The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer (12 page)

There are many pieces involved in assembling the puzzle of the voice, and no one teacher can provide everything that is needed. I can still trace the origins of all the key elements of my own voice: the foundation from my mother and then Pat Misslin, the most important pieces and a solid understanding of technique from Beverley, the contributions from Schwarzkopf, from Jan DeGaetani, and from choral singing. These were all crucial components, but there were also dozens of smaller lessons from other coaches and teachers along the way, and I brought them all together in incremental stages. I still discover something new with every engagement. Today, it often involves learning how to incorporate new repertoire and how to manage the voice from day to day, when stress, fear and other emotions, hormones, acoustics, colds and other health issues, diet, and the interpersonal dynamic of a cast and conductor can all have an effect on my singing.

 

I look back at myself at six, sixteen, and twenty-six, and I reflect on how much of my identity was tied to my relationships with my teachers. I never stopped being a good student, for I genuinely like to learn and I have always been eager to please. Even after I left Juilliard and began to make my way in the world, I still worked with Beverley, and I always kept my eye out for other people who had something to offer. I found a whole new crop of mentors when I was a young adult, and I found them in a group of women some might regard as a highly unlikely source of sisterly support: other sopranos.

Sopranos are burdened with a stereotype that is rivaled perhaps only by librarians and mothers-in-law: we are, as a group, invariably labeled divas and prima donnas, though neither term had a negative connotation in its original usage. We are selfish, high maintenance, and hugely demanding. We drink only Swedish spring water without ice from a Lalique glass that has been chilled to exactly sixty-seven degrees; if it is sixty-eight degrees, we simply will not perform. We call our managers from the backs of our limousines so that they can call our drivers and ask them to adjust the air-conditioning. We wear scarves copiously, and preferably Hermès, Gucci, or Loro Piana. We speak in high voices, à la Julia Child, in a “continental” nonaccent; or we don’t speak at all, but write on little personalized pads; or if we’re terribly modern, we type on our tiny laptops or personal organizers, which are also cell phones, iPods, Palm Pilots, and digital cameras. We travel with an entourage of assistants, so we needn’t actually speak with a hotel receptionist or flight attendant (what a waste of the five thousand utterances we may have left), a dresser, hairdresser, and, as I recently observed of a very famous tenor, a personal hat maker. Before performances we eat only carbs, avoiding apples and any gas-inducing vegetable, or we eat only protein, and apples to combat phlegm. We never consume an acid-producing tomato sauce or spicy food, and we wouldn’t dream of eating past seven p.m. for fear of causing the dreaded reflux (I’m crossing myself ten times in both the Western and Russian ways just thinking about it). We drink lactose-free, low-sodium, soy-based, and decaf everything. We don’t drink alcohol before a performance, since it dries the throat. We instruct our secretaries to call ahead and make sure our hotel rooms have not one but two humidifiers running at least twenty-four hours in advance of our arrival. We have not touched our own luggage since we graduated from high school, lest we stress the trapezius. We wear spike heels and have our hair teased, straightened, colored (an absolute three-color minimum), and cut to within an inch of its life for rehearsals. Some of us wouldn’t feel dressed without false eyelashes, while others won’t allow anyone in the theater to actually look at them. We’re not very collegial, especially within our own voice type—i.e., with the competition. Did I miss a stereotype? Trust me, I’ve heard them all, even though I’ve seen little to support these images. I much more often encounter a group of generous women who are happy to share what they know.

The first in my own career was Renata Scotto, who kindly gave me a private lesson in Beverley’s apartment in advance of Scotto’s master class at Juilliard. She laid the music out in front of me and told me to read what was on the page, to do that and nothing else. “Just sing what the composer asked you to sing,” she instructed. Because Scotto is famous for being a brilliant singing actress, I had thought she would care more about the theatrical values than musical ones, but I was wrong. She has enormous integrity and intelligence. During a conversation at the end of the lesson, she said, “Have children.” I was young at the time, and that was a subject I hadn’t even begun to think about. She told me that after she had had her son, she approached singing from a much healthier perspective. “I don’t live or die on the stage every night,” she explained. “I have more than that in my life.”

