Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva (24 page)

But even more amazing than the weight coming off so easily was that I stopped
thinking
about food all the time. I marveled at that and wondered if the doctor hadn’t cut out a part of my brain.

That first year, I lost over a hundred pounds, and followed that with various skin-tightening surgeries to adapt to the quick weight loss. My self-image, however, was slower to adapt—there should have been a surgery for that, too. Although my eyes could see me getting smaller when I looked in the mirror, my subconscious lagged behind and still thought of me as a fat girl. I kept dressing in the same old baggy pants and tentlike muumuus, until my new part-time assistant and stylist, Jaime, insisted on going shopping with me. I had hired Jaime to fill in when Jesslyn was out of town. She was young, fun, and voluptuously beautiful—she, too, struggled with weight, so she understood my mentality.

I’d emerge from fitting rooms at Bloomingdale’s, saying, “Look, aren’t these pants great?” and she’d say:

“No! They’re not! Debbie, these are two sizes too big for you, can’t you see that?” She’d pull at the extra fabric like it was my old, stretched-out skin—my old sausage casing.

“Are you sure?”

“Debbie, it’s okay if the clothes touch your body. That means they fit.”

I had no idea.

Life as a nonobese person took some getting used to those first few years. Moments other people take for granted were for me red-letter days. Like the first time I was able to fit into an economy seat on an airplane without having to raise the armrest, and—imagine this—able to fit into the tiny airplane bathroom! I traveled so much for my work and always had to be careful about what I ate and drank before getting on a transatlantic flight because it was so difficult for me to get into the darn bathroom. Let me tell ya, 333 pounds, my all-time high before my surgery, does not fit onto that tiny plastic seat. Same goes for movie theaters, which I used to avoid because my body would overflow from my seat onto the seats and strangers next to me.

I WAS SOON
to learn that for as many postsurgery triumphs as I experienced, I also had difficulties. For every twenty or twenty-five pounds lost, I had to make major adjustments in order to feel comfortable singing. Suddenly I felt like I wasn’t connected to my body, as if my voice had lost its home, its base. When we sing, we engage certain muscles to support the sound, like having a girdle press on the abdominal muscles. When you’re over three hundred pounds and you take a breath, all that fat sitting on you automatically does extra girdle duty for you; the weight presses down and helps engage the musculature. You don’t really have to think about it, it happens
automatically. But now, I didn’t have the extra weight for support and compression. I felt physically shaky, ungrounded. It wasn’t an easy transition—much more difficult than I expected, or had been warned.

The critics attending my early, postsurgery performances were quick to point out the change in my voice.

“She used to sound more golden, now she sounds more shrill”—I’ve seen that in print a few times since my surgery. Those reviews were difficult to read, especially because my presurgery reviews were often so admiring. Not that I put much weight—forgive the pun—on reviews. I don’t read them anymore because they can be upsetting if you are having an off night. You can’t become an international opera star if you don’t consistently give good performances; but everyone has an off night once in a while. And when you do, it’s not the audience or critics who judge you the harshest—the audience, in fact, is especially forgiving. It’s the administration, the ones who do the hiring and firing, who don’t always understand the organic and mercurial ups and downs of a voice. In my early days onstage, James Levine, whom I called Jimmy, taught me to accept the ebb and flow of my instrument.

During a performance one night at the Met, I had screwed up a note in an aria. Jimmy called my dressing room during a break—in those days, I was his dramatic soprano darling and he’d call me in between every act to touch base. I hadn’t messed up the note too badly—I’ve never gone onstage and cracked a note like a strangled dog. But that night, the note didn’t sit right and I knew it. I was berating myself in my dressing room when he called.

“Jimmy, I’m so sorry that note didn’t go well.”

“Oh, baby,” he said, in that resonant, deep voice he has. His grandfather was a cantor, and Jimmy’s voice had a sort of Old Testament resonance to it. “We’re human beings, not machines.”

