The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer (32 page)

It is amazing to think almost every night a production involving so many intricate details comes together in a perfect performance. The curtain goes up; the lights come on. Although it is rare, things can also go hugely wrong. When I made my debut at the Royal Opera in
Médée,
one of the front pieces of a steeply raked set hadn’t been properly fixed to the stage. I had the first aria in the opera, so I sat down to sing it directly on the loose scenery, and it tipped forward with me on it. There was a loud gasp from the audience, because if I had been an inch farther front I would have been tipped into the orchestra pit. In
The Ghosts of Versailles
at the Met in 1991, a heavy piece of flown scenery fell. Had we been rehearsing a loud section of the opera we never would have known, but fortunately it was a quiet moment, and we heard the initial crack before it fell, and we ran. Two other young singers and I had been rehearsing directly beneath the spot where it fell and could have been crusted. Teresa Stratas was so upset at the thought of what might have happened to us that she burst into tears and couldn’t go on. Two years ago, in a Paris production of
Rusalka,
an enormous wall of scenery that was six feet deep and two stories tall came crashing down onto the stage. I didn’t realize I could run quite that fast. The members of the backstage crew generally do a remarkable job of keeping us safe. They manage a set change in five minutes, attaching a set of rickety stairs to a piece of scenery with a couple of clamps that have to support the entire chorus, and somehow it works.

When we get to the edge of the stage, Vicki drops my skirt and I am on, stepping out onto the bridge between the front of the world and the back.

The world onstage is oversized. Like our voices and our jewelry, it must be easily accessible to every row. A giant chandelier looms overhead. The furniture is overstuffed with big, floppy pillows everywhere. This Zeffirelli production, with its red walls and gilt trim, paints a scene you can sink into, lush, soft, and beckoning. I begin singing, taking my energy from the audience and the other performers onstage and giving them mine in return.

Even though this is the penultimate performance of my second appearance in the role of Violetta, I still discover five or six new interpretive refinements in the first act. In the first duet with Alfredo, I realize I haven’t fully explored the coloratura. Ideally anything we sing must have some purpose behind it. It isn’t enough to sing the notes well; there must be meaning in every phrase. For example, take the cadenza that falls at the end of the first duet. It can be interpreted as laughter, as ardor, or as hysteria; it can represent Alfredo’s pulling Violetta close and her pushing him away—any of those choices are valid. Nowhere in the score does Verdi specify: “This is the way I meant for this to be.” That’s exactly what makes the music so exciting: it’s intangible, it’s enigmatic, and it gives me the space to stretch out and experiment, to play it different ways on different nights and see what feels organic to the character, or even what feels organic on that particular night. At this performance I decide to let Violetta’s consumptive breathlessness also come to represent her yielding to romance, so I make her breathless in an almost aroused way. I see how I can associate these two ideas: she’s ill, but she’s also under the spell of a very charismatic young man. Creativity is like a muscle—the more often you use it, the stronger it gets, and the more you come to rely on it, even unconsciously. I believe that everyone is creative, but we have to train ourselves to be so in a comfortable and confident way. If I exercise my creativity frequently, keeping it as limber as I do my voice, I’m much more likely to make discoveries and improve my performance. That’s the real joy of performing: you do something for so long and with such discipline that it actually begins to look, and at times even feel, effortless.

Another chance for expression comes at the cadenza at the end of the cavatina in the big aria, which offers me one of the most powerful opportunities in opera: to make the audience wait. If a performance is successful, the audience feels that it is experiencing something real, something that is happening in front of it for the first time. On the stage, we experience a similar sense of reality. One of the ways to maximize this potential for identification is with time and surprise. It was Frank Corsaro again who gave me my favorite surprise, the long pause before “È strano! È strano!” The guests from the party have left, the evening dies down, and everything is quiet again. Normally, the door shuts, Violetta turns around, and before she can forget the pitch, she sings, “È strano! È strano!” immediately. But Frank had a different notion of the scene. I want you to take off your shoes, he said, and go look at the fire. All of this sets up an element of tension with the audience, and tension is essential to the drama of music.

