Outside Looking In (11 page)

The most impressive voices, of course, belong to opera singers. The opera voice is a freak of nature. It surpasses others in size, range, flexibility, and speed. It can trill, spin dazzling fioriture, dive far down and soar far up. The first time I was able to experience a classically trained voice close up was also in high school. There was a marvelous program, back in the 1940s, called Community Concerts. Great artists were sent around to remote communities and schools. I heard the Trapp Family (long before
The Sound of Music
) and the Russian Cossack Singers (in the original cultural exchange program), but mainly I was impressed by Todd Duncan, the classical music professor from Howard University who was George Gershwin's original Porgy in
Porgy and Bess
.

At my high school, Duncan sang Schubert songs and Mussorgsky's “Song of the Flea.” But he ended with excerpts from
Porgy
. It was all moving musicianship, and though I never heard him again live, I retained an interest in his records and his life. Like other black artists of the time, he was unable to register in hotels of the cities where he sang and had to be put up in private homes. I read later how Gershwin had found him while searching for a black baritone of operatic quality. Duncan was recommended as a professor of music, and he showed up at Gershwin's Manhattan apartment carrying his classical songs. Duncan had never heard Gershwin's music. He was a classical music scholar who looked down on popular songs. Asked to sit down at one of the grand pianos in the Gershwin apartment, he sang a piece he had brought with him. When he finished, Gershwin asked him to stand in the elbow of the piano so he could see what he looked like while he sang out, not looking down at the piano. Duncan said he would have to take the music sheet with him, and Gershwin said that was all right—he would play it while Duncan sang. Gershwin needed to hear music only once to repeat it at the keyboard. Duncan said, “That is when I knew I was dealing with a real musician.”

I met another great singer of the Porgy role, William Warfield, at my own university, Northwestern, where he taught music while I was in the history department. The former husband of Leontyne Price, Warfield was in his seventies when I knew him, but he was still singing beautifully, though in diminished range and volume. He sat at the piano to sing selections from the
Old American Songs
of Aaron Copland that he had premiered, and told us about working over them with the composer. When I heard Thomas Hampson sing them in the White House, I was able to tell him a story that Warfield had passed on. In the song “I Bought Me a Cat,” where the singer imitates the sounds various animals make, Copland had written that the cow says “Unh! Unh!” imitating the actual bellow of a cow. But Warfield complained that everyone wants the cow to say, “Moo! Moo!” So Copland made the change. Hampson, who adored Warfield, was glad to hear this bit of musical history.

I never realized the sheer size of the opera voice till I stood onstage next to Beverly Sills as she was rehearsing for a recital with her pianist. She was thought of as having a rather small voice by the standards of her peers (like Joan Sutherland). But my ears were ringing as she sang so near me, and I wondered how singers saved their own eardrums when they were loosing voices of this power directly into each other's faces.

Sills was rehearsing a Rachmaninoff song, and she had taken coaching for its pronunciation from her mother, an emigrant from Odessa. (The mother had fled an anti-Jewish pogrom in an empty pickle barrel and come into America through Canada.) I came to know “Mama Sills,” as she was called, over the years. At her house for a birthday party, her Russian language skills were at issue, since she could not understand the Yiddish dirty jokes Danny Kaye was telling. She asked what he was saying, and the conductor Julius Rudel told her, “You don't want to know.”

Mama Sills's real name was Shirley Silverman. She was a warm and generous person, widely loved in the circle of her famous daughter. I first met her when I was writing an article on Beverly. After she had told me about her daughter, she typically said, “I am very proud of Beverly. But I am just as proud of my sons, so let me tell you about them”—her two sons, a doctor and a publisher. When she had described them in detail, she asked me to tell her about my children. Her interest was genuine. She said, “Do you praise them enough?” I said, “I hope so.” “You must. If they do nothing more spectacular than tying their shoe, you must make them see that as a great achievement.” Mama Sills asked to hear from my children, and they corresponded with her. When my daughter went to New York to work as a literary agent, Mama Sills took her to lunch and invited her to her home. When my son, who was a fan of musical theater, visited New York, Mama took him backstage to converse with Yul Brynner after a performance of
The King and I.

