Mary Jane Phillips-Matz

Mary Jane Phillips-Matz (January 30, 1926 – January 19, 2013) was an American biographer and writer on opera. She is mainly known for her biography of Giuseppe Verdi, a result of 30 years' research and published in 1992 by Oxford University Press. Born in Lebanon, Ohio and educated at Smith College and Columbia University, she lived for many years in Italy, and even after her return to the United States in the early 1970s spent her summers in Verdi's hometown of Busseto where she continued her exhaustive research into his life. She died in New York City at the age of 86, survived by three of her five children.

Mary Jane Phillips was born in Lebanon, Ohio to William Mason Phillips and Hazel Spencer Phillips. Her mother was the author of several books on Ohio history and folklore. She grew up in Dayton and acquired her interest in opera as a child from family excursions to the Cincinnati Zoo where the price of admission included a free performance by Cincinnati Opera in the zoo's pavilion. After earning a bachelor's degree in medieval literature and modern European history in the late 1940s from Smith College and a master's degree from Columbia University, she began a 50-year period of contributing to Opera News. She married Charles Albert Matz Jr., a writer and literary historian, in 1950 while still a Masters student at Columbia and published under the name Mary Jane Matz until the couple divorced in 1977.

Her first book, Opera Stars In The Sun: Intimate Glimpses Of Metropolitan Personalities was published in 1955 and dedicated to her parents. The 1960s saw the publication of two more books, a biography of the philanthropist and arts patron Otto Kahn and Opera: Grand and Not So Grand. The latter was an analysis of the modern opera business which she characterized as "monstropera", contrasting what she felt was its dehumanized, bourgeois approach with its past as a flamboyant yet more human spectacle. During the 1960s and early 1970s Phillips-Matz lived in Venice with her young family. She continued her research and writing and also taught English to the employees of Venice's public boat system. She and her husband became friends with Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound who lived nearby and introduced Pound to Gian Carlo Menotti, another old friend. During this time, Phillips-Matz was also general manager, fund-raiser, and public relations director for Menotti's Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto.

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