The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer (6 page)

 

Music was so exciting to me in that period of my life, you would have thought it had been invented the week before. There were two pieces that absolutely obsessed me. One was Anne Trulove’s aria from Stravinsky’s
Rake’s Progress,
“No word from Tom.” I would sit in my dorm room every night and listen to it before I went to bed, and then it got to the point where I had to listen to it three or four times in a row. But it was almost like drinking three or four cups of espresso: the energy of that aria and the way it built made it impossible for me to sleep. Its jagged vocal line and its use of English with wrong syllabic accents were so quirky as to seem nearly electric in Judith Raskin’s performance. I learned it and I sang it in a lot of auditions, but it was never that successful for me. People weren’t familiar with the piece at the time; it seemed too long, and I didn’t sing it quite well enough. It was hard for me to know the difference then between the things I madly loved and the things my voice was meant to sing. I operated under the mistaken impression that only an aria that was difficult for me would be impressive in an audition, rather than the correct idea that if the piece was easy, perhaps that meant it was a good fit. Still, this constant stretching ultimately gave me the solid technique I would need to withstand the real rigors of a career. The other piece that lodged itself in my imagination was Jan DeGaetani’s recording of George Crumb’s
Ancient Voices of Children
. I was so attracted to the mystery of the piece and the vocal writing that the “Todas las tardes en Granada” section—with its marimba tremolo and its exotic-sounding toy piano, DeGaetani’s voice resonating directly into the piano, whispering, then the next moment shrieking—became my favorite piece for a while. Years later, when I had the good fortune to study with Jan and had the chance to get to know her better, it made me admire both the song cycle and the artist all the more.

 

Classical wasn’t my only interest in those days. Potsdam was the place where I fell in love with jazz, a love that, for a while at least, I thought would be my life. When I had the chance to audition as a big-band singer my sophomore year, I jumped at it. My mother had taught with Esther Satterfield, who was Chuck Mangione’s soloist when his Rochester-based band was enormously popular. Esther sang “The Land of Make-Believe,” and that song, with all its sweet exhilaration, had always stayed with me. It was the piece I used for my audition, and I would picture myself as Billie Holiday, my hand cradling an old-fashioned silver microphone, a gardenia pinned behind one ear. I had worn out the soundtrack album of
Lady Sings the Blues
while learning every song from the piano/vocal score. I got the big-band job, which soon led to a weekly engagement with a jazz trio. We performed every Sunday night for two and a half years, developing an incredible following and packing the house week after week.

Singing with that group was a great release after spending school time disciplining my breathing and my resonance. Instead, this music was teaching me about performing. Jazz is, of course, incredibly interactive, and every time a given song is played, its actual performance is going to be different. Singing jazz was a great way of letting go of my fears, because the music was just going to happen, and I had to make constant decisions about which direction I was going to go. It also taught me to be much more instinctive. As the vocalist, I quickly discovered it was my responsibility not only to sing but to make the friendly patter between numbers. I could handle the vertiginous high notes and the endlessly extemporaneous melodies, but simple sentences like “How’s everybody doing tonight?” proved to be almost too much for me. Pat O’Leary, the bass player, would lean forward and smack me on the shoulder. “Say
some
thing!” he would hiss. “Tell a joke!”

A joke? No one had mentioned that in my job description. The worst of it was that at every performance it had to be a different joke, a new direction in my one-sided conversation. (“Pretty cold out there tonight, eh, Potsdam?”) It was perfectly acceptable for me to sing the same songs week after week, but my unwritten monologues expired after a single use. The audience was like a shy blind date that expected me to make all the conversation, and so out of sheer necessity I did, but never with any flair. There are a lot of different ways to capture your audience’s heart, but learning how to talk to them wasn’t a bad place to start.

Jazz was also a perfect opportunity to experiment vocally. Pat came to see me a few times and during the breaks would say, “Do you know you just sang a high D above high C above high C?” Pat had perfect pitch, so she knew exactly what I was doing even when I didn’t. I could hit those high notes as a jazz singer, mostly because I had no concept of just how high they were at the time. I was simply improvising. The trouble was that I couldn’t yet manage the high notes I actually needed for the soprano repertoire. Anything above the staff, from G to high C, was still difficult, at best. These pitches were inconsistent, still strident and shrill.