I’ve never forgotten his words. The whole beauty of live
performance is that anything can, and will, happen, good and bad. If you have a great conductor like Jimmy Levine, he can help you through a rough spot. During rehearsals once for
Ariadne
, I was having technical difficulties. At one point the score called for me to drop into a low part of my voice from a high G to a very low G in the aria “Es gibt ein Reich” when I sang the word
Totenreich
—meaning, “the realm of the dead” or “the netherworld.”

I couldn’t settle into the note, my voice didn’t want to go there. Jimmy was probably one of the few conductors able understand instinctively what I needed to do—he knows more about singing and vocal repertoire than anyone on the planet. I had to take more time, I had to give the note a proper setup. I wasn’t breathing correctly, I was too fearful of the scary note, he told me.

As we approached the dreaded
Totenreich
low G during our first performance, I looked at Jimmy and he looked at me. He gave me a reassuring look and he took a breath with me. With that breath, he gave me the freedom and the belief that I could do it. We connected in that moment, two artists together inside the music, and everything aligned perfectly. I knew exactly what he meant for me to do, and I did it, and it worked—my note was perfect. It was like being inside each other’s minds, it was so intimate. It was like Spock’s Vulcan mind-meld in
Star Trek
. In the same way that Jane was a musician-whisperer, Jimmy was a voice-whisperer. After our mind-meld, I never had a problem with that note again.

BUT BACK TO
my weight loss—I don’t believe it changed my voice for the worse, I just had to think more about how I moved, and how to support the air. It took me a lot longer than I thought it would to feel my voice was back to normal, to where it was before the surgery. Voices change and evolve for many reasons—menopause, age, overuse, and just life. A voice is naturally bound to change over a ten-year period in the same way one’s body changes. Also, if I have a different sound today, it may be due to my transition in
repertoire. I’ve gone from singing the arias of a spinto soprano in roles like Aida and Tosca, to heavy hitters like Brünnhilde, which is a totally different vocal category.

Sometimes a role doesn’t work for you because of bad timing.

My experience with Strauss’s Marschallin in
Der Rosenkavalier
was hit and miss. I was first contracted to sing the role for a run in Vancouver in the fall of 2004, a few months after my surgery. At the time I was living full time in my Florida condo, the exact spot where two devastating hurricanes were about to hit within three weeks of each other.

I had reached beautiful Vancouver, Canada—literally, at the other side of the continent from my home—days before the first hurricane hit, and when I saw the devastation on the news after rehearsal that day I panicked. I had no idea what, if any, damage had been done to my home and couldn’t concentrate during the rest of the rehearsals. Furthermore, hurricane number two was in the works and ready to hit. All I could think about was getting back home to batten down the hatches, as they say. The management knew I was distracted and I knew I couldn’t do the part justice because of it. Since we were all in agreement I called Andrea and told him, “I want out.” It was one of the few times I had ever done that.

I made it to my condo before the second hurricane hit. The first one hadn’t done any real damage, so I decided I’d bravely stay and ride out the second one until it was over. Everyone else in the condo had pulled down their aluminum, impact-resistant, hurricane-proof windows and doors and abandoned ship; everyone except me and one couple in the whole twelve-storey building had evacuated. That should have given me a clue. The night before the second hurricane was to hit, I heard a crash on the roof. The wind had blown part of the roof loose and it was slamming against the building like a wrecking ball.

I’m outta here.
I called every inland hotel, but they were all booked—even overbooked, with people sleeping in cots in the ball
rooms. Then I remembered my friend Holly, who lived nearby in a flood zone, and called her. She was freaking out, too, and we decided to escape together to our friend Mary’s—she was on higher, safer ground. Holly grabbed her cats, I grabbed Steinway, and we drove in my car as fast as we could.

Mary worked at a pet store, and all the animals had been divvied up among the employees to take home during the hurricane—Mary, just our luck, was given the aviary and her entire dining room was wall-to-wall cages of birds. Someone at the pet shop got to take home the cute little puppies and kittens . . . but not Mary. So there we were—me, Holly, Mary, Holly’s two cats, Steinway, Mary’s two dogs and five fish tanks, and about forty birds flying all over the place like in a Hitchcock movie. The birds were flying in slow motion and shitting all over poor Mary’s shag carpet. Okay, maybe that last part of my memory comes courtesy of the Xanax we were taking to calm our nerves. But that’s my recollection, and I’m sticking to it.