When I met Joan Sutherland, I actually was pregnant with my first child. (Good student that I am, I had taken Scotto’s advice.) I was singing in Geneva—my debut in
Così fan tutte
—and my manager, Merle Hubbard, drove me up to the mountain chalet where Sutherland lives with her husband, the conductor Richard Bonynge. It was for me, as it would be for anyone who loves opera, a dream come true. The Bonynges’ living room was painted a dark hunter green, and every inch of its walls was covered with drawings or needlepoint. The entire house was full of needlepoint, which was Sutherland’s hobby between acts, while traveling, and while waiting around at rehearsals. Bonynge was an avid collector, and he had stacks upon stacks of original manuscripts and scores, including first editions of obscure Massenet operas that he brought out to show us. I had a chance to gingerly ask Joan Sutherland a few questions about singing, and what I most wanted to know about was her extreme high notes. How had she managed to sing them? She told me she aimed them directionally, not just out of the front but more toward the back of her head as she climbed into the stratosphere. She also said she loved not singing anymore; her grandchildren were the greatest joy in her life. “Absolutely have children, and don’t worry about when. Years after the last engagement, a beautiful child will be loved, and the engagement will be completely forgotten.” It was her most impassioned piece of advice.

Marilyn Horne has been a great friend ever since we sang together in John Corigliano’s
The Ghosts of Versailles
. I love her no-nonsense, down-to-earth style. She knows what she thinks and she’ll always tell you. One day during rehearsals, I took her aside and told her that someone had asked me about singing Norma. She stared directly at me and said, “OOOOOH, no, you don’t! I’ll tell you right now that role would be a terrible mistake for you.” And of course, she was exactly right at the time. I had asked Joan Sutherland about it, too. “It’s not that there is anything on the page that is so difficult,” she explained. “It’s just that the role is incredibly long. One has to have an enormous amount of stamina to get through it.” Fortunately, though I have tended to consistently work too much and have been known to spread myself too thin, I’ve always been naturally disinclined to take on anything that has the potential to harm my voice.

Marilyn has also been a real mentor to me, advising me about repertoire. She suggested that we do an album together, for which we rehearsed, but after both of us became ill during two different scheduled recording periods, the record company gave up on us. She’s always been so generous whenever I’ve called on her, as has Frederica von Stade, who helped me through a difficult personal time. Singers don’t get together just to talk about music, after all.

When I think of the remarkable singers I’ve met in my life, the one who took my breath away was Leontyne Price. She had said to a mutual friend not long ago, “Tell Renée I would like to meet with her,” and so I went down to her home in Greenwich Village, a house that once belonged to the first mayor of New York.

Though I was paying my first visit to her home, it was not the first time I had met Miss Price. When I was ten years old, my mother took me to see her in a song recital at the Eastman Theatre. After the performance, we stood in a long line that wound up a narrow staircase, all of us wanting to pay our respects to her backstage. I listened to my mother talking to another music teacher about Miss Price’s technique, how her neck stayed soft and showed no signs of strain when she sang, and they agreed that this was something of a miracle, considering the power of her voice. This conversation, the hushed and serious discussion of her voice, was indelibly etched in my memory. I nodded slowly in agreement, feeling as if I had just been allowed into some exclusive club. When we got close enough to see her, I watched as she signed programs and greeted fans, one after another; but when my turn came, she smiled hugely and took my hand. I told her I wanted to be just like her, even though I didn’t understand precisely what that meant at the time. I doubt I even meant that I wanted to sing like her; I simply wanted to have her beauty and power and presence. She wrote out my name across my program—“To Dear Renée”—and then signed her own name close to mine with a flourish. I walked down the staircase pressing it to my heart.

