Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva (35 page)

Years ago a reporter asked me what it felt like to be a “star,” and I couldn’t answer her, because I didn’t feel like one. Only now, today, am I beginning to own that feeling, to accept that I’ve had success and be proud of it without feeling guilty or bad about it. My success was based partly on my gifts, but I had to work hard to develop those gifts. When I think back and recall the early days onstage and the thousands of pages of memorizing and the fears I had to overcome and the highs and lows and insecurities that go with an opera career, I take a deep breath and shake my head at all of it.

Time passes quickly; I’ve passed the age of Beverly Sills when I saw her in concert in my early twenties during her farewell tour, in which she thanked the audience for joining her in her twenty-
five years in the business that gave her “as much joy and passion as this poor little heart can bear.” She continued, saying, “I prefer to think the book isn’t finished, it’s only a chapter that’s finished, and we’re going on to another one . . . and maybe [I can] help someone else’s dream come true as mine did. I can only hope that the best is yet to come.”

I feel the same way. For the last few years I’ve been teaching master classes to young opera students and I try to teach them what I’ve learned. It’s exciting to help them with their future, and I’m also excited with my own new beginnings.

On my piano stand—in front of my kitchen window overlooking the backyard bird feeders—I’ve got my
Wozzeck
libretto, which I study every morning. At the Met, in the spring of 2014, I was to play Alban Berg’s Marie, a flirtatious and unfaithful yet kind-hearted, Bible-reading (again!) common-law wife who is tragically murdered by her husband. It’s a great dramatic part full of fire and pain, like life, and it’s a part I’d never played before, so I’m eager to immerse myself. Every morning I make myself a coffee, feed Steiny, and nudge myself over to the piano . . . slowly changing old habits of procrastination.

I do the best I can do, I try to be good to myself, I try not to judge myself harshly, because what I have learned is that we are all in this together and we are all afraid at some time or another, not just me. We all have our off nights or off weeks—or even off years—but we can pick ourselves back up.

And as my good friend Maria von Trapp used to say, “When God closes a door, somewhere He opens a window.” (Or was that the Mother Superior?) One surprising new job at the Met that I first grumbled about but quickly grew to love is hosting the live HD performances. Instead of dressing up in costumes or glamorous gowns, I put on my serious Barbara Walters suits and become a journalist, interviewing my colleagues backstage. I’ve been told by producers and my Twitter and Facebook followers that I have a knack for it.
Perhaps it’s because I feel compassion for and solidarity with my colleagues, not competition.

Opera singers are more fragile than an audience member would ever believe. We loom larger than life up there, and when people meet me in person, I think they expect me to be seven feet tall. To catch us as we’re running offstage to change costume, or when we’ve flubbed a difficult aria or forgotten a line, puts us in a very vulnerable situation—never mind having cameras lingering on our every pore and nose hair at every turn.

I remember when the idea of doing the live HD broadcasts was first being discussed at the Met and the buzz backstage among performers was concern.

“I don’t know, what do you think about this HD thing?” Ben Heppner asked me at the time, when we passed each other in the halls at the Met a year or two before our revolving-Tristan run.

“I think it’s a great idea, I think it’s wonderful.”

“But what if we have a bad night, what if we crack a note?”

“Ben, we’re human beings, and our audience is, too. If we are willing to admit that to them, and say, ‘Wow, that really didn’t go the way I wanted it to,’ and talk about how that makes us feel . . . that’s only going to endear us to them. The idea that we’re these revered people on a pedestal who make no mistakes and have only confidence and only put out the best performances . . . it’s not humanly possible.”

That’s me, the anti-diva. I’m all for making us human to the public, because the alternative is too difficult to live up to. I take great comfort in knowing my fellow colleagues get nervous, or make mistakes, like me.

I remember the first time I interviewed someone who had a “bad night.” I was the HD host for
La traviata
and the role of Violetta was being sung by soprano Natalie Dessay. As every soprano who has sung the role knows, there’s a perilously high E-flat at the end of Violetta’s aria that’s a killer. It’s not written by Verdi that way,
but somewhere along the way it became tradition, and not everyone can do it. The rest of the opera doesn’t require that kind of vocal pyrotechnics, but that one note. So Natalie got out there and went for that high note, and it really wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. I knew it and she knew it.

When she came offstage she was shaking like a leaf.

“I blew it!”

I grabbed her hand and we started the interview.

“Ah, that was not such a good note,” she said, embarrassed. I told her, on camera, that it was just one note, and what she brought to the role was so much more than that one note.

Even Plácido gets nervous when he’s acting as HD host for the night. He was assigned the job during one of my Brünnhilde performances in
Die Walküre
and as I walked off the stage and we hugged like old friends, his glasses fell to the floor and we both fumbled around, trying to pick them up. Everybody was momentarily flustered, especially Plácido, and then . . . everything was fine.

None of us is perfect, we are only human, as Jimmy used to reassure me. And it’s important that we bare and share our humanness with each other—it’s the main reason I’m writing this book. And it’s the main reason why I developed
Voigt Lessons
with playwright Terrence McNally and my Chicago
Salome
director, Francesca Zambello.

Voigt Lessons
is a one-woman, ninety-minute autobiographical theater piece in which I talk about the ups and downs of my personal life and my career, much as I’ve done in this book, and sing the songs and arias important to me throughout my life. I also talk about the eight words that saved my life: “My name is Debbie, and I’m an alcoholic”—followed by a rendition of “Smile” (. . .
though your heart is aching
). After a year of writing and rehearsing, we showcased the piece in Boston in November of 2013 to see if an audience would be open to a truthful, honest Debbie. Deborah
Voigt, unplugged. I’m happy to report that they laughed and cried as much as I did.

