The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer (2 page)

Once that’s in place, the subsequent task of learning the role comes along much more quickly. When performing an opera, I have to memorize not only my own text, but the text of everyone around me onstage, so that I’m ultimately involved in a dialogue, as opposed to simply staring blankly at my colleagues while they make unintelligible sounds. I’ve devised many tricks over the years to help with memorization, and although it seems obvious, the most important one is learning to connect the words with their meanings. Ten minutes of concentrated memorization with a full understanding of what I’m saying is worth hours of mindless repetition. Using alphabetization, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and rhyming, especially in languages like Russian and Czech, and having a visual memory of the music on the page are also essential. I do anything I can come up with to grind the text into the gray matter between my ears. Interestingly enough, the more difficult the etching, the longer it lasts. Six years after learning a role as complex as Tatyana may find me mumbling the confrontation scene with Onegin while waiting in line at the post office, despite the sideways glances of other customers.

Of course, I was hardly the first American soprano to find herself in this position. Our national tradition of pressing ahead and assuming everything will work out in the end dates all the way back to Lillian Nordica, formerly Lillian Norton of Farmington, Maine. She must have been the first true American superstar on the international scene. When she came to the Imperial Opera in St. Petersburg in 1880, she was twenty-two years old and had virtually no career behind her, but the Maryinsky engaged her to sing a dozen leading roles in the 1880-1881 season alone. A dozen roles at twenty-two. Comparatively speaking, I had nothing to worry about.

For this performance, I was coached in Russian by Irina, a smartly dressed and professional musical presence in the theater. Valery Gergiev has single-handedly built up the reputation of the Kirov Opera until it has achieved a towering international position, often keeping his artists employed through more lucrative Western tours. Russia is a society that recognizes artistic potential in children from a very early age, and it has consequently produced not only talented performers but a people with a deep and intelligent appreciation for the arts.

Which only made me all the more nervous about Tatyana. Her letter scene is fourteen minutes long and extremely wordy, and I suddenly wished I could trade my program with the Maryinsky’s leading soprano, who was to perform Glinka’s Vocalise instead. Singing “Ah,” after all, is foolproof! I decided the only way to get through this was to steel my mind and not allow doubts to flood in. Of course, this was nothing compared with the first time I sang the role in 1992 when my daughter, Amelia, was two months old, and uninterrupted sleep was a distant dream. Memorizing between her birth and the premiere had been agonizing, and I felt vindicated when I read years later that pregnancy and a sound memory are mutually exclusive. Now I willed myself to think only of Tatyana and her letter, to forget that this event would be televised around the world and that Vladimir Putin himself would be seated directly in front of me, judging my pronunciation. All I had to do was put on my nightgown and robe, step out onto a stage without any blocking, and begin to sing in a language I didn’t understand.

 

It’s impossible, at moments like these, not to stop and wonder how I got there. How does a girl from Churchville, New York, come to be asked to represent her country at a major international musical event, standing on the stage of a theater filled with dignitaries? The answer is unnervingly simple: it all comes down to two little pieces of cartilage in my throat. Those vocal cords—delicate, mysterious, slightly unpredictable—have taken me to unimaginable places. I have slept at the White House after staying up until two in the morning talking music with the Clintons and the Blairs. I have sung for Václav Havel at the end of his presidency and sat beside him at dinner for four hours afterward while he spoke of his life.

Apart from the moments of celebration and commemoration, I have performed at more solemn occasions. I have sung “Amazing Grace” at a ceremony at Ground Zero, only a few months after the attacks of September 11, with nine thousand people crushed into a space that was impossibly small for them, filling up the streets, pressing against one another shoulder-to-shoulder in every direction until they became one single life of sorrow. In the week leading up to that event, I had sung that song again and again, trying to imprint it into the muscle memory of my throat so that when the time came to perform it, I would be able to get through to the end without crying. I remember a young girl who was sitting at the front of the crowd with her family on the day of the ceremony. She was about sixteen years old, and I had no idea whom she had lost, but among the obviously grief-stricken people who carried photographs and signs and wept, her expression seemed utterly empty. Her eyes were dry. It was as if she had lost her own soul when those buildings went down, and when I started to sing I had to look at the sky or I knew I’d never be able to maintain my composure.

Given the fact that most classical musicians are not household names or faces recognizable from television, it’s interesting to speculate about why people so often turn to a classically trained musician, and most often a singer, in times of national conflict or grief. Why choose a soprano to represent our collective emotional experience, rather than a familiar singer from the world of popular music who has sold millions of records? Why turn to a far lesser-known voice whose music is appreciated by a smaller audience? I think the answer lies in two places. First, the tradition of music grounds us and connects us to one another through a sort of universal appreciation that transcends taste, particularly in such songs as “Amazing Grace” and “God Bless America.” Second, a trained voice has a kind of innate authority that transmits a sense of strength. We can be heard without a microphone. We sing with the entire body. The sounds that we make emanate not just from the head, but from the whole heart and soul and, most important, the gut. The word “classic” has come to be applied to so many things in our culture—cars, rock music, a particular episode of a television show—when in its truest sense it carries the weight of something that has been distilled over time and represents the highest quality in a given field. The music we sing has been loved in many past generations and will continue to flourish and find life and love in the future.

Thanks to the instrument of my voice, I have been fortunate enough to be invited to step onto the stage at great national and international occasions. I have seen the world from the vantage point of the greatest opera houses and recital halls. I have been incredibly fortunate in my career, and people often remark to me, “What a wonderful gift you have—how glorious it must be to open your mouth and have that voice pour out!” While it’s a fact that a voice begins with natural talent, any talent must be nurtured, cajoled, wrestled with, pampered, challenged, and, at every turn, examined.