Sometimes we would go out on tour. The guys in the group were a little older than I was, a little wiser. Larry Ham taught me how to make perfect omelets, and Eddie Ornowski drove me around the countryside in his big old white Cadillac with a red leather interior while listening to Schubert string quartets. I drank it all in.

My turning point came when legendary saxophonist Illinois Jacquet came to teach a master class and suggested later that I tour with him. (He had teared up when I sang “You’ve Changed,” songs of unrequited love then being my forte.) That offer forced me to decide whether I wanted to be an opera singer or a jazz singer. In my heart, I knew I was too young and too frightened to move to New York, which a career in jazz would have required. I had not been raised to be an independent thinker. I couldn’t decide what to cook for dinner without asking someone else for guidance. Jazz is the music of free will, and I still preferred to toe the line. So I stayed with what I knew, which was how to be a student.

 

After the Bach B-minor Mass, I sang Laurie in Aaron Copland’s only opera,
The Tender Land,
the lead in a chamber opera by Gustav Holst called
The Wandering Scholar,
and Elsie Maynard in a great production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s
Yeomen of the Guard
. Those roles, along with my jazz performances, placed me before real audiences and not just teachers and classmates. The drama and dance classes I took at Potsdam were incredibly helpful to me too. If I had gone to Eastman or Juilliard as an undergraduate in those days, I wouldn’t have been able to study drama, because at that time there was no crossover between different divisions in the conservatories. This changed later when the necessity for fully rounded acting singers began to be appreciated, but by then my school days were behind me.

My major at Potsdam was music education. My parents, forever practical, insisted that I graduate from college with a skill that would ensure me a job. They had confidence in my abilities as a singer, but they had also been in the music business long enough to see that the streets were littered with talented sopranos who couldn’t achieve a professional career. I had to be able to support myself on the very real possibility that my big dreams might never materialize. All I can say is that I’m lucky I made it as a performer, since the trials of Mozart seemed minor next to the semester I spent student-teaching in a public middle school. Eighth-graders, with their cracking voices and pinging hormones, remain one of the greatest challenges I have faced to this day. I had always respected what my parents did for a living, and had even thought I understood it, but it wasn’t until I did some time in the classroom myself that I came to see what a daunting task teaching in public schools really was. When my brother, Ted, later followed in the family tradition and became a teacher, he earned my greatest admiration.

When the time came for me to graduate from Potsdam, I had a great deal of hesitation about leaving Pat, but she gently though firmly pushed me out of the nest. “Go out there and learn new things from different people,” she urged me. I loved Pat and appreciated all she had done for me, and, as I reminded her, a lot of singers do spend their whole professional lives with one teacher. But she was insistent that it was time for me to go. With her encouragement and a lot of nudging, I moved on to Eastman to study for a master’s degree in music.

In my first audition at Eastman I landed the role of Zerlina in
Don Giovanni
in another upset, surprising everyone, most of all myself. It was my first bona fide full-scale opera production, and I was thrilled to be on the stage of the Eastman Theatre after spending so much time there when I was growing up. This was an enormously ambitious production, and the baritone and I both worked out madly at the YMCA across the street, because he had to lift me in a dance scene. During the course of my career I have sung all three female roles in
Don Giovanni,
and Zerlina is certainly the place to start, her “Vedrai carino” being that opera’s precious jewel of an aria. Donna Anna is the most difficult role to sing, with her two glorious scenes and one of the greatest accompanied recitatives ever composed. Da Ponte and Mozart portray her ambivalence toward Don Ottavio and then subtly allow us to surmise that Don Giovanni’s attack unleashed a repressed passion in her, followed closely by the murder of her father and then a torrent of shame and sorrow. Donna Elvira, with whom I made my inauspicious La Scala debut, is wildly temperamental and more obvious: a perfect example of fatal attraction. Mozart was the solid cornerstone of my operatic repertoire for the next ten years, and I ultimately sang nine different Mozart roles, in many different productions. The Countess in
Le Nozze di Figaro
served as my debut role, first as a student at the Aspen Music Festival, then in Houston, at the Met, in Paris, at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, in San Francisco, at both Spoleto Festivals, and in Hamilton, Canada, and I went on to sing her at Glyndebourne, in Geneva, and in Chicago. If anyone needed a Countess, I was the Go-to Girl, and I was lucky to have come to prominence at the commemoration of the bicentennial of Mozart’s death in 1991. Frankly, I would have chosen Berio, Puccini, Berlioz, or Stravinsky—anything but Mozart—as my introduction to the international stages of the world. While I would have preferred to avoid having to live up to his requirement of crystal-clear, naked perfection, in retrospect I’m grateful for that repertoire, as it helped protect my voice. I had no choice but to sing well and carefully for that first decade of my career, maintaining a youthful weight and quality to my voice, when the demands of other composers—full-voiced drama over a heavy orchestration—would have used me up by now, and I’d likely be hearing from opera companies, “Thank you very much, but you have a wobble and your top isn’t what it used to be.” Sheer luck again sent me into Mozart’s demanding but safe hands.

