The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer (15 page)

 

My Paris Opera debut, in
Figaro,
was on Christmas Eve in 1990. The gleaming new Opéra Bastille presented another opportunity to sing with an organization that had an illustrious history of presenting great artists and operatic premieres. It was humbling to be there, and in Paris, which I came to adore and now refer to as my second home. I rehearsed the beautiful Giorgio Strehler production until the arrival of Lucia Popp, who was to sing the first five performances, after which I would finish the run. Hers was among the voices I truly loved—pure, spinning, and seemingly effortless—and once again I was privileged to witness a great artist’s generosity. Rather than scrutinizing the competition and behaving accordingly, she immediately invited me to lunch. She spoke of things I honestly couldn’t fathom then, for she was in love and felt that as she had already worked hard and had paid her dues, it was her time to enjoy life and revel in her relationship. I’m sure that as I listened to her I had a look of total incomprehension on my face, since I was at that time so desperate to be where she was, in demand as a great artist and recording star, and I couldn’t imagine wanting to wish that away. I didn’t know then that she was terminally ill, and indeed, I’m not completely sure that she herself imagined that she would be gone just a few short years later.

The Metropolitan finally came through with a cover contract for the Countess in 1991. One morning at ten a.m., the word came that I would be going on for an indisposed Felicity Lott, whom I was understudying. It was one of those phone calls, like the one from Erica Gastelli when I got into Juilliard. Rick and I were living in a railroad flat, and I ran up and down the hallway shouting with joy. I made a few calls and tried to pull together all the friends and family I could to be in the audience and share this momentous occasion with me.

The Met’s
Figaro
was Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s 1986 production, already a classic. I remember making my entrance feeling calm and prepared, and within minutes I was joined by Samuel Ramey and Frederica von Stade, two artists for whom I had tremendous admiration and two people I had never actually been introduced to before. And now there I was, singing with them on the stage of the Met! It was one of the many, many times in my life I felt grateful to Mozart.

I had never chosen to become a Mozart specialist but felt, rather, that Mozart had chosen me. With performances of the Countess, I had already laid a relatively complete foundation for an international operatic career. It was unusual and fortunate that I could achieve it so quickly, for there are many examples of great singers, such as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who never appeared at the Met, while very few artists manage to sing in all of these places, preferring instead to focus on only two or three markets. However, as Merle had to remind me, getting hired is easy. Getting hired
back
is the goal! It was my good fortune that the Countess was so difficult to cast, as the role requires a pure and consistent tone, perfect pitch, style, quality, and nerves of steel, because the singing is so exposed. I was young enough and hungry enough to embrace these opportunities enthusiastically. If someone had laid out all the facts for me before I started, I would have passed on the Countess and been much happier singing Mimì all over the world, as Mimì is an easier role. But the Countess taught me how to sing, and in that respect, Mozart kept me in the role of the good student long after I had left school. By the time I was called upon to make my Met debut, I was as comfortable being the Countess as I was in my own skin.

 

In 1992, while I was pregnant with our first daughter, Amelia, I left New York for three months for engagements in England, at Glyndebourne and the Royal Opera. Though I was relieved that my career had taken off, I was under tremendous stress. I didn’t want to be away from Rick for so long a time, and I was anxious about all the work that faced me in my condition. As I was changing planes in Europe, the flight attendant took my carry-on bag but I was so sad that I didn’t think to get a claim check from her, and in this case the bag contained everything that was important to me, including the paperwork for the mortgage and the co-op application for an apartment we were hoping to buy in anticipation of the baby. The suitcase vanished. Every day I went back to the airline office to plead, but no one could find it, until, after a two-week-long detour to Saudi Arabia (where all stylish luggage longs to go, I suppose), it made its way to England and then, miraculously, to Glyndebourne, unharmed.

Before the luggage was returned, I started to bleed in my fifth month of pregnancy. I was completely alone in an apartment fifteen miles outside the town of Lewes in the middle of nowhere. I used to think it was a good thing to cut myself off from people before an engagement because I would get more work done, studying scores and practicing in the evenings, or, in this case, answering the year’s worth of mail I’d brought with me, but now I know there is such a thing as too much isolation.

