The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer (7 page)

When it was finally over, after what felt like twenty years of standing there with my throat in a vise grip, I had my first real existential crisis. I saw a school-appointed therapist for the first time to discuss my growing realization that I didn’t even understand what I was doing in graduate school. All I’d ever known was how to please others and how to do the right thing so that I could see a positive reflection of myself in their eyes. I was so steeped in the role of good girl that when I once skipped an opera rehearsal to attend a Bonnie Raitt concert, I couldn’t enjoy it for the intense nausea I was experiencing. I’d been the perfect chameleon, becoming whomever the person I was talking to wanted me to be, and I don’t mean only my parents or my teachers. I would behave this way with complete strangers. Somehow my botched audition brought all of that crashing down on my head. As a result of it, I started to pull together a genuine sense of who I was and what I wanted. It was then that music became mine for the first time, as I started to take responsibility for what I really wanted to achieve. This was not an amazing transformation, and it is one that many young performers experience, but it was the beginning of my real growth. John Maloy was very supportive through all of this, telling me it was all going to work out, and I believed him.

As much as I struggled with my fears, it never once occurred to me to just stop trying. My parents had drilled into me the code of Never Give Up. In my family, you didn’t admit defeat, or change your mind and go on to something else. The core of my mother’s philosophy, whether it involved being in a play or taking piano lessons or having a horse, was that you can take on anything you want, but you can’t quit.

When I look back on it now, I can see that this crisis was inevitable. If it hadn’t been the Met audition, it would have been something else. The passivity of my desire to please was holding me back from going on to the next level in my development. I needed to kick up all this dust and start questioning things so that I could learn the answers and move on. What I finally discovered was that in fact I really did love music, and especially singing, and I loved to learn about singing. It was time for me to stop worrying so much about what other people thought. It’s such a simple concept but it was completely foreign to me.

 

My parents had divorced in 1981, and in the winter of 1983 my mother and her new husband, George Alexander, had a baby, my brother Geordie. I was there at the hospital waiting while she went into labor, and at the last minute I was invited in for the big event. There was my mother, at the age of forty-five, having her fourth baby! It was the moment I knew that I would have children myself one day. This angelic, curly-haired, towheaded baby is now Bryn Terfel-sized and is studying voice. He shadowed me in London last summer to see if the operatic lifestyle was one he could live with. The talent is there, but only time and his own strong desire to sing will tell.

That year I spent the first of several summers singing and studying at the Aspen Music Festival. It was a very sweet time in my life, with blue skies, serious musicians, and endless possibilities. I bicycled seven miles up to the Maroon Bells and back down every day. The glorious scenery was there for me no matter where I looked. After a winter in Rochester, a summer in Aspen is an almost unimaginable reward, and every year I could hardly wait to pack up my suitcase and my bicycle and get back there. I had applied to a lot of summer programs, but the only two that accepted me were Aspen and the Spoleto Festival. I have a noble history of being rejected by a lot of places, only to discover that the one that finally lets me in is in fact the perfect fit.

For two of my summers at Aspen I studied with Jan DeGaetani. She was a tremendous role model as a musician, above all. Her love of music and her gratitude for her art manifested itself through tears at nearly every master class. We students felt as if we had been granted membership in a clandestine and exclusive club, meeting in her crowded living room, singing for one another and discussing in hushed voices the intricacies of a text, the use of dynamics and resonance. I also met Ed Berkeley, who directed me in one of the best theatrical experiences I’ve had to this day, Conrad Susa’s opera
Transformations,
a setting of Anne Sexton’s poetry in which I played Sexton. We spent days on end just reading and analyzing her poems. The following summer I was cast as the Countess in
Le Nozze di Figaro,
in which Jorge Mester, who was the festival’s director, heard me. It was he who suggested that I go to Juilliard for a postgraduate program, the next step in my education. One of the many reasons that my work is so endlessly exciting is that you never know who is going to be in the audience or the orchestra pit, holding your fate in his hands.

