The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer (24 page)

Some years back, I was consistently criticized for a certain bland-ness, or for carrying vocal values above artistic ones, which was probably true, due to the difficulty of the repertoire I was singing and to the stage of my development. I took these comments to heart. Then the pendulum swung, and the complaining turned to my tendency toward interpreting with too much “artistry,” or with too artful a use of text and phrasing. It’s a matter of adjusting the bubble in the level again, finding the center.

I think there are very few people who truly don’t care about what’s being written about them. Most of us try to find a decent balance between paying too much attention to criticism and completely ignoring it. I have to remind myself continually that this is one of the few careers in which you work at night and read your performance evaluation in the newspaper the next morning. It takes some getting used to, and fortunately, thicker skin does start to build up over the years.

If you separated reviews into three categories, you would have those that come at the beginning of a career when critics are experiencing the thrill of discovery, harsher reviews once the real scrutiny begins, and then later, kind and nostalgic reviews, which come merely by virtue of having survived for so long. Everything changes, and sooner or later the day comes when a fresh new face will outshine you in a performance. There’s a great joke about how opera management views the five stages of a singer’s career:

“Who is Renée Fleming?”

“Get me Renée Fleming!”

“Get me the cheap Renée Fleming!”

“Get me the young Renée Fleming!”

“Who is Renée Fleming?”

I try to prepare myself step by step for each new direction in my own career. Recently Matthew Epstein told me that I had to change my attitude about my work, explaining, “You’ve got to move away from the striving and climbing place and understand that maintaining your position isn’t drudgery. In fact, it’s much more difficult than the climb.” You must improve your skills constantly, to keep your audience and yourself interested in your repertoire and in the choices you make.

In trying to sort through this transition of sorts, I called Jim Loehr, sports psychologist to the stars. It turns out that all those encouraging words that tennis players need to hear when they’re going into the finals at Wimbledon and that quarterbacks need to hear in the last quarter of the Super Bowl are the very ones that sopranos need to hear as well. The goal is to help performers in all fields achieve their peak under extraordinary pressure. He left me with some fascinating new ways of approaching this issue, though I have never been able to think of them without imagining myself standing on the fifty-yard line, shouting them out to a man in a coach’s uniform with a whistle hanging around his neck.

 

 

Isn’t it easy to imagine all these things being said to a fourteen-year-old girl in tennis whites?

 

 

It was a helpful experience, which made me stop and consider what I really wanted to accomplish. In short, I want to grow artistically.

If I have come to realize that I am ambitious, I still occasionally feel uncomfortable acknowledging it. Ambition still too often has a negative connotation, implying that you have to step on other people to make sure you’re the first one to get through the door. My own sense of ambition is that it is very much an inward motivator. In a sense, it’s less about seeing how high up I can vault than about seeing how deeply I can explore my potential. How can I find a truer interpretation of a role? How much more depth and light and emotion can I find in my own voice? How much can I feel when I’m singing a piece, and how much can I in turn make the audience feel? Ambition for me is about the willingness to work, the ability to mine my own soul fearlessly. At the end of my career, I want to know in my heart that I did everything I was capable of doing, that I succeeded in singing in a way that not even I had imagined was possible.

 

 

 

 

W
HEN IT COMES to interpretation in opera, my primary goal is to make the audience forget that I’m singing. The basis for this is a technique that is so solid I can, for the most part, put technique out of my mind. Of course, it can never be completely ignored. There are always a few places in every performance when I have to really think about what I’m doing, whether it involves how to approach a certain pitch or how to execute a particularly difficult phrase. Stepping into a role should be like getting into a car: you no longer have to be conscious of how to drive at this point, but only of where you’re going. I expect it’s the same kind of experience for an athlete—in that case, it’s the concept of going into the zone. There is a kind of suspension of thinking involved, as though there is so much inspiration and ease that it feels as if you’re channeling the music rather than singing it. Reaching that place allows me, in a sense, to step out of the music’s way and leave my mind free to discover new shadings in the role that I might have missed in the past.

When I spin out a long phrase, for example, I give that phrase a shape in my mind, which then travels out into the air. If it could be seen, it would appear as the silhouette of a mountain range. The shape would not so much trace the melody as the dramatic direction of the phrase. Where is its high point? Where is its most dramatic moment? Does the phrase vary dynamically, or is it steady? I make some of these decisions in rehearsal, while others are left to a moment of inspiration. But all of the choices go together to create what I hope will be a perfect moment in the performance, something that is both unique and ephemeral.

Part of the work done in a role is fine-tuning my approach to the text, making sure I can be understood and pronouncing the words as authentically as possible. Then there’s the musical work: where I take a breath; the shape of the phrase; should it be sung legato, which means that the notes are strung together seamlessly, or are there different articulations in the bar that would require staccato, marcato, a tied note, or stresses? Although these are fine points that are usually spelled out very specifically on the page by the composer, it’s surprising how much discipline it takes to actually study a score so carefully that all these little details are attended to, and unfortunately, memorizing them takes twice as long. However time-consuming, this process adds depth to a performance, and anything less can result in an interpretation that is bland and not necessarily true to the composer’s intentions. A wonderful conductor will also use rehearsal time not only to encourage us to enrich our own performances, but to collaborate with the rest of the cast and the orchestra in presenting a unified whole. James Levine has just this kind of musical intelligence in spades, which is one of the reasons he is such an extraordinary conductor.

