The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer (22 page)

Of course, taking care to protect one’s voice will not always be met with understanding and support from opera houses and concert halls. Generally speaking, a singer will begin to suffer professionally after more than a few cancellations, and only a great artist will be indulged in frequent absences. Someone like Teresa Stratas, for example, who always explained that her health was fragile, was such a brilliant singing actress that the companies would hire her at any cost, knowing she could not always be reliably counted on to appear. Pavarotti likewise became prone to last-minute cancellations and was almost inevitably forgiven. With a voice like that, how could he
not
be?

My own experience in canceling performances due to illness was always at the Metropolitan Opera. The first was opening night of Brit-ten’s
Peter Grimes,
when whatever infection had been brewing finally camped out directly on my vocal cords. Unfortunately, my symptoms worsened just as I was getting into my costume, wig, and makeup backstage, which meant that my understudy was doing the same, since by then we all knew that I might not make it. The Met representative came into my dressing room five minutes before curtain and tried to encourage me to go on, since I hadn’t yet been able to decide firmly not to. Just for a scene, for the audience, he pleaded. I continued to vocalize, and fortunately for me, a coach standing directly behind him risked her job and shook her head no, based on what she heard. I had the good sense to listen to her advice. We never know if singing on a cold or a throat infection will be our last performance, so prudence is rewarded with a future. Still, it is devastating to any singer to sit in her dressing room in tears, removing her makeup and getting ready to go home as the performance continues without her.

My second Met cancellation came more recently, during the production of Bellini’s
Il Pirata
—the very opera toward which I felt the greatest sense of obligation.

The way things normally work at the Met, the artistic administrator calls a singer’s management and says, “We’re casting these ten operas over the coming seasons and we’d like to consider your client for these roles.” That is, repertoire is chosen first, and the casts subsequently. But on one occasion I was asked to come in for a meeting with the general manager, Joseph Volpe, so I knew something important was up. When I sang at the Met, I always had the sense of being a cog in a large machine, and never lost sight of the fact that it’s an honor to sing there. At this particular meeting, Joe said to me, “Here’s the list of things we’d like to see you do, but we also want to know what opera you would be interested in singing.” This was an enormous change in protocol; I was being offered the luxury of choice. Joe Volpe’s reputation is based primarily on his gruff exterior; but to me he has always been a caring mentor, helping me with personal problems as well as the production at hand. I once totaled my twelve-year-old BMW at Broadway and Seventy-ninth Street (it takes real talent to total a car in the middle of Manhattan) and Joe sent a car for me for the rest of the run of the production, for both rehearsals and performances. When I finally had an opportunity to thank him for his thoughtfulness, he said, smiling, “It’s not for you, it’s for me. We need you in one piece.” He most recently, and without my knowledge, assigned security to my postperformance exits from the Met, after I received an alarmingly threatening hand-delivered letter at the stage door. It wasn’t until a friend asked “Why are these men following you?” that I realized it.

Our relationship only continued to grow stronger over the years, and now he was offering me a remarkable opportunity. As I sat in his office thinking of a role I would like to perform at the Met, I knew it would be something from the bel canto repertoire. I did some research and learned that Bellini’s
Il Pirata
had never been performed at the Met, and I liked the idea of challenging the audience as much as myself. I am still my father’s daughter, after all.

The problem, of course, was that since
Il Pirata
was obscure, and since I was the one who had chosen it, I felt a special responsibility to make it a success, both for the audience and for the house. Seven performances were scheduled, and I canceled two of them. My daughters and I were living in a tall Victorian house in Connecticut at the time, and I had already been having some trouble with my throat when one afternoon I was calling upstairs to Sage. When she didn’t appear quickly enough to suit me, I did what any normal mother would do: I called out her name again, and
loudly.
At that moment I felt a strange little pinch and thought,
Oh, no . . .