The Glyndebourne administration found a general practitioner who made house calls, a service that’s still possible to find in rural England. He ordered me to lie down and not move, put my feet up, and stay in a horizontal position for five days, or I’d lose the baby. That meant no cooking, nothing but quick trips to the bathroom and then back to bed. The festival staff was remarkably gracious, sending someone to bring food and visit me every day. The experience would have been awful enough if I’d been in New York with Rick, home in my own bed, but to be so alone with the terror of perhaps losing my baby was nearly unbearable. I didn’t have the money to talk on the phone all day to my family and friends, so I just had to wait it out.

In the end, we two bounced back, and I wound up performing until a few weeks before Amelia’s birth. The beauty of singing while pregnant is that the baby provides the support that the abdominal wall usually has to work much harder to offer. With pregnancy comes the lovely, buoyant pillow of a womb for the diaphragm to press against, which makes singing wonderfully easy up until the last few months, when there’s simply no more room for breath. However, as long as I was breathing intercostally, with the most horizontal opening of the rib cage possible and an open chest and back, I could get through everything by simply breathing more often than usual.

The real challenge was singing again after I had the baby, but I didn’t have the luxury of time to regain the supportive abdominal strength I needed. I would have to do it on the job. When Amelia was a month old, I took her to Dallas to sing my first Tatyana in
Eugene Onegin
. Memorizing an opera in Russian is difficult under the best of circumstances, but now it seemed virtually impossible, since like every other new mother I had given up sleeping through the night. This was the time when I discovered that having an infant and memory are mutually exclusive, and in my case I also had no ability to concentrate for long periods of time, which is another essential component in memorization. The Russian conductor and largely Russian cast were understanding, and it was with this engagement that I began to forge a life on the road with young children in tow.

After a quick trip back to New York, Amelia, my new nanny (a young singer), and I were off to Milan, where I made my La Scala debut as Donna Elvira in
Don Giovanni
. I was just learning how to travel with everything I needed: baby food, formula, diapers, a stroller, and soon a portable high chair, a jumper, and a walker. It was a true exercise in packing ingenuity to travel to a foreign country and set up shop with a baby for six weeks. Beverley used to call me the earth mother with a core of steel, and I think that pretty much described it.

I didn’t have an especially enjoyable time at La Scala, due in large part to the house’s tradition of the Sala Gialla, the Yellow Salon. The Sala was a conference room in the theater where rehearsals were held. At that time, all of La Scala’s productions were double-cast, and ultimately there would be an A cast and a B cast. Normally, opera companies have understudies, or if a singer cancels, another singer is flown in at the last minute. When an opera is double-cast, the configuration is set and contracted long before anyone arrives. But at La Scala, Riccardo Muti, the house’s music director, would host rehearsals with both casts, at which everyone would get up and perform his part, in effect a sing-off, as Muti alternated between the two casts. There were the people who were clearly the big stars, and then the rest of us, who were jockeying for a position on the A team. Unfortunately, I was one of the youngsters, in a brilliant group that included Thomas Allen, Carol Vaness, Cecilia Bartoli, Vinson Cole, and the late Gösta Winbergh. Despite the tension that the circumstances created, I was thrilled by Muti’s talent. He was incredibly charismatic, and the sounds he could wrest from the orchestra were inspired.