In the musical line, I learned about tension from Hartmut Höll, who referred to it as
tragen,
German for “to carry.” Think of music as a piece of taffy that can be pulled and stretched. Rather than sing the line in a four-square, pedantic way, the heartstrings of the audience can be pulled with dynamics and legato, anticipating the next pitch just slightly or delaying it just a touch, to create tension in the line, giving voice to yearning and desire. This will actually draw the audience forward and bind them to you emotionally. Alternatively, an absolutely straight, pure, pristinely sung line will sometimes carry equal emotion for its sheer angelic quality. When Hartmut talked about
tragen,
he could demonstrate with his phrasing on the piano, which was infinitely more difficult to do than with the voice, because the instrument doesn’t sustain. This is another means of expressing what’s in our hearts and guts, and very few singers master it. When they do, I am more moved by this as an audience member than by all of the scenery chewing in the world.

Even in the moments when I’m alone onstage, as at the end of
Traviata
’s first act, I’m never really alone, for I have the enormous comfort of Joan Dornemann in the prompter’s box. She averts train wrecks, gets people back on track when they’re ahead or behind, cues us when we forget what we’re supposed to say, and in a desperate case shouts out a word. As young singers we never had the luxury of prompters, but in the major theaters we become completely reliant on the extra security they provide, which makes their absence more than a little nerve-racking. I sang my first
Manon
in Paris without a prompter, which was especially stressful, given the dialogue in the piece. When James Conlon came in as the new music director of the Paris Opera, the first thing he did was install a prompt box. The prompter, after all, is an opera tradition, dating back to when performers sang different roles every night.

Once act 1 is finished, I breathe a huge sigh of relief. This is not to say that the rest of the opera is easy; however, the opening act is not only where my anxiety lies but also the most exhausting of the acts, and if I don’t pace myself properly I start to wilt later in the evening. I also worry about injury in a demanding role. It’s amazing how even now I’ll sing a phrase slightly wrong and think,
That’s it! It’s over. My voice is ruined.
That may sound neurotic, but it’s certainly possible: you never know exactly when you’re going to oversing and shut down your vocal cords for good. Think of how a figure skater executes perfect double-axel-triple-toe-loop combinations all night long, only to slide her foot out the wrong way while skating straight ahead and pull a tendon.

The curtain comes down, and after a bow to encouraging applause, I’m back to the dressing room. Off comes the cream-and-white wedding cake gown of act 1. Vicki slips over my head the blue-and-green-striped dress for act 2, scene 1: the courtesan in the country. The rhinestones are traded in for a large cross, the upswept wig is now long loose curls, and the jeweled hair picks are replaced by a modest straw hat. Plácido Domingo knocks on my door. I had no idea he was in the audience tonight; I had just seen him the night before in
The Queen of Spades
because Sage was singing in the children’s chorus. He gives me a kiss, takes both of my hands, looks at me seriously, and says, “You know I adore your voice.” When he leaves, the conductor, Valery Gergiev, calls on the dressing-room phone to tell me I’m doing wonderfully. Even at this stage of my career I need and appreciate all the positive reinforcement.

I walk back through the winding hallways with Vicki carrying my skirt, past giant wooden storage crates labeled GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG and LUISA MILLER. The glamorous props of the first act have been pulled away, the chandelier now folded up and hanging two stories above our heads, safely out of the audience’s sight. The high life is now bucolic, a sunny room with endless windows.

If you’re lucky, there are dozens of times in your career when you think,
This is the best director I’ve ever worked with. This conductor is a genius. This tenor, this mezzo, this bass—I have never seen such talent.
In a way, being an opera singer is like being a very romantic sixteen-year-old who falls in love with great passion and conviction every month. I especially love to sing with Dmitri, who is famous for his breath control and ability to spin out long phrases. He’s a perfect example of someone who understands
tragen
and can use it to pull and bend the very strings of your heart. If you lined him up against all the historic Germonts, you could discern his special gift immediately: he has perfect support and technique. Add to that the fact that he has a beautiful voice and he knows what to do with a phrase, and the scene passes like a dream. It also features some of my favorite acting in the opera, because it’s so subtle and tragic. This is the moment when we see who Violetta really is, when her goodness shines out and the audience makes a deep commitment to her.