Mama's was the wisdom that kept Beverly grounded in a life of great suffering—she had a mentally troubled son, a deaf daughter with multiple sclerosis, a stepdaughter with legal troubles, and (eventually) a husband with Alzheimer's disease. Though Beverly was nicknamed “Bubbles” for her bouncy attitude, she was a fiercely determined professional, as Julius Rudel found when he opened a new house for the New York City Opera at Lincoln Center. Beverly had been his most durable star in the old house, and she felt he owed it to her to open the new theater. Rudel was putting on Handel's
Giulio Cesare,
and he had slated Phyllis Curtin for the splashy coloratura role of Cleopatra. Sills told him that if he did that, she would leave Rudel's company and have “Pete” (Peter Greenough, her wealthy husband) rent Carnegie Hall, where she would sing all the Cleopatra arias in a way that would make Rudel's production look sickly. She won, and it was her performance as Cleopatra that lifted her from fame to superstardom for the rest of her career.

She was usually cunning enough that she did not have to resort to threats. When she made her debut at La Scala in Milan, the opera director tried to achieve exotic effects in Rossini's
Siege of Corinth
by the use of scrims over the stage. Singers do not like the psychological effect of an obstacle between their voices and the audience, so they protested. But the director was unbending. That is when, Beverly told me, she informed the conductor that she would have trouble following his baton if she had to peer through a scrim. Instantly the scrims came down. She was good at getting her way, using skills that she deployed on singers, directors, conductors, and donors when, after she stopped singing, she became the manager of the New York City Opera and chairwoman of the board of both Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera. She was always smart and clear in what she did, beginning as a mathematical whiz in school. Her piano coach, Roland Gagnon, told me, “She sight-reads music like lightning, and can memorize a score in no time, even on an airplane.” When I sat with her in her dressing room before
Lucia
or
Anna Bolena
, she sometimes worked a double crostic while we chatted. Despite her sunny smile, she had a formidable intellect. When I asked her why she never sang in
Rigoletto,
which seemed made for her voice, she shrugged. “Gilda is such a dope.” She did not find it fun pretending to be dumb.

Becoming the boss at the Met was an ironic triumph for Beverly, since the autocratic Met manager Rudolf Bing had insulted her in her early career and vowed she would never sing in his house. When he retired and she made her belated Met debut, she was given an eighteen-minute ovation at the end of her first performance there. But in a manner typical of her (and of her mother), she visited Bing when he was hospitalized late in life. Her charitable activities were as extensive as her managerial ones.

The many sides of Beverly came out in her letters to me, of which I'll quote just one:

Things got tougher and tougher for Beverly. Peter's Alzheimer's progressed to the point where he no longer recognized her, but she went every day to visit him in his care center, despite her Lincoln Center duties. Muffy had to move about in a wheelchair and could not leave her mother's apartment building.

As her troubles mounted, she asked me to lunch with her whenever I was in New York. Across from Lincoln Center, we would meet at Fiorello, where there was a booth named for her. Because she knew I loved her mother (back when old ladies mothered me), she began to confide her problems, which she did not want to air in her professional role as board chairperson. She had to find a new apartment with a pool where Muffy could swim. She marveled at Peter's serenity, derived from medication. “Pete's so nice now. He was never
nice.
” Greenough had a caustic wit, which he sometimes used on Beverly's groupies. He once asked if I was a freelance writer. I said no, I taught at a university. He laughed: “Good. ‘Freelance writer' is just a polite name for ‘unemployed.' ” When Peter read in the paper that I had turned down an award from the Sons of the American Revolution because the speaker before the presentation of the award had been applauded for a right-wing diatribe, Peter wrote me a letter of congratulation, saying that he had turned down membership in that group several years earlier when they endorsed conservative positions. It bothered Peter that Beverly sang in Nixon's White House, but she convinced him that her duty to promote opera overrode her own revulsion at the Vietnam War.