Director Richard Pearlman was running Eastman’s opera department then, and I’ll never forget the day he played a recording of Maria Callas in a class devoted to her art. He had known her, and he loved to tell a story about offering Callas a cup of cocoa during a rehearsal in Dallas. She refused it, saying, “No, thanks, honey, chocolate gives me pimples.” The story made a huge impression on me, not so much her response as his reverence for her. All those years later you could still see the power she had over him as a young director. Every soprano in the class sat there thinking,
What would that be like?
As we listened to her singing he would tell us that her voice was beautiful, as if it were an objective fact rather than a controversial opinion. The first time I heard a Callas recording—and, for that matter, one by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf—I didn’t understand why they were considered iconic when to my ear they weren’t even particularly accomplished singers. Callas’s voice seemed unattractive, with its overly covered, steely edge and its wide vibrato on top, and Schwarzkopf ’s vocal production struck me as uneven and eccentric, however beautiful the voice. But as often is the case with things that are unusual and unfamiliar, we develop a taste for them. We come to love certain voices because of their very flaws, their strangeness, and, most important, the way they can be identified by little more than a single note. After I had listened long enough and thoughtfully enough to these two sopranos, I came to a point where my heart belonged to both of them, along with those of their millions of other fans. I was probably especially sensitive to the idea of flaws at this time because I was trying so hard to iron out my own. Arleen Augér once remarked to John Maloy, who was one of my teachers at Eastman, that I’d be great if I could only get my technique together. I had the talent and the discipline, but I was still learning to sing, which meant I had plenty of kinks to work out if I wanted to make a career of singing. And while I had some successes at Eastman, I had my share of dismal failures as well—the very worst being my first audition for the Met National Council Auditions, a program designed to assist promising young singers in the development of their careers.

My accompanist was Richard Bado, a friend and a fellow student at Eastman. I was a quick study even then, and that talent did nothing but exacerbate my tendency toward procrastination. I memorized Pamina’s aria from
Die Zauberflöte,
“Ach, ich fühl’s,” the week before the audition. My parents were in the audience with several of my friends, and the adjudicating panel, which had flown in to represent the Met, was right in the middle. I was polished and brushed and made up and well dressed, and as I looked out at all the people who loved me and the people who wanted me to do well and the people who were ready to give me a chance, I fell apart completely. We’re talking white knuckles. All I could do was fantasize about fainting or falling through a hole in the stage. So many nervous singers long to fall through nonexistent stage holes that I have to wonder why recital halls across the world don’t just go ahead and saw them into the floor-boards. “Ach, ich fühl’s” is a very exposed aria, sung for the most part very quietly. That’s always been the thing that frightens me the most: anything that’s exposed. Not the fireworks, fioriture, leaps, trills, or chest tones—those I can file my nails by. The terrifying place is that soft pitch in the middle voice. That drenches me in cold sweat. This was one of the first pieces I’d sung with this kind of exposure, so you have to wonder what I was thinking of when I chose it for such an important audition. My throat tightened completely. My breath stopped working, and I had a flutter in my sound that you could drive a truck through. I can still see my family’s faces fall, and everyone in the house just sitting there with a look of growing embarrassment. Richard Bado told me later that he wanted to stand up in the middle of the audition and say, “We’re going to stop now. She can do so much better than this, and I think we should just try again another year.”