When the first scene of the second act is finished, I head backstage to change again, and on the way a woman stops me and hands me an envelope. The principal performers at the Met are paid at some point in the middle of every performance, and while getting a paycheck is always gratifying, I’m always distracted, to say the least, and I often forget where I’ve stuck the check in the rush of getting out of one costume and into another. Several days after a performance, my assistant Mary usually has to say to me, “Um . . . did they ever pay you?”—at which point we start hunting for the check.

Act 2, scene 2, starts with a party featuring the chorus and dancers. I’m not onstage at the beginning, and I have just enough time to get into the black gown that says “I have returned to the high life and now I am a miserable courtesan again.” It’s the biggest scene for the extras, and the costume people set up shop right at the side of the stage, ironing out jackets, fluffing up skirts. When the act is finished, I race back to get into my nightgown and prepare to die.

I’ve always struggled with how best to look emaciated and waiflike in the final act, and this year I took a great tip from Susan Graham—a bust flattener. She wears one when she sings trouser roles in Handel and Strauss, and it occurred to me that its use might aid me in appearing less healthy, so I put one on underneath my lavender nightgown. Victor comes in to take off the extra blush I put on before the first act and gives me dark circles, and then I get a long, disheveled wig that sends a clear message that I’ve been sweating through a high fever for days. I trade in my cross for a large, sentimental locket that no doubt holds a picture of Alfredo, along with the portrait I will give him as a keepsake of our love. The handkerchief I carry now is large and blotched with blood. I look like an Edward Gorey drawing. Vicki takes me back to the stage and helps me into bed. The carpenters have stuck an enormous wooden pole in the middle of the set and are noisily drilling something above my head, but it’s the third act, I’m in bed, and everything is right with the world. The carpenters remove the pole, straighten up, and are gone. From the other side of the curtains I hear the music and try to rouse myself.

I am so grateful for the times I’ve been able to work with Valery Gergiev. Our artistic sensibilities are complementary, and we play off each other well. Valery has a way of bringing virility to the orchestra that I find gutsy and exciting, and in response I’ll sing more passionately, which in turn inspires him. He gives the music a much more strongly rhythmic reading than what I usually encounter. We performed
Otello
together in 1994, and because I was in the second cast I was able to watch many of the rehearsals. The storm scene was so fiery and alive that I actually felt terrified. I don’t have to watch him constantly, for he’ll stretch a phrase, and then I’ll hear it and innately feel that my next two phrases need to push forward to balance out that stretch. It’s that constant give-and-take, the risk and trust, that can make a production of
La Traviata
feel like an opera you’ve never seen before.

My favorite performance analogy has to do with love. Leonard Bernstein said that conducting was like making love to a hundred people at the same time. I’ve also heard it said that to see Kleiber conducting Ileana Cotrubas as Violetta—the way he never took his eyes off of her, and the way they responded to each other musically—was to imagine that he was in love with her. And a jazz musician once told me that Miles Davis had said that his job wasn’t done unless the women in the audience fell in love with him. No wonder we try to replicate the most powerful emotion in the human existence.

One of the moments requiring the greatest interpretive skill in the opera comes in the third act, when Violetta reads the letter she has received from Alfredo. The letter scene can make or break a Violetta, because it is so nakedly revealing. In Houston, Frank had her seriously angry that Alfredo hadn’t come yet even though he knew she was dying, a powerful concept that led compellingly to her scream of “It’s too late!” But at the Met, my reading was more pensive, in keeping with the production’s overall gentler vision of Violetta. The letter reading is about the meaning and beauty of the language, as one is infinitely more exposed when speaking a language than when singing it. In singing, every vowel is stretched, and you can get away with a lot more and still sound authentic; but in speaking, there’s no place to hide. It involves the kind of detail that I can get very obsessive about, even more so than with a difficult vocal passage.