Opera’s Biggest Fan Leaves Behind a Sprawling Time Capsule

Pavarotti, Domingo, Sills, Fleming and many more: Perhaps 200,000 autographs are piled in a vacant East Village apartment.

“To Lois.” For many of opera’s greatest stars since the 1950s, writing that phrase before signing an autograph was both a rite of passage and an honor. After they had finished a long performance at the Metropolitan Opera, singers like Beverly Sills, Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and Renée Fleming knew that Lois Kirschenbaum would be waiting at the stage door to greet them. The artists admired her almost as much as vice versa. Kirschenbaum was a switchboard operator from Flatbush, Brooklyn, who became perhaps New York’s biggest and longest-standing opera buff — and an obsessive autograph collector. For over half a century, she spent about 300 nights a year at the Met and other musical and dance performances. Legally blind since birth, she would usually sit in the uppermost balcony and follow the action with a pair of large binoculars, always hustling back after the curtain call — programs and headshots in hand — to gather signatures.