As I set about my education as a singer, I devoured the autobiographies of my predecessors, hoping to find the kind of advice that would improve my singing, but mostly what I found were entertaining accounts of celebrated lives. As much as I enjoyed the stories of intrigue at Champagne receptions, what I desperately needed was practical advice: When did these singers learn what they knew, and who taught them? How did they survive their early auditions, stage fright, and rejection? How did they learn all those roles once they finally succeeded? How did they maintain their voices over the course of a demanding career? I searched for such a long time for the book I wanted to read that finally I decided my only recourse was to try to write it myself. What I came up with in the end was not the story of my life, but the autobiography of my voice. My voice, after all, is my calling and my career, just as any performer’s talent—whether singing, acting, or dancing—compels her to find her place on the stage. I hope that
The Inner Voice
will be a valuable companion to anyone striking out in this daunting but exhilarating profession.

The story of my singing has a plot not unlike those of the horse novels I loved in my youth: A child finds a wild horse whose true potential only she can see. She loves it and cares for it, trains it tirelessly. The girl and the horse have a commitment to each other that no one else can get in the way of. She sticks by the horse through injury and doesn’t believe anyone who says the horse is all washed up. When the horse is thriving, she turns down all offers to sell it off. In the end, the horse proves to be a winner, and in return for her work and devotion, it takes her to victories she had never dreamed possible.

This is the story of how I found my voice, of how I worked to shape it, and of how it, in turn, shaped me.

 

 

 

 

I
HAVE LIVED A LIFE with a soundtrack. So many of my memories have music attached to them. Sometimes the music is at the center of the story, and other times it’s only an afterthought, a song that one of my daughters half-sings under her breath while we’re walking to the bus stop in the morning. Music can propel the story in a perfectly quiet room when I’m alone and learning a score. It has taken me around the world and brought me home. I can trace back so many of the dearest people in my life, my teachers and colleagues who became my friends, to a certain set of pitches. My memories so often involve someone singing, or me singing, or someone striking the first notes on a piano, that it becomes difficult even to imagine the precise place where those memories began. So while I can’t remember first hearing music, I can at least remember the night when I first fell in love with it.

 

I was thirteen, and my family was living in a suburb outside of Rochester, New York, in a tract subdivision that had shiny new houses based on one of two models—the ranch and the split-level. It was summer, and the streets stayed light until late. The kids played in their yards, running games of tag through neighbors’ lawns, shouting to one another, until it finally grew dark and their mothers came out onto the front steps and called their names and one by one they went inside. It was warm, and because everyone kept the front door open, we could hear the calls of “Good night” and “See you tomorrow” and the slamming of screens, and then the world quieted down again, the sound of voices giving way to the sound of crickets and the cars driving past. On this particular night, I was in our living room and my parents were singing. They were both music teachers, and all day long they listened to singing—the endless scales, the songs learned and repeated again and again, practiced until every note was perfect. My father, Edwin Fleming, a high-school vocal music teacher, listened to legions of voices every day, while my mother, Patricia, taught at a small private college. They sang and listened to singing until you would have thought that by the end of the day every note would have been squeezed out of them; and still when they came home they would find it in themselves to sing even more, as if the music at their jobs hadn’t tired them out in the least. On this night they were singing for each other and for me and my younger sister, Rachelle, and brother, Ted. My mother played the piano and my father stood beside her, and together they sang Gershwin’s “Bess, You Is My Woman Now.” The
Porgy and Bess
duet was one of their greatest hits, a song that was romantic and yearning and completely suited to their voices, his baritone supporting her beautiful soprano. I stretched out on the living-room rug with my dog, Bessie, and felt a kind of perfect contentment.

My father was handsome, with a soft lower lip and shining black hair that fell across his forehead in an Elvis Presley curl. My mother looked like the kind of leading lady Hitchcock always favored, a cross between Tippi Hedren and Kim Novak. They were a glamorous couple, and when they sang together, everything was right in our lives; we were all happy. I always associated the music they made with happiness, because how could the world not be perfectly in balance when such harmony existed in your own living room? I could have lain there forever, listening.

It was something that happened regularly, the two of them singing after dinner, but on this summer evening their voices carried out across the lawns, and the children who had been playing put down their balls to listen, and the mothers who had come out to call them went back inside to get their husbands, and one by one the neighbors made their way to our house. They were moths and my parents were a single, irresistible flame. Some of them stepped inside our screen door, but most stood in our front yard, their faces close to the big picture window. Everyone I had ever seen in our neighborhood was there. It was a street made up of immigrants, mostly Italian families newly arrived in upstate New York. My parents now began to sing to them, popular arias and the first-act duet from
La Bohème.
My mother was working on her master’s degree at the Eastman School of Music, and she sang the Puccini arias she was rehearsing for her graduate recital, “Mi chiamano Mimì,” “In quelle trine morbide,” and “Vissi d’arte.” After every piece the neighbors applauded wildly, unable to believe their good fortune that such singing existed right there on our little street. The applause kept my parents going, and they performed until it grew late, holding hands, smiling, bowing, making their way through every duet they knew. Finally, it was over, and the thrilled and exhausted neighbors wandered back to their own houses, and my parents sent us to bed. I was Eliza Doolittle, too excited to sleep. I was the luckiest girl in the world to have parents that other people marveled at, to live in the center of such singing.

 

“But it didn’t happen like that,” my mother said recently when I was recounting this memory.

It didn’t?

Of course there were plenty of nights when the two of them sang together, and people would come by; but on the particular night that seemed so unforgettable to me, my father wasn’t even home. My grandmother was visiting from out of town, and my mother was accompanying herself at the piano.