Mnemonic (18 page)

I read about her before I heard her sing. There was a wonderful profile on Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in
The New Yorker
, written by Charles Michener. After reading it, I thought, This is a singer I must listen to. I wasn't sure why, but I think it was because she didn't sound like a diva in the profile. She'd done things other than sing; for instance, she had helped to erect living quarters in the yard of a Mexican prison so she could be near her boyfriend of the time, a man convicted on drug charges. Her allusions to astrology amused me; I remembered my own encounter with a medium who told me I was in the care of Pan.

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson photographed by Richard Avedon — a gorgeous woman with long hair and a shirt open at the neck, smiling. It was so refreshing to see a generous mouth and crinkly eyes instead of a stern-faced Valkyrie in breastplate and horned helmet, or an elaborate brocade gown showing fierce cleavage bound in whalebone. Michener had heard her sing first at a benefit concert at the home of Leonard Bernstein and had been so taken by her voice that he said to her, “‘You have one of the most beautiful voices I've ever heard. Who are you?' ‘I'm a violist,' she replied, with the trace of a smile.”
¹³

I love this anecdote for what it tells us about the woman — her voice, the sense of that voice as an instrument, a mid-range instrument, with a depth and texture that one doesn't encounter very often. Not a violin, not a cello. Elsewhere in the profile, Michener refers to the “darkly gleaming” quality of her voice. (I thought of coffee, the kind I love most: dark roasted beans made into a strong infusion, flavour consistent with strength.)

What I heard in Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's voice the first time I listened to it — after reading her profile, I went out to buy whatever I could find: a recording of Handel arias (of course) and two Bach Cantatas, BWV 199 and BWV 82 — was a luxurious depth of emotional engagement. This was not simply a technical performance, a gifted virtuosity, but something lived and felt, singing that was a process, an act of offering.

Once she was on my radar, I encountered her everywhere. In truth, she was there before I knew her name. A recording of
Dido and Aeneas
, bought and listened to reverently: when I took it from the shelf and checked, yes, it was Lorraine singing Dido. Mentioning her to a friend who has sent me gifts of music, to my surprise he told me I was revealing excellent taste. But I have no particular taste, I thought. I have no basis for liking what I like. I only know what moves me. And she did.

I thought of that quality in some Renaissance painting:
chiaroscuro
— a balance between light and dark. The brilliant highlights on skin or interiors serve to effectively contrast the areas of strong shadow. Caravaggio for example: his
Madonna of the Pilgrims
shows us the dark-haired Mother with her child, her throat a chalice of light and her infant's thigh gleaming while behind her a dim plaster wall shows brick, one pilgrim's cloak ripples on his shoulders like a pelt, and the Madonna's own shirt and skirt are studies in dusky tonality. Lorraine's voice has this balance — the clarity and brightness of tone held in exquisite tension with such deep and velvety warmth. You could
see
her singing, although of course it was a recording.

I began my own singing lessons with her as my inner muse. I'd leave my lesson and listen to her sing “
Ich habe genug
” on my way home along the Coast Highway, taking in every note, every passage of open-throated beauty as I drove past views of islands, the Strait of Georgia glittering in sun or gun-dull in rain. I'd never heard this cantata sung by a mezzo-soprano before (though in truth I think the transposition is nearer the alto range) but had heard a bass, a soprano, the gorgeous obbligato passages played by flute. In this recording, the oboe d'amore echoed Lorraine's rich vibrato. Or she echoed the oboe d'amore, the two of them engaged in a long legato duet.

Where did Bach's glorious creation end and Lorraine begin? I'd never known that a singer could reside so completely within the emotional and spiritual landscape of a composer that he or she was somehow its embodiment. (I had heard this in a way with Rostropovich's transcendent interpretation of Bach's suites for unaccompanied cello. But with Cantata BWV 82, in this recording, it was as though Lorraine and the oboe d'amore and the sorrowful resignation expressed by Simeon, as he both anticipates and regrets his own impending death, are all of a voice, all in the same place.)

Eventually, I began to sing along with Lorraine. Having no piano at home, no means to practise in the usual way, I taped my lessons and practised by singing to my own exercises. I'd cringe as I pressed Play and heard my thin efforts, marred by missed notes, no sense of timing, my voice straining to sing even a D. But I'd persevere, trying to improve.

Discovering that I could practise by singing with Lorraine was an unexpected blessing. Not the cantatas, of course, or the Brahms, the Schubert. But there were several Handel pieces — “
Ombra mai fu
” for instance, the plane tree shining and beloved — that I had also begun to learn and there was no better model than her recordings. I'd like to believe I learned phrasing and pitch from Lorraine, and how to enter a song with my whole self, giving myself over to it. I loved the sound of her voice in my empty house, the fully open “As With Rosy Steps the Morn” ringing up the stairs to my bedroom where sunlight filtered through the white linen curtains, her “Deep River” like a block of dark chocolate.

A Beginner's Repertoire (annotated)

1) “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Maidens”: I found a Joan Baez songbook and Xeroxed two copies of this, one for Shelley and one for me. We worked on it for about three lessons and I found it very difficult. But there were moments when I'd feel my throat open and a phrase would sound out with something like a ring. I knew I wanted to do this for the rest of my life.

