Ruby Cutter Savage

Cutter was born in Boston, the daughter of Fitch Henry Cutter and Mary Alvida Clark Cutter. She was a student of Arthur J. Hubbard in Boston,^[1] and studied voice with W. Elliott Haslam in Paris.^[2][3][4] In New York City, she studied German or French diction with Margaret Goetz.^[5]

Savage was a soprano soloist who sang with the Boston Opera Company.^[3] and in a 1903 production of Orfeo ed Euridice in Angers.^[6] She toured with the New York Philharmonic in 1904,^[7] appearing in forty cities,^[8] in concerts with tenor Dan Beddoe and conductor Walter Damrosch.^[9] In 1905 she sang with the Savage Opera Company.^[10] "She always makes a splendid impression. Her voice in quality and range is phenomenal," according to a profile in Musical Courier magazine in 1904, which also discussed her appearance ("a fine figure and a most pleasing facial expression") and her "artistic temperament".^[4]

Savage sang in Montreal in 1906, including as a last-minute replacement soloist for Handel's Messiah.^[11] She and tenor Theodore van Yorx gave a concert together at Boston's Jordan Hall in 1907.^[12] She returned to the opera stage in 1909, appearing in La traviata and Faust at the German Opera House in Prague,^[13] and appearing as Mimi in La bohème in Boston late that year.^[14]

In 1913, Savage used the name "Rena Saville" when she was with the Zuro Opera Company.^[15] In 1914 she played Josephine in a "mammoth" production of H.M.S. Pinafore at the Hippodrome, complete with "real water, real sailors".^[16] In the 1920s, she was a church soloist in Florida.^[17]

Cutter married twice. She married fellow singer and voice coach Paul Savage in Italy in 1902; they divorced in 1915,^[18] the year she married Pierre LaJard Willis in New Jersey. The Willises also divorced. She lived with her mother in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s.^[19] She died in 1949, in Los Angeles, at the age of 72.^[20]