Only once all of these musical elements are in place do we begin work with a stage director, who presents his concept of this opera, both visually and dramatically. Most directors will begin by blocking each scene—meaning, for example, that Figaro sits upstage center on the bed for the first phrase of a recitative, and then Susanna crosses downstage left of him to cradle Cherubino in her arms for her response. Blocking gives us a frame-by-frame template for movement. This is the least enjoyable part of the work for me. I prefer to get through the nuts and bolts of blocking as quickly as possible, because what follows is the joy of interaction and collaboration with my colleagues. We play off one another the same way actors in the theater do, except that our pitches and rhythms are fixed by the music. This limits our freedom when it comes to delivering a line, but it also helps to ground us in the scene. We are left to interpret by means of how we use and emphasize the text, and by our dynamic shaping or bending of each phrase. We can obviously inflect a good deal expressively with our faces and bodies as well.

A good director will use this preparation time to motivate and build character, but in a revival, which might have only two days of rehearsals, we are fortunate if we know which doors to enter and exit from. My favorite
Rosenkavalier
performance was at Covent Garden, with the Royal Opera. We had only two weeks to prepare and were left rather to our own devices, once we had the geography of the stage down. This had to be one of the most detailed performances of that opera I’ve ever taken part in, because each performance had an element of freedom and improvisation to it, which kept us all on our toes. It worked in this case because we were an ensemble of performers who had already sung together in at least four other
Rosenkavalier
productions.

Even if our singing is at the point of complete confidence (and let’s be honest, how often is that the case?), there are still plenty of other things to worry about in a performance. Beyond the challenges that any stage actor would face, we have to be sure we can be heard over an orchestra and sometimes a very large chorus as well, and without amplification. Considering how large theaters can be—four thousand at the Met, for example—that is not an insubstantial task. We have to keep our voices directionally pointed out toward the audience and rarely toward the wings or the back of the stage. We also have to be in sync with the orchestra and with one another at all times. Fortunately, the prompter is there to help, along with as many as ten television monitors placed around the stage and in the theater, so that the conductor’s baton can be seen from any position. We must act our emotions and control them at the same time. No matter how devastated we may feel at any given moment, we cannot give way to tears as our lover leaves us while we’re on our deathbed, because we still have to sing, and singing and tears can be a highly incompatible combination. The moment the audience suspects that I, Renée, am grieving is the moment it forgets about Violetta’s grieving.

We count on our audiences to suspend their disbelief in many ways. First and foremost, we ask them to believe that it is a natural thing for us to be singing rather than speaking; second, we must do such a convincing job with our singing and our acting that they are willing to overlook the fact that we so rarely fit the physical requirements of our characters. People marvel at Meryl Streep’s ability with accents and her adeptness at physically inhabiting her roles, but could she play the teenaged virgin in
Faust
? The first time I sang
Manon
in Paris and introduced myself as a girl of sixteen, several in the audience snickered, but then, most opera heroines are sixteen and no opera sopranos are. At the height of our careers, we are typically in our midthirties at the very least, and no one is surprised to see a singer taking on an ingenue role at fifty or even sixty. This is one aspect of the profession that I love dearly. All of the qualities demanded by a given role can be suggested by a believable performance and, more important, a suitable voice. After all, who ever doubted that Mirella Freni, singing late in her career, was the embodiment of the very young Tatyana in
Eugene Onegin
?

One of the hallmarks of sensitive, intelligent people is that they don’t make sweeping generalizations about others based on physical appearances—unless, of course, the people being generalized about are opera singers. Put me on an elevator in any music school in the country, and I can tell you almost immediately who the singers are and who the instrumentalists are. You may say I am stereotyping, but when the passengers on that elevator declare their majors, you will also say that I was right. Instrumentalists have been practicing long hours since they were children, with the kind of discipline that demands a dedication and a seriousness that belong to a certain kind of personality. Singers often don’t discover their voices until they’re sixteen or seventeen, and their ability to project their voices isn’t limited to the theater—an elevator will do just fine. When I was in school, Miss Texas seemed to be the soprano ideal: big hair, lots of makeup, high heels, and dressed to the hilt, with all components doubled, from hair height to heel height, for auditions. I tried to add an element of hipness to the image with my thrift-store vintage dresses, until Beverley drew the line at moth holes, after which my father only added insult to injury by tossing out my favorite dress when I wasn’t looking.

We have other, more familiar stereotypes to deal with as well—first and foremost, of course, Brünnhilde, with her breastplate, long blond braids, horned helmet, and the spear. When most people think of a soprano, they think of a big woman with a comparably big voice, and historically, we are not for the most part small in stature. Marilyn Horne said it best: big rockets require big launchers. We’re the weight lifters of the vocal arts. What we do, in fact, does feel very close to heavy lifting sometimes, making a sound that is substantial enough to carry to the farthest reaches of the balcony. On the other hand, I was amazed when I met Birgit Nilsson, Leontyne Price, and Renata Scotto, none of whom is particularly tall or large at all. (And as long as we’re trafficking in stereotypes, tenors are traditionally not very tall, while the basses very often are, which might be related to the lengths of their vocal cords.)