2) I've already confessed to mangling “
Ombra mai fu
,” the aria that led me to singing lessons in the first place. I'd been listening to Daniel Taylor's
Portrait
CD and was very taken by the John Dowland song, “Flow My Tears.” I loved its mournful quality, its elegance. “Can we try this?” I asked. And Shelley kindly said yes, though I realize now what a trial it must have been for her to guide my weak and faltering voice through such a gorgeous piece. I'd take huge lungfuls of air and attack the song like a drowning woman, seeing the E looming towards the end — “Hap-py, hap-py they that in hell / Feel not the world's de-spite” — and feeling my heart flutter with anxiety. Could I reach it? Would I strain and not arrive? Whew. But I practised regularly, my tape deck set up in the corner of the kitchen, trying it over and over again. And now, years later, I wonder how I ever could have chosen that song with only a month or two of lessons behind me. It is so hard and requires such breath control.

3) My older son had been to Lester B. Pearson College of the Pacific and had sung in the college choir. One piece he'd enjoyed was “Jerusalem,” stanzas from Blake's “Prophetic Books” set to music by C. Hubert H. Parry. After hearing him sing it in his light tenor, I tried to entice him to teach me but he wasn't willing. Sometimes I'd hum when I heard him singing but wasn't sure of the melody, the lyrics. So Shelley ordered the sheet music and we laughed our way through its very hymn-like cadences. (As a child, I sang in a church choir and enjoyed the practices, the occasional appearance before the congregation in our dark blue gowns with the contrasting white yokes. But it was hard not to laugh when the [very] senior choir sang “Bringing in the Sheaves” or “Holy Holy Holy.” I'm sure they felt wonderful — well, I know they felt wonderful and all the recent scientific evidence suggests that they were unknowingly keeping their blood pressure down, their serotonin levels up, their immune systems in healthy readiness — but they sounded so frail and so trembly.) Still, I'd get goosebumps when we came to the robust final stanza: “Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire!” (How did arrows of desire fit in a poem about the Holy Lamb of God? Well, that was Blake, I suppose — heaven and hell, innocence and experience.)

4) “Why not try this,” she asked? I'd bought
Italian Songs and Arias
, arranged for medium voice, and we were leafing through it. “This” was “
Caro mio ben
,” ah dearest love, by one Tommaso Giordani. What I liked about the collection as a whole was the way each song was presented: a page of background information, source, bibliography should one want to follow up, and a phonetic guide to pronunciation. There was also a CD of accompaniment included for those like me who had no way to practise the piece at home. And what I liked about “
Caro mio ben
” itself was its accessibility, both as a song and as an exercise for a beginner like me. It wasn't too high (I was learning about tessitura and although there were some high notes in this piece, the portion of the range that was characteristic was very manageable). I had several months of Italian at university, just enough to give me a little bit of confidence if the tempo was, as with this song, larghetto. There were passages with interesting ornamentation, too, to aspire to. (I'd listen to Cecilia Bartoli sing this song and was breathless at her quicksilver grace as I followed the score.) This was a song I revisited, every six months or so, to see if I'd improved enough to do it any kind of amateur justice.

5) “Could we try ‘When I am laid in earth'?” “We can, of course.” I muddled through the recitative, though finding it easier than “
Frondi tenere
,” which I never sang after the first few attempts. And then the exquisite cry from the heart of Dido. Or it would have been beautiful if my throat hadn't closed completely for the G above the staff. I was so disappointed with myself. Shelley very sweetly took the final refrain down half an octave but I was completely aware that I was mangling a thing of great beauty. “It's not that it's too high for you,” she explained, “but that you have to make a leap to a vowel, to an eeee, and you don't want it to sound like you've seen a mouse. It's always difficult.”

6) I discovered I loved Benjamin Britten's folk song arrangements and that I could sing them reasonably well. “Down by the Salley Gardens” — a poem by William Butler Yeats, haunted by a long-ago love; “Last Rose of Summer” with its dark embellishments. Shelley had this transposed for me as the arrangement was for soprano voice; after three years of lessons, I could almost manage, apart from several ornaments which went to high C. Almost, but not quite. And the misses were dreadful. And I also was intrigued by the American song-collector and composer John Jacob Niles. I worked on “Black is the Colour,” a song I couldn't forget and found myself singing mournfully while working in the garden or washing dishes. There was something in it of Dowland, something of Britten — the minor chords, the flats. The wonderful Daniel Taylor sings this with lute accompaniment by Sylvain Bergeron on the splendid
Lie Down, Poor Heart
, and I learned a lot about timing from him.

7) “Amarilli,” “And So It Goes,” “Aye Fond Kiss,” “Fairest Isle,” “The Cuckoo,” “Since First I Saw Your Face” (which took me full circle back to that choir when this had been a piece we sang in four parts. It made me wistful for missed opportunities, bad timing — maybe I could have become a singer in those sad old years in high school), “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child,” “
Laschia ch'io pianga
,” and “Where'er you walk” (I love singing Handel!), “
O Leggiadri occhi belli
” (my Italian stumbling to keep up), “Have You Seen but a White Lily Where it Grows?”, more Niles (“The Black Dress” and “The Gambler's Lament,” which I sang with rib cage expanded and my tentative vibrato, but I longed to put aside my small classical accomplishments for these to sing them as plaintively, wistfully as Emmylou Harris might).