At our lunches, Beverly worried about attendance and donations slacking off at the Met. She was hatching some of the tactics that her successor, Peter Gelb, would use to make opera more accessible. Like her mother, she always wanted to know about my children. She never pined for her singing days. She had determined beforehand to retire at age fifty, and not to hang on to followers while her powers declined, as so many singers do—Callas, Tebaldi, and Sutherland among them. Beverly admired Rosa Ponselle, who had retired at the height of her career. Beverly had sung briefly for Rosa's Baltimore opera company. After my wife and I moved to Baltimore, we occasionally saw Rosa around town, and visited her Villa Pace home in the countryside. When Rosa visited Johns Hopkins, she brought with her the screen test made of her
Carmen
performance, using the best sound equipment of the time. From the back of the room she shouted that the volume should be turned up: “Louder! I had a
big
voice.” When Licia Albanese visited Rosa, I got to talk with the first Mimì I had heard at the Met. I asked her about the earliest opera she ever recorded, when she was Mimì to Beniamino Gigli's Rodolfo. I wanted to hear about his voice, but she just remembered his thoughtfulness to a young soprano: “He brought me sandwiches when I was feeling tired.”

Ponselle was a personal hero to my wife Natalie's Italian community in Connecticut. Rosa had been born in the same Meriden hospital where Natalie and many of her relatives (and my son) were born. Rosa and her sister Carmela had sung on the Keith Vaudeville Circuit as the teenage “Ponzillo Sisters” before Enrico Caruso heard Rosa and brought her to the attention of the Met manager of the time. She made her debut in the opera that opened the 1918 season,
La Forza del Destino,
when she was only twenty-two. Caruso was from Naples, like Rosa's parents, and he called her Scugnizza (street urchin) in their native dialect. As she stood in the wings for her first entry onto an opera stage, he went over to her and said, “I always get nervous at an opening. Would you please hold my hand?” Great singers are sometimes simply great. Of Rosa's first night, the
New York Times
wrote that the Met had discovered “vocal gold.” The soprano Geraldine Farrar famously said that, when comparing singers, you must first place two outside the contest, Caruso and Ponselle, then you could begin ranking the rest.

Another singer I got to know well in several cities was Shirley Verrett, who had overcome the same kind of racist problems that Todd Duncan faced. Leopold Stokowski tried to book her for his Houston Symphony Orchestra in the 1950s, but Texas racists on his board blocked the move. Only when he returned to Philadelphia could he perform and record with her. Her sensitivity to racial issues made her reject the role of Bess in
Porgy—
she felt the stereotypes were too condescending. Her independent judgment made her take heretical positions. Though she was a strong and convincing actress, she did not adopt Maria Callas as her ideal, since Callas's top notes were too “screechy”—she told me they made her think of playing a comb through cellophane. Though Verrett began as a mezzo-soprano, her brilliant high coloratura made her just as convincing as a soprano, and some of her greatest roles—like Verdi's Lady Macbeth—were performed in that register.

My interest in voices was not channeled entirely toward opera. In 1959, I heard at Stratford-upon-Avon Charles Laughton, playing Bottom in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, memorably say, “I will
roar
you as gently as any sucking dove; I will
roar
you an ‘twere any nightingale.” Two of the greatest voices of the twentieth century belonged to John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier, whom I heard perform both in England and in America. In 1959, Olivier repeated the triumph he had achieved twenty years earlier in
Coriolanus.
It was said that he could not repeat the athleticism of his first run, but he surpassed it. When Aufidius called him “Boy,” Olivier ran up an incline and took a dive out from the top, straight at the audience, something he had done in his
Hamlet
movie, imitating John Barrymore's dive in the film
Don Juan
. In order to get insurance in the role in 1959, Olivier had to hire professional acrobat “catchers” to grip him in midair. He so concentrated on impulsive athletics that he almost threw away the play's words. Those are better served by Richard Burton in his dazzling recording of the play. But Olivier could concentrate all his verbal artistry in one word. When the actor playing Aufidius called him a “boy of tears,” Olivier answered “BOY?” and it was miraculous how much pride, scorn, contempt, and defiance he could pack into a single syllable.