The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer (20 page)

Not only is the industry badly in need of paying audiences and CD sales, but there are also gifts to be solicited to keep the opera and symphony alive. No one expects to be asked to make a donation for the upkeep of Britney Spears, but classical music is forced to reach out to patrons for support. In the 1950s and ’60s, charitable giving primarily benefited cultural institutions, as governments in Europe and America were more attentive to social concerns. But as public funds have been slashed on all fronts, the public is understandably much more likely to give its discretionary dollars to hospices, homeless shelters, and educational causes rather than the arts. The one partial exception is the construction of performance spaces, which involves tangible realities like bricks, mortar, and donors’ plaques, as opposed to an abstraction like the annual operating budget. As a general rule, people like to build things but are much less comfortable about being asked to sustain them.

On every front there have been shifts in our cultural tastes in music including the newfound popularity given to the composers of film soundtracks, a genre I had firsthand experience with when Howard Shore asked me to sing on the soundtrack of the third film in the
Lord of the Rings
trilogy,
The Return of the King
. When I first met Howard he said, “I’d love to have you to do this; however, I want to explain to you that we have a vocal concept and a musical concept that you might not want to fulfill.” He told me that he was looking for a medieval sound and that my singing would have to have a very pure, chantlike quality (words I expected to hear from William Christie!). I listened to the previous soundtracks and understood exactly what he was looking for, so I said, “I would love to try.” I recorded five three- to four-hour sessions for what ultimately became about ten minutes’ worth of music in the film.

I was amazed by how different recording techniques are for a film score than, say, a collection of Strauss scenes. When we record classical music in the studio the process is not very far from a live performance, with just enough orchestra time to get through a piece two or possibly three times and then patch in a minimum number of corrections. In any three-hour orchestral recording session, fifteen minutes of usable music is about what is expected. Perfection isn’t even an option, since the finances of recording with an orchestra simply don’t allow for much repetition. It turned out that the people making movies from J. R. R. Tolkien novels did have endless time for perfect results, however, and could afford the London Symphony for months of work, thirty or forty sessions for a single film—an unimaginable luxury in the classical music world. Add to that the discussion of the proper pronunciation of Elvish, and I can definitely say that this was a unique experience.

To get the degree of perfection in the singing that they wanted, I had to imagine beyond what a boy soprano could contribute. The producer asked me to take every ounce of expression out of my voice in order to make the cleanest sound possible, saying, “Remember, no vibrato, no connecting between tones, no dynamics.” Then he said, “Good, now could you add a little bit of emotion?” He lost me there, because to achieve the sound he wanted I had eliminated all the standard devices to express emotion: vibrato, portamento, legato, and dynamics. Without any access to those tools, I didn’t have the faintest idea of how to create something beyond the pitches.

Amazingly to me, the final result sounds much richer and warmer than it did when I was singing it, and my short selections are incorporated into the film in a beautifully seamless way. I left that experience feeling a tremendous sense of respect for people who work in film. They have remarkable patience and stamina, given that the hours they put in are endless—or in this case, not just hours but years. Barely a month later, I recorded a disc of Handel arias and found to my delight that the experience of fine-tuning my ears to hear the tiniest change in vibrato and dynamics lent itself perfectly to the baroque style. A fortuitous side benefit to taking on the music of the Elves!

Many people think the answer to the salvation of classical music is to tap into the obsession with celebrity, to find artists who can make the industry seem less
classical
. Others predict that what has been called “the cult of celebrity” is a sure path to ruin. I myself have spent most of the past ten years confused about the whole subject, and to make matters worse, my recording career began during one of the most difficult transitions the industry has ever faced. Just where do I fit into the larger picture of our culture?

The demand for Enrico Caruso’s recordings single-handedly changed the phonograph from a curiosity to a commercial enterprise. Caruso dominated the musical world, and while he was always an opera singer first and foremost, he was equally beloved for his Neapolitan song repertoire, which sold as well as his aria recordings. All of his recordings are still in print, something that can be said of few recording artists.

Thanks in large part to Caruso, opera singers became such celebrities in the early twentieth century that they were even sought out for silent-film roles. In Europe, the great beauty Lina Cavalieri made a film of
Manon Lescaut,
and in America, Geraldine Farrar did an incredibly popular version of
Carmen,
which is still screened to this day. This is particularly ironic in light of the fact that the biographical films made about opera singers in the second half of the twentieth century featured nonsinging actresses whose singing was dubbed.

Once sound came to the movies, singers were everywhere. Grace Moore, Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, and Mario Lanza all could be considered crossover artists, as they were well-trained performers who brought popular songs and light and core classics to a larger audience. And even though Deanna Durbin never had an opera career, she managed to sing (and sing well) at least one aria in each of the twenty-two musical films she made before retiring at the age of thirty. During the height of her fame in the 1930s and ’40s, she became the highest-paid woman in America, and in some years the biggest-selling female box-office star. All while singing arias!

Today, “crossover” has become the golden word of the age. Crossover is based, in fact, on the model used for the development of pop artists. It is a lesson taken directly from the recent pages of star development, where bands are constructed out of pretty faces with an ability to dance in sync. Their recordings do not generally travel internationally, and some of the groups are actually paid a salary rather than a royalty, allowing the company to reap great profits if the band takes off; or, alternatively, an enormous amount is spent on promotion and development. The image is decidedly far more important than the content, enhanced with arrangements of classical tunes or original material, light shows, costumes, and choreography. Crossover is definitely finding an audience, and an enormous audience at that.

