film Niño

She herself is a mother of two and a grandmother of five. Nicole, daughter of her son Noli and Iwi Laurel, sings. The remaining four grandkids are children of her son Dennis, a physician, and his American wife Rebekah Colby: Michael, bio-engineering student; Ryan, an environmental engineering student; Kirsten, also a singer, and Marielle, still in middle school. 

The lola says, “I have a small family, but what it lacks in quantity is evenly balanced with quality.”

Noli, her son Manuel III’s nickname, was taken from Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere.

Recalls the grandma: “I was singing Sisa when Noli was five months inside me.” 

At this late stage of her life, Fides is given credit as opera singer, librettist, impresario and music teacher. As performing artist, she was the coloratura to reckon with the ’50s and the ’60s.

She made her professional debut as Adele in Die Fledermaus at the Far Eastern University Auditorium. Two years later, she sang the role of Sisa in the world premiere of De Leon’s Noli Me Tangere with the Manila Symphony Orchestra.

Until the late ’60s, she appeared in Filipino operas, including Santos’ Mapulang Bituin, Pajaro’s Binhi ng Kalayaan and Kasilag’s Dularawan. Her repertoire included roles from conventional opera, including Gretel in Hansel und Gretel, Lucia in Lucia di Lammermoor, Susanna in Il Segreto di Susanna and Konstanze in Die Entfrung aus dem Serail.

On the week she was  given tribute as singer and music teacher, several arias from various works come to mind like Huirizilippochtli and Napakahaba na ng Gabi sung by Doña Luisa from La Loba Negra. Another favorite aria is Mayo, Mayo… and Madilim sung by Anastacia from her work Mayo…Bisperas ng Liwanag with music by the late Rey Paguio.

Why are these her favorite arias? She answers, “They are special to me because they are all challenging and dark. As a singer, I wish I had a larger dramatic voice to deliver those arias but with my histrionic ability and vocal technique, I manage to color my light voice to convey the lives of acid red bitter yellow, black, brown and grey into the palette of the arias I mentioned.”

Another favorite is Verdi’s La Triaviata, especially the second act’s extended duet with Germont, father of the love of Violettas’ life. Fides recalls, “I sang Addio del Passato live in the latest foray into the cinema, in Niño, which although accompanied only by piano, I did no more than 10 takes because Loy Arceñas, director par exemplar, was meticulous to the point of exhaustion. Those takes were physically and vocally equivalent for a singer at my age to singing with full orchestra in the full-length opera version.”

She continued, “Violetta’s character is so woven into Verdi’s music. There is no way a singer who is vocally equipped can lose her way. The moment I researched on Dumas’ play and learned the music, I was hooked. Every woman who has truly loved a man can relate to Violetta’s farewell scene from Alfredo, rejected by the man himself or his family. Every scene in Traviata resonates very well to women in love. Even the death scene is how I think I would like to go. Ha, ha, ha! With a burst of joy in the opera, it is Alfredo who brings forth from Violetta the last line ‘O Gioia!’ Oh joy!  I think for me it would be God welcoming me to his kingdom.”

 She also remembers Die Fledermaus because it’s a fun opera. “It didn’t pose a vocal difficulty for me at my age. I had great co- singers, director, conductor and choreographer.  They were Austrian Herbert Zipper and Trudl Dubsky Zipper who mounted an authentically correct staging.”

She would not exchange her roles as singer and librettist for any other role in the arts “I still have three completed un-staged works waiting in the wing for sponsors.  One is a work in progress. All three are on Philippine themes as I’ve always tried to write on topics about my country.”

Asked to describe this latest phase of her personal and musical life, she says, “I am still sailing on smooth waters with wavelets of problems every now and then which are rare. My late husband, Manuel Asensio, kept me ‘well protected’ and financially funded to pursue my music-theater life. That life is hysterically, excitingly and deliciously chaotic as anybody in the producing, creative and performing magical world of theater knows. I have two sons, now middle aged, five grandchildren and myriads of cousins, uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces who are all into the arts, creative and performing in one way or another.”

Fides’ other children, her graduates and students, who choose to be identified with her, keep the line of her passion for music and theater unbroken into the future.

This business of mounting and marketing opera has been overblown by misconceptions one of which is that it is for the elite. She says, “I want to dispute that and have a real debate on what opera is about. I want to demystify it. Operas are mostly stories which even barrio children can relate to. The killings, murders, love affairs, incest and so forth can actually be headlines of tabloids read by the masses. It’s a matter of how to present it in the language Filipinos understand and market it the way they do foreign shows.”