It feels good not to live a dual life anymore. A friend helped change my life when she told me it was time to stop being one person onstage and another in private. Incorporating the two Debbies together means I have to accept my flaws; I hope others do the same. As Shane, my new “spiritual advisor” says, I’ve spent way too much time beating myself up and it’s got to stop. Out of the mouths of babes, and it’s good advice for all of us.

Last Christmas I went to visit my family in Wisconsin, and Mom and I went through boxes of old photos that we hadn’t looked at in decades. We sat on the couch and the memories spilled out of the boxes. Here was the pic of Mom in her beautiful black dress on New Year’s Eve (when Dad told her she needed to lose ten more pounds) . . . there was the pic of me as a curvaceous teenager, right around the time I met John . . . here was a pic of the family during “devotional time” . . . and so on, and so on. My mother and I both had simultaneous reactions as we held the photos up: “Look how slim and pretty I am!” And yet neither of us knew it
then
. Instead, we wasted precious time, torturing ourselves about our bodies.

MY NEW PERSPECTIVE—TO
accept myself as I am and bare my flaws and mistakes to the world—feels like hang-gliding, something I did for the first time a few years ago emboldened by my earlier paragliding experience with Peter in Hawaii. I was in Zurich playing concert performances of
Salome
and driving into the city from the airport when I looked up and saw dozens of people flying through the sky. The next morning, at six a.m., I was driving up the side of a mountain to meet my hang-gliding instructor, the person to whom I’d be tethered for the ride. Here were his instructions:

“We’re going to start running, and we’re going to come to the end of the little hill, and whatever you do, don’t stop running!”

So I did what he said, I kept running and running, and the next
thing I knew we were in the air . . . flying. We flew over the hills in the middle of a fog and could hear cowbells ringing below us.

I laughed—it was heavenly and liberating. It was the kind of feeling I get when I sing.

Last year began so horribly, but ended so beautifully.

Before Christmas, I performed several concerts in Utah with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. The staff treated me like a princess all week, sharing their spirit, soul, and faith with me, and after we finished our last show they presented me with a gift.

“Debbie, if you would please turn around and face the choir,” said the choir leader. The smiling group of 360 looked at me and sang the hymn “God Be with You Till We Meet Again.” It’s a hymn you sing when someone is going away and will be missed.

I felt so touched, appreciated, and loved, I burst into tears. It had been a difficult year—filled with “life’s perils thick confound you”—and their Christmas gift gave my year a happy ending. A big part of my life began when I heard God’s inspiring voice encouraging me onward, and now the most difficult year of my life had ended the same way—comforted by it.

On the night of December 31, back home in New Jersey, I sent out a video—taken with my iPhone—to friends and family of my faithful Steiny and me. In it, we lit candles by the fireplace and sat by the decorated Christmas tree, sipping hot chocolate (me) and eating doggie cookies (Steiny). I wore my flannel pajamas, and it was so cozy, the two of us.

I was able to be alone, yet I wasn’t alone. I had loved ones who cared for me nearby, and I had myself. Finally, I had myself.

I thought of those little lights peeking out from the darkness down in Cassadaga and they reminded me of a children’s gospel song I used to love as a child. I hummed it for Steiny as the clock turned to midnight and the fireworks went off in the east, over the Hudson River, signaling a New Year and a brand-new start.

This little light of mine . . . I’m gonna let it shine . . . let it shine, let it shine, let it shine . . .

My name is Debbie. I’m a daughter, a sister, and a friend. I sing for God and I sing for others. And now, more than ever, I sing for myself, too—and that makes me happy.

A Chicago native raised in southern California, soprano
DEBORAH VOIGT
is increasingly recognized as one of the world’s most versatile singers and one of music’s most endearing personalities. A leading dramatic soprano, internationally revered for her performances in the operas of Wagner and Richard Strauss, she has also portrayed some of the heroines of Italian opera to great acclaim. Voigt has an extensive discography, has given many enthusiastically received master classes, and is an active recitalist and performer of Broadway standards and popular songs. She is also co-creator of
Voigt Lessons
, a one-woman show she developed with award-winning playwright Terrence McNally and director Francesca Zambello.

Deborah Voigt appears regularly, as both performer and host, in the Met’s
Live in HD
series, which is transmitted live to movie theaters across the U.S. and overseas. Among her appearances as a TV and radio host was a special five-night presentation of Wagner’s complete “Ring” cycle on the PBS series
Great Performances from the Met
. Robert Lepage’s visionary new staging, which starred Voigt as Brünnhilde, was also released as a Blu-Ray DVD set that won the Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording of 2013.

Audiences have seen Deborah Voigt in many important national media outlets, including a CBS
60 Minutes
profile, appearances on
Good Morning America
,
Charlie Rose
, and CNN, and features in
People
and
Vanity Fair
. Voigt is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of South Carolina.
She has won many awards, including
Musical America
’s Vocalist of the Year and an
Opera News
Award for distinguished achievement. Known to Twitter fans as a “Dramatic soprano and down-to-earth Diva,” Voigt was named by the
Los Angeles Times
as one of the top twenty-five cultural tweeters to follow.

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COVER DESIGN BY ROBIN BILARDELLO

COVER PHOTOGRAPH © HEIDI GUTMAN

This is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed in order to protect the privacy and/or anonymity of the individuals involved.

CALL ME DEBBIE
. Copyright © 2015 by Deborah Voigt. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.