At the very last rehearsal, I received a call from the artistic administrator, who said, “Maestro is concerned about you. He doesn’t want you to be booed and so he’s thinking you shouldn’t sing opening night.” In fact, I had already been informed that I
was
singing opening night, and, more to the point, I had been rehearsing with the first cast. I thought the situation through quickly and replied, “That’s okay, really, but I’m going to leave now. It’s better if I just go home to New York.” A great deal of back pedaling followed, and he promised that the maestro would call me. Muti did phone me and said the same thing, and again I said that this was demoralizing and that I would prefer just to get on the next plane. I had enough of a sense of myself by now to know that I probably wouldn’t embarrass the theater by singing Donna Elvira. I was part of an ensemble, and I knew the other artists in the cast and felt comfortable with them. In the end, they agreed to give me opening night, and I wasn’t booed. I did, however, slip on the stage and tumble backward within seconds of my first entrance. Fortunately, the Leporello was quick on his feet and managed to catch me, but I should have known right then where things were headed. American audiences love an underdog. If I’d tripped on my opening night at the Met they probably would have signed me to a lifetime contract merely because I was brave enough to pull myself together and go on. But European audiences are a bit less tolerant. When you slip in Italy, the audience thinks,
Is this the best they could find?

 

In 1993, I sang the title role in Rossini’s
Armida
at the Rossini Festival in Pesaro, Italy. Even though I had debuted in several Mozart productions in Europe, this was the moment the door finally opened for me there. It was a wonderful engagement; I was living in the beautiful town where Rossini had composed, and I was eating fresh fish and pushing my darling towheaded cherub in the stroller down to the beach every day to cries of “Che bella bambina!” The
Armida
had an especially imaginative production by Luca Ronconi, with striking costumes and wigs. (One cannot underestimate the contribution a good costume makes to how one feels in a role.) My character was made to look like a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Judy Jetson, complete with a futuristically swirled platinum-blond wig. I was particularly amused when Ildebrando d’Arcangelo, a young Italian bass, wore a mask molded from my features and a copy of my costume, and from the theater, my husband couldn’t tell us apart. I’m not sure which of us felt less flattered. At the final performance, the audience rained rose petals down on the stage—a dreamlike conclusion to a perfect run. I love the complete immersion in the work of a single composer that a festival allows. Whether Rossini in Pesaro, Wagner in Bayreuth, or Mozart in Salzburg, festivals appeal to the musicologist in me and give me the luxury of time to create an in-depth interpretation.

One of my favorite things about the work I do is that it presents so many opportunities to grow. Sometimes, in a case like the Rossini Festival, that happens because of the circumstances in which I get to sing. At other times, I learn things about myself by exploring the character I’m portraying, as we all have a little of the Countess in us somewhere. And of course there is always something to be learned from the music itself. But perhaps the best education for a natural-born student is through a mentor, and in Sir Georg Solti I found both a wonderful teacher and a valued colleague.

Solti had cast another soprano as Fiordiligi in
Così fan tutte,
but the role was too heavy for her and at the last minute she wisely stepped down. As had happened so many times before in my career, I benefited from someone else’s cancellation and my own ability to step up to the plate on short notice. Decca’s senior vice president of artists and repertoire, Evans Mirageas, had recommended me to Solti because he had faced a similar problem two summers before, when an unexpected vacancy came up in the role of Ilia in
Idomeneo
and he had summoned me to Tanglewood. He knew I worked well under pressure.

When Solti called me, I was singing my first Desdemona in
Otello
at the Met, with Valery Gergiev conducting. I was in the second cast, and the Met generously released me from my final performances. I was grateful at the time, but even more grateful later when I realized how important the
Così
performances would be to me. I got off the plane to London at two o’clock in the morning, my time, went directly to Solti’s studio at nine a.m., and sang through the entire opera—not the kind of thing singers normally do, but now and then it’s good to know you can rise to the occasion. I was immediately struck by Solti’s intensity—not to mention the record thirty-two Grammys lining the windows of his studio. I felt inspired just being in his presence.

We worked for three solid hours, there in the sun-drenched studio overlooking the lovely garden of his house, and Solti’s commanding presence and musicianship—not to mention the much-needed coffee sent down by his beautiful and supportive wife, Valerie—soon made jet lag a distant memory. And so began another of the central relationships in my career. My recording contract came about in large part because of Solti’s excitement about my voice, which he was to christen “double crème” in Paris, when we reopened the Paris Opera’s Palais Garnier in
Don Giovanni
after a long renovation—a nickname that has stayed with me to this day.