I went to my ENT, Dr. Slavit, who after examining me said, “I could shoot you full of cortisone and you could go onstage, but if you care about the big picture or even the rest of this run, and your longevity, don’t do it—don’t sing.” When I asked him to explain what was wrong with my “cords,” he said, “For the record, it’s the vocal fold that actually vibrates to produce the sound—the inner membrane or tissue which looks as if it’s been folded. The actual vocal
cord
is the back third of the entire membrane. In toto, you have muscle surrounded by mucosa, which vibrates and creates the sound, attached to cartilage, and there’s a tiny area of swelling on one side.” In all the years I’d been going to him, he had never told me to cancel any performance, and whenever I had been concerned about a particular problem, he put me at ease, saying, “Oh, come on. You’ll be fine.” In this case he called Joe Volpe personally and said, “She cannot sing.” Even worse than my disappointment was the fact that when I went back I never gained complete confidence in the role again. Because of the injury, I felt as if I was being too careful, which created its own set of problems. You don’t really protect your voice by undersinging or holding back. It’s a little bit like whispering when you have laryngitis: in the end, it only does more damage. Beverley had always been so good about shaking me out of that habit. I’d complain, “It doesn’t feel right,” and she’d reply, “You’re undersinging, dear. You’re worried. Stop that. Just sing.” She had an uncanny ability to discern subtle differences in my voice and call me on them, and once she gave me permission to sing out, things would click and fall back into place again.

Success is a wonderful thing—until highly anticipated performances have to be canceled. Not only was I worried about my voice, I felt as if I had a giant spotlight focused on me. Still, no matter what obligations await, it’s better to stop. Otherwise, small problems have a bad habit of becoming large ones. It’s easy to begin a downward spiral as a result of the bad habits and confusion formed by singing when ill, so that when your health finally does come back, you find you’ve lost your confidence. The voice can be a terribly fragile instrument. Someone once repeated to me in hushed tones regarding a well-known tenor, “He sang on a cold and could never trust his voice again.” This kind of statement can leave even the stoutest bass waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. Have these voices actually been harmed, with damage done to the vocal cords or the tendons surrounding them? Has the technique been thrown off, and is the problem reparable? Or was it just a loss of faith? It’s rare that anybody has the precise answers to these questions. Every voice has a shelf life, and one has to be extremely careful of anything that might end a career mysteriously and prematurely.

Caring for a voice includes paying attention to aspects of physical health, the environment, mental fortitude, and, above all, a solid technique. As a Juilliard student, I was constantly ill, and even had back problems, until I happened to notice that they occurred only before major auditions—a case of self-sabotage, caught red-handed. When I asked the legendary Dr. Gould to have a look at my throat for the third time in one year, he suddenly took hold of my shoulder and said, “You’re not sick. You’re tense.” That marked the beginning of a journey of self-exploration, which eventually would enable me to become one of the singers who rarely, if ever, got more than a generic cold. I’ve always considered the question of health to be one of mind over matter. Whether I imagine smiley little scrub brushes cleaning out the dirty bacteria or virus in my veins, or I simply tell my body in no uncertain terms that there’s no time for a cold this week, whether it’s making sure I am aware when tension threatens my health and well-being, or finding a way to ignore the common illnesses of my children and other loved ones, I manage to keep singing. Some are surprised to discover that, indeed, we are paid only if we sing. There are no sick days in opera. Otherwise, I live in moderation and try not to make any unusual allowances for my voice in speech, diet, or how I spend my day, with just a few exceptions: I avoid excessive air-conditioning and cold drafts on my head and ears, refrain from unnecessary speaking on performance days, and drink little or no alcohol, which dehydrates, the night before a performance. I can’t imagine using up many precious hours of my life worrying about my throat in the third person.

The key factor, however, is decidedly technique. A solid technical grounding enables me to realign my voice and gently coax any hoarseness out of it on a daily basis, no matter what allergies are circulating, how tired I am, or whether I spent the day at Disneyland with my children.