Had I been one of Hitchcock’s icy-cool blondes, maybe I could have turned the situation into a suspenseful, romantic drama instead of what it was—bedlam. I just prayed we wouldn’t have a flood and drift off like a little Noah’s Ark.

We all slept lined up on the floor, listening to the wind howl and the house rattle and the birds squawk. As for food, I had grabbed a pre-cooked, honey-baked ham from the freezer before I left, and it turned out to be all we had to eat. We spent the next day sitting on the front porch, hacking off chunks of thawing ham with knives, popping Xanax, and watching the electrical converters blow up around us on nearby streets like fireworks.

I couldn’t help but believe that the chaos around me was symbolic of the year I was having.

I FINALLY SANG
the Marschallin a few months later, in Berlin, in January 2005.

It was at a Strauss festival—though one of the big
newspapers there called it a “Deborah Voigt Festival” because I also sang the Kaiserin and
Vier letzte Lieder
, Strauss’s beautiful “Four Last Songs,” at the festival.

Christian Thielemann, the chief conductor of the Staatskapelle Dresden, was conducting, and under the direction of Götz Friedrich we created a very playful production of
Der Rosenkavalier
because he saw the role of the Marschallin as much younger than how she’s usually played—the character is meant to be in her thirties but is often played older. Friedrich’s youthful vision is what I think made the production such a success.

But as I was saying, there are many variables that come into play that affect one’s voice and performance. Sometimes it has to do with the specific director, the production, or even the opera house. A few months after Berlin, I sang the Marschallin again at the Vienna State Opera and although I mainly got good reviews, it wasn’t as successful. Why? The production is much loved by the Viennese public but it’s old and dusty. And, unlike in Berlin, the director wanted me to play the character very stodgy and staid, and it didn’t suit me. Plus, there was a long and established history between that piece, the opera house, and the women who’ve sung her there. The very fine soprano Felicity Lott had been their most recent Marschallin, and she had delivered exactly what they wanted and were used to. So to have some American come in and not fall in line with tradition . . . I didn’t have a prayer. Which was unfortunate, because I generally had great luck in Vienna, though not with this one.

So there are a lot of things that can go right or wrong when it comes to a performance. A lot of people felt I took too big a risk having the surgery, but I look at it this way: there are roles I play now that I could never have played at 330 pounds. There is no way the Metropolitan Opera would have made me Brünnhilde as they did years later had I still been obese—it just wouldn’t have happened. Besides, being able to move better and look more the part at my slimmer size, I feel I can do these roles more justice acting-wise, because
my face, my expressions, are not lost in an indistinguishable blob. A single gesture with my arm reads so much more clearly to the audience because I don’t have forty pounds of fat hanging from it.

But the most important factor in deciding to do the surgery was my health, and that trumps all the challenges that came with it. And I’m not the only opera star to think this way.

Late one night about two years after my surgery, my landline rang at an ungodly hour and when I picked it up, all I heard was static, and then:

“
Buon giorno.
Is this Debbbbeeee Voigt?”

“Yes, it is . . .”

“Please hold the line for Luciano Pavarotti.”

Crackle, crackle, crackle.
A minute later:

“Hey, Debbeeeee! It’s Luciano!
Ciao, bella!
”

“Oh, hey, Luciano, how are you?” I was half-asleep, not sure if I was dreaming or if this was a crank call or if it was really . . .
him
. “Um, what’s up?”

“Well, Debbbeeeee. I am wanting to talk to you about something.”

“Sure. Anything, Luciano. What do you want to talk about?”

“Well, I know you had this surgery, Debbbeee. You had this bypass thing. Tell me about it.”

I lay back in bed and explained the technicalities of it to him, about what the surgeons do with the stomach and the intestine so that you only ate small portions of food and lost a lot of weight.

“Why are you asking, Luciano?”

“Well, you know Debbbeeee, I keep gaining the weight and is not good for me and my knees and my back, and I’m thinking, maybe, I have this surgery like you.”