It was the staggering sales of Andrea Bocelli’s CD
Romanza
that spawned a series of successful CDs by people who are generally referred to as opera singers without actually having the requisite training or stage career. Most could also never be heard without amplification, not necessarily because their voices are small, but because they haven’t had the years of development and knowledge of projection and the craft of singing. Furthermore, higher voices have a juvenile purity of sound and not the ripe, warm tone of a true operatic voice. The smart ones will either use their overnight success as a launching pad for a career in television or film, or will find a way to develop as musicians and change with the times, as some pop idols can.

Ironically, the success of crossover repertoire for these performers means that young artists who are pursuing a traditional classical career face choices that were not there just a few years ago. Young musicians want to sell their extraordinary gifts to the major labels, but when they get no response, they hire professional photographers to shoot them draped across the top of a piano or around a cello in tight clothes. Then the labels start to be interested.

In today’s market, classical recordings, at least at the major labels, are also being held to the same standards as pop. There are fewer releases, enormous expectations for sales, more money spent on promotion, and shorter contracts, with artists no longer being signed for the duration of their careers. But classical music isn’t pop, and its numbers really can’t be run the same way. It used to be expected that a classical recording would recoup its investment in seven years, and that was an investment companies were willing to make. But by 1999, it seemed that classical recordings were being held to the same standards as those of U2: the investment had to be made back in one year. Most operas cost at least $250,000 to record; Solti’s
Die Frau ohne Schatten
cost a million including all marketing expenditures and company overhead. My recording of
Rusalka
cost around $300,000 and has sold forty thousand units to date. It will have to sell seventy-five thousand to earn back its cost. Yes, these recordings may stay in the red for a long time; but in truth, even staying in the black is no longer enough. The only thing that counts for the share-holders of the largest companies is a huge profit.

Fortunately, huge does happen every now and then. In recent years, classical artists such as Yo-Yo Ma and Joshua Bell have even made it onto the
Billboard
pop charts. And the phenomenon of Pavarotti, Domingo, and Carreras, the Three Tenors, flew—eventually to the tune of twelve million copies. Their success, however, ultimately served to mask an overall malaise in classical recording. Thanks to the seventeen million units they sold, the bottom line for classical record sales looked very bright on average, but if anyone bothered to examine individually some of the other recordings, it was easy to see there were huge losses. In the end, the Three Tenors’ legacy was primarily an extraordinary string of spin-offs: Three Mo’ Tenors, the Three Scottish Tenors, the Three American Tenors, the Three Irish Tenors, the Three Countertenors, the Three Broadway Divas, Three Men and a Tenor, the Three Phantoms, the Three Sopranos, the Opera Babes, Ten Australian Tenors, and the Three Finnish Basses. It seems that all the music industry took away from the experience was that three seemed to be a very palatable number for the buying public.

Studio executives suddenly turned their attention to their classical divisions and had the idea that all of their projects should live up to these results. Executives who were considered “old-fashioned” were asked to step down and were replaced by mostly young, marketing-driven managers. But the forces that were driving the sales of the Three Tenors had little to do with classical music. Their success was a phenomenon: a confluence of stars, the connection to the World Cup, well-established artists performing at the peak of their careers, and a great human-interest story. In the long run, this spike in popularity did little if anything to tarnish the seriousness with which Pavarotti, Domingo, and Carreras were taken as opera singers. They were firmly established by the time the recording was made, and each had a substantial body of work. Even some aficionados were thrilled to hear Plácido sing Mac-duff in a Three Tenors concert in Los Angeles or José sing the tenor aria from
Le Cid
. Where else would they be able to hear that?

Some have criticized the Three Tenors phenomenon and other exceptional classical music events as bad for the classical music industry, in that they accustomed major artists and the labels themselves to unsustainably high advances and royalties, while rewarding record companies with unrealistically high profits. This may be an unnecessarily negative view. No singer I know, myself included, would ever turn down an opportunity to preserve the legacy of a career in the opera house simply because she’s not being paid Three Tenor-size royalties. Yes, singing is how we make our living. But sometimes it really is a labor of love, and for most of us, the artistic satisfaction of a challenging role is far more alluring than a big fee. If not, why would we have become classical musicians in the first place?

If I wanted to capitalize on my commercial potential entirely, I would sing only the most popular classical arias, not in their original forms, but arranged stylistically to fit everything from techno to Holly-wood film music. I would sing even less opera, and then only Italian opera and not the lesser-known Strauss and French rarities that I adore. I would tour only my recordings in pursuit of ever larger sales, rather than performing world premieres and the concert repertoire of Strauss, Berg, and Schoenberg. I am not at all against adding visual elements to a performance, whether through image and fashion or through lighting or perhaps film. In fact, I would welcome opportunities in the future to bring, say, the imagination of a Pina Bausch production to a musical performance, but never at the expense of the integrity of the music.

The most important point to be made about mass audience events that sometimes feature opera singers, whether the Olympics or televised celebrations such as the Kennedy Center Honors, has to be this: that somewhere out in the audience, whether on a grassy hillside viewing a big-screen monitor or at home watching his own television, will be someone hearing opera for the first time—possibly even hearing classical music for the first time. That alone has to make it worthwhile for artists to continue—in appropriate settings, with musical integrity—to try to expand the audience for their music. If we failed to do that, we would be, and should be, criticized even more strongly, as our audience, at least in the Western world, shrinks away.