Amazingly, in my generation of top singers, I’m considered conservative in the ways I protect my voice. Some of my colleagues have never even heard of the word “moderation” and blithely go on singing beautifully after playing eighteen holes of golf, in-line skating, and then spending a night on the town—
all
night. Because I push myself to the limit with multitasking and work, the one concession I do make is in taking care with
how
I use my voice, whether speaking or singing. Higher resonance and very little breath pressure can extend my stamina in rehearsals, and if I need to be heard, I speak high, and with as much mask resonance as I can. This tactic works especially well in a crowded restaurant—which, by the way, is one more thing I try to avoid. Who decided that louder is better in New York City restaurants? I can’t even
hear
the person across the table half the time, let alone communicate with him.

Marking is another point of controversy. I learned an important lesson about marking—half-singing or singing down an octave so as to preserve the voice in rehearsals—during one of my very first engagements. My role was small, which gave me an excellent opportunity to observe how the more seasoned professionals prepared their roles in rehearsal. The opera was a rarity, and the two leads, to my disappointment, never sang out in rehearsal. Still, I assumed they knew exactly what they were doing to preserve their voices, and so I was shocked to find on opening night that neither had the stamina to survive his or her role. Vocal muscles have to be trained consistently for strength, flexibility, and stamina, just as an athlete’s would. Alfredo Kraus said that one should be able to sing easily for six hours a day, although for me, two or three hours is usually the limit. Ideally, marking should be reserved for only the most extreme phrases, and for the most extreme kind of singing: high Cs or Wagnerian outbursts, for example. If these phrases are solid, one can afford to let them fly just every so often—but unfortunately, in my case those are usually the phrases that need the most practice. Although I find that sustaining high-tessitura passages, especially without interludes, isn’t possible for any great length of time, less demanding singing certainly shouldn’t be tiring at all. Unless I’m under the weather or genuinely tired, I try to avoid marking, as do many of my colleagues. If marking seems to be necessary for an artist, chances are something uncomfortable is occurring in his vocal production, which should immediately be attended to, as ignoring it promises only a career of worry about the voice.

Even with exemplary discipline, every singer faces a vocal crisis at some point in her career. Most of us have several. I needed to take a few weeks off and realign my voice after my debut as Eva in Wagner’s
Die Meistersinger
at Bayreuth. I spent an exhilarating summer there—with Wolfgang Wagner himself directing and Daniel Barenboim in the pit—soaking in some of history’s greatest repertoire in Wagner’s very own theater. I adored the entire experience from start to finish, with my toddler and my infant girl happily in tow. In the second act the role is conversational and low, and I oversang, adamant that I be understood at all costs. Hindsight is, as usual, twenty-twenty, and it wasn’t until I recorded Donna Anna directly afterward that I realized that something wasn’t quite right. The role, which is demanding and high, felt much more difficult than it had several months earlier when I sang it in Paris.
Così
at the Met was to follow, and I decided to take a break and spend two weeks with Beverley so that we could unravel the tangle. Fortunately, we did, and fortunately, Mozart was again my teacher. Beverley and I used to joke that my coming to see her every so often was like a twice-yearly visit to the dentist—just making sure things were in place and still healthy. More recently, since her death, I’ve relied on Gerald Martin Moore, based in London, as my “outside ears” for difficult roles and recordings, as well as my sister, Rachelle, who knows me and my voice as well as anyone now.

As a beginner, I often pulled my senior colleagues aside and asked for coaching. During my San Francisco debut as the Countess, I asked Michel Sénéchal, the great French tenor, if he would work with me on Massenet’s
Thaïs
. He graciously agreed, and gave me another important piece of the vocal puzzle when he said, “The danger with sopranos—in fact, mostly American sopranos—is that they tend to sing too thickly in the upper middle [the notes at and around the top line of the staff], and before you know it, the voice has aged, the top is gone, and a wobble is born. . . . The weight is too much, and the voice can’t bloom in the top. It’s a stone column, and not the sapling it should be.” I developed my own idea of the voice as hourglass from this very conversation, and I have come to agree with him, having seen a number of voices come to grief in precisely this way.