 

 

 

 

T
HE HEAD OF Juilliard’s opera department was Erica Gastelli, an incredibly elegant Italian woman who was always perfectly put together in a way that seemed at once flawless and effortless. Whenever I think of her, I see a beautiful necklace she wore, which was made out of huge chunks of golden amber. The first thing I did when I made a little bit of money as a singer was to buy myself an amber necklace. This is often the way we put together our lives, adding the striking qualities of others into our own character. Whether it was Erica Gastelli’s style or Elisabeth Schwarzkopf ’s ease with languages or Beverly Sills’s ability to draw her public close to her, I made a careful study of the qualities I admired and did my best to emulate them. The other students in the program and I used to impersonate Erica’s thick Italian accent, mimicking the way she criticized our hair or our clothes, beginning with a finger-wagging “Oh, Renée . . . ,” followed by “Why would you wear that
aaawful
dress?”

It was Erica who had called me at my parents’ house right after I’d come home from Aspen to announce, “You have been accepted to the Juilliard program. We would like you to sing Musetta in
La Bohème.
” She had a very low speaking voice, very formal—the kind of voice that makes you stand up straighter even if you’re only speaking on the phone, the kind of voice that under normal circumstances would have demanded a very dignified response. At this moment, though, I had no dignity. I felt as if I had been shot out of a cannon. I dropped the phone and screamed, running through the house, crying, “Juilliard! Juilliard!” My mother was home, as were Ted and Rachelle, and they joined in the shouting. It was pure bedlam, as it would be the three or so times later in my life when the truly great phone calls arrived. When I finally remembered what I had done, I crept back into the kitchen and picked the phone up off the floor, certain that if Erica was still on the line she would inform me that Juilliard had changed its mind. She was not amused; but then, as I was to find out later, she was never amused.

Juilliard had a postgraduate training program then called the American Opera Center. Being accepted there was an enormous boon to me for many reasons, not the least of which was that it was free. For two and a half years I could audit any language class and study voice, perform in opera productions, and coach both music and diction. The only expenses I had to cover were my room and board. I could never have afforded to live in New York City and pay for so much instruction. I would have been lucky to manage the occasional voice lesson, maybe a bit of coaching, but I never would have been able to learn as much as I did. I still had a very long way to go.

After witnessing my heartbreak over the failed Met audition and the tumultuous period of growth that followed, my father didn’t want me moving to New York. “You’ll end up jumping off a bridge,” he warned me. He worried that living in the city would overwhelm me, but I loved it. I found a temp job in Rockefeller Center with a group of opera singers at a law firm, assigned to an enormous asbestos case—a case from which my own grandfather ultimately would benefit. The firm had well-educated, reliable, and honest workers in us, and we had almost complete flexibility regarding our hours. I had earlier acquired excellent secretarial and touch-typing skills while temping, which was probably related to the eye-hand coordination I had developed through years of studying piano. This job enabled me to take advantage of everything Juilliard had to offer. I also added to my income by singing in New York City churches, which used students to supplement their amateur choral ranks.

Jorge Mester was slated to conduct the production of
La Bohème
in which I would appear, and Graziella Sciutti, who had only recently retired from the stage, would be directing it. Musetta would have been her role, whereas I was anything but typecast. My extreme inhibitions prevented me from displaying any of the sass and sway needed for a seductive Musetta. Sciutti finally threw up her hands and said, “I cannot make this girl do anything!” That was when my favorite coach, Ubaldo Gardini, stepped in. Ubaldo would work with me for hours. “Why do you want to bang on that note?” he would whine, as I pressured out the high A in “Dove sono.” He also gave me some advice that I follow to this day: “Sing in the mirror. If it looks funny, it’s wrong.” He was as frustrated with my Musetta as Sciutti was, and he finally ordered, “Just walk across the stage and swing your hips.” But I couldn’t manage even that. Musetta, of course, is a legendary coquette, and I was a famously shy girl from upstate. Even if I could learn how to talk the talk, I was hopeless when it came to walking the walk. Still, I was confident that once I got my costume on everything would be fine. Back then, I could be Musetta only if I
looked
like Musetta. I had to be physically transformed before I could become a character onstage. Fortunately, I got over that. Learning to quickly assume a role is a necessary part of the profession. In my current rehearsal days, murder, rape, sobs, and vengeance often follow a coffee break. One has to swallow and simply take the plunge, embracing the dramatic, emotional language of opera.