Of course, I told her none of this when we met again. I am old enough myself to know how often a soprano hears “You’ve been my role model since I was ten years old.” None of us likes to be reminded of our relationship to time. “Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding,” to quote the Marschallin in
Der Rosenkavalier
. I simply shook her hand as I had done the first time and told her what an honor it was to meet her.

When I walked in the door, the first things I noticed were nineteen Grammys displayed on a table in the living room. I could only think,
If I work for the rest of my life I will never achieve anything like this
. Miss Price was surprisingly petite and still very beautiful, and she paced the room while she spoke. “It’s funny the way people talk about the voice as if it is a separate entity, like it’s another being separate from us,” she said. “It’s not.” She had put the needs of her voice first for her entire life, and as long as her voice was in top condition, she was fine. Her voice was her comfort, and she had lived for the gift she had received.

She stopped her pacing for a moment, looked at me firmly, and said, “I called you because of what you’re going through right now. I thought you might need some advice. You’re experiencing the noise.”

“The noise?” I asked.

“The noise, the hype, the demands that are being made on you from all corners.” She talked about people literally crowding around me, wanting this and demanding that.

“Miss Price,” I asked, “would you mind if I took notes?” I was in school again, but she was more preacher than teacher, so impassioned was her speech. She nodded her head and I began to write.

“You have to learn to tune out all of the noise and focus on one thing.”

I looked up at her, and she tapped an index finger against her throat. “This is all that matters. Because the minute this goes, they’ll disappear so fast you won’t even know what happened.”

And of course she was right. It was a moment of complete clarity.

“I feel intuitively that you are in a place right now where you need to hear these things. You’re confused and torn by the decisions your success is forcing you to make. The priority is to stay focused here.” She pointed to her throat again.

She said she wanted to be helpful because she thought we had some similarities. We were both what she called “three-prong singers,” which meant that we sang not just opera but recitals with piano and concerts with orchestra. She spoke of the strength she had developed when she faced tremendous racism at the beginning of her career. When she first toured with the Met, she was not allowed to stay at the same hotels as the rest of the singers and was forbidden to enter the theater by the same doors. Time after time she made her debut in houses where no black artist had ever sung before. But she always took the high road and maintained her dignity, over time developing a self-protective persona.

She had had a career of extraordinary longevity, touring and singing into her seventies, but she had handled herself with tenderness and care. She never went to the theater, never went to hear other singers, explaining that she preferred to avoid the drafts created by air-conditioning. She had little interest in the business outside of her own career. After she retired from the operatic stage, she sang recitals and premiered the music of American composers, giving back to the profession, which adored her. She would sing a recital program that wasn’t especially strenuous or long, but then would return to the stage and sing six demanding arias back-to-back as encores—a feat I couldn’t imagine having the stamina to accomplish even now. Whenever people ask me about my favorite voices, hers is always the first one that springs to mind. I used to joke that I was hoping for her high C in my next life.

When I was leaving, I stood at the door and held her hand. I felt as if I was touching someone who was a sacred part of musical history. I thought of how one day I would say to my grandchildren, “I once held the hand of Leontyne Price.”

“I can’t begin to thank you for being so generous,” I said.

“I can tell you this, I can be generous with you because I can still sing all of my roles.” She looked at me hard. “And I can still sing them in their original keys!” In short, she wanted me to know that if there was ever an occasion for us to be in competition, she could go head-to-head with me any day.

And there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that she would win—over me, over any of us—every single time.

 

 

 

 

P
ICTURE THE EDUCATION of an opera singer as a beautiful country—say, England—full of museums and concert halls, palaces and rose gardens, where people can study and learn and grow. Now picture a career as a successful opera star as another country—say, France—and imagine it as being full of culture and couture, Champagne and the Eiffel Tower, where the power of a single voice is lauded and adored. Now picture the English Channel separating those two countries, with its icy gray waters and choppy waves. Having completed my stay at Juilliard in 1987, I found myself stranded on the English side with no boat, no plane, and no Chunnel, trying to figure out how to get across.