Of course, swinging my hips and batting my eyelashes as Musetta was a minor dilemma compared with what I faced in my next Juilliard production, Gian Carlo Menotti’s
Tamu-Tamu.
Then the question was whether or not I’d go onstage topless.
Tamu-Tamu
opens with a middle-class family reading the newspaper, talking about how tragic things are in a third-world country they’ve never heard of before. There’s a knock at the door, and suddenly all the people they’ve been reading about are standing on their front doorstep, grass skirts and all. I played the suburban mother, and at one point one of the girls, who was sufficiently covered by her beads and long hair, and I were supposed to exchange costumes, which meant I would be going topless. It was a scandal. My voice teacher walked into the office of Juilliard’s new president, Joseph Polisi, and said, “Under no circumstances will a student of mine be pressured into performing topless. There must be another solution!” In the end I wore a body stocking, with garishly painted nipples. Who knew that real nipples wouldn’t read in the house, and that painted ones would look more realistic?

 

My memories of Juilliard fall into two distinct categories: On one hand there was the school, the productions I was in, the friends I made, and my beloved diction coaches, Tom Grubb, Corradina Caporello, and Kathryn LaBouff. On the other, there was Beverley Johnson. Certainly I have Juilliard to thank for providing the means for us to work together. But then Beverley became a force in my life so much greater than any school could ever be that when I think of her it’s not as part of Juilliard, but simply as part of my life.

All Juilliard students were expected to find a voice teacher, and at that time they were allowed to study only with someone on the school’s faculty. Beverley taught there and at the Aspen Music Festival, so I approached her about a consultation. Within five minutes she had me on the floor doing sit-ups while she admonished me about several vocal issues. And that was that. We’d found each other. I was looking for the kind of detailed instruction I had gotten from Pat Misslin, and there it was, on Beverley’s living-room rug.

Beverley had an extremely distinctive look, with a very long chin that she was forever, in all the years that I knew her, trying to hide. Not long after I met her, she decided she would never be photographed again. She was a very slim woman with such perfect posture that if you saw her from the back, you would think she was twenty-five years old, not the approximately eighty she probably was. She might not have had much luck hiding her chin, but she hid her age perfectly.

Beverley wasn’t a very popular teacher when I began studying with her. Teachers go in and out of fashion over the years, and someone who had taught as long as Beverley had become accustomed to going from being the instructor everyone fights to study with to being last on the list and back again, two or three times in the course of a career. I happened to catch her when she was out of fashion, which was all the better for me because she had more time.

Although Beverley had studied singing, she was trained as a pianist. Her husband, Hardesty Johnson, was a singer, and it was he who had originally been brought to Juilliard to teach. She eventually joined the faculty in 1964. The interesting thing about her being an instrumentalist was that she intellectualized the voice, studying it much more than a singer probably would have, which ultimately led to her becoming so strong a technician.

I had technical issues that still needed to be resolved, and she was so technically oriented and focused on physiology that we responded to each other immediately. Between the sit-ups, her breathing exercises, and the way we were able to communicate with each other, it was almost like hearing the locks on a safe all tumble into their correct sequence. I ultimately worked with Beverley for sixteen years, and it’s safe to say that she did more for my singing than anyone else.

Of course, Beverley wasn’t the only voice teacher who was asking her students to do seemingly strange things. In one master class, I had to sing before an audience while lying on the floor. Another teacher had me leaning against a wall, then leaning over the piano, then singing while bent in half, touching the floor. Teachers will do almost anything to encourage the body to release tension in some areas while maintaining strength and energy in others. It’s a coordination process that is technically complicated and difficult to achieve both physically and psychologically, demanding all available resources to get the necessary elements to line up properly. Beverley used to say that tension in your upper lip could ruin your voice for the day, a connection that you wouldn’t even remotely think of making. She would instruct me to take my finger and press down on my upper lip while I was singing, and suddenly the sound would free up. It seemed impossible, and yet I could hear the difference. There are so many different muscles that can affect vocal production that it’s almost impossible to check all of them off in your mind, and even more impossible to control them, since they are largely involuntary.