The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer (28 page)

There are nights when I perform a recital and everything has gone perfectly. I feel that I’ve sung my best and have been able to make the leap from interpretation to artistry. I’ve made a real connection to the audience. I look back on the entire evening and wouldn’t change a thing. And yet those can be the very nights when I go back to my hotel and feel disoriented, for the juxtaposition is just too great. For the most part, I enjoy the time I spend on the road, as it gives me an opportunity to be on my own. The phone doesn’t ring nearly as much as when I’m at home, and I’m not in the middle of the chaos of my regular life. Even though I thrive on chaos, everyone needs a respite from time to time. Still, after communicating so intensely with twelve hundred people, it feels strange to be alone in an unfamiliar room. I’m wide awake, wound up after the performance, and what I feel is an incredible void. Many concert performers have spoken about the loneliness of their lifestyle, and this is generally a very true observation. There’s an enormous thrill that comes from a night onstage, when the hard work that goes into making a great performance comes into contact with the excitement and energy of the audience. But when I get back to the hotel there’s no way to hold on to that elation. It’s as if the whole evening has been erased with the single turn of the key in the lock on the hotel room door, and suddenly I can be negative and judgmental about the smallest error I might have made. By the next morning I’m usually fine, because I understand that this is part and parcel of the nomadic life that singers lead.

Opera’s built-in social life makes for a less lonely existence. We are reunited with an ensemble of singer friends and familiar faces backstage at least every few years, creating a family of sorts for the month or two that we’re working together. There’s an inherent excitement in the adventure of it all, but underlying it is the constant desire for a connection to home and family. This is the supreme sacrifice we make in exchange for practicing this glorious art form. As a wise colleague once said to me, “What we do is so joyous, so satisfying, we would do it for free. We are actually paid for the grief of leaving our families and friends.”

 

 

 

 

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NE OF THE OBSTACLES I face in learning any new role is finding a way to carve two hours each day out of the middle of a packed schedule to find time to practice. Rehearsing at the piano in my living room makes me grateful that I have developed such good concentration skills over the years, as the phone rings every two minutes and the doorbell only a little less often. My assistant Mary Camilleri tries her best not to interrupt, but every now and then something comes up that requires my immediate attention. While she juggles three phone lines she is also digging up copies of musical scores I need to look at and packing for my next trip to Germany. My other assistant, Alison Heather, is my liaison to the world, creating travel itineraries and putting together my schedule, trying to finesse the details of where I’ll be singing and when, and arranging interviews, fittings, lunches with friends, practices, school plays, meetings at the Met, and the occasional date. My assistants have referred to me as anything from “the velvet whip” to simply “the hurricane,” though if I didn’t become so harried, I’d say that the overwhelming necessity for multitasking puts me more in the category of “Stepford diva.” When my daughters come home from school, they swoop past the piano for a quick kiss and report on their day, covering everything from grades on pop quizzes to playdate and party invitations, to general gossip about who sat next to whom at lunch and what was said. It’s the highlight of my day. After we catch up, they have a snack and head to their rooms to start their homework. Right now, I’m rehearsing
Daphne
while also living through a complete renovation of my apartment, so not only is there a great deal of dust to contend with—not the best environment for singing—but constant banging, guys in baseball caps trudging in and out, and a lot of yelling in Russian, which makes me wish I’d been putting in a new kitchen while I was learning Tatyana. Meanwhile, the girls’ nanny is doing the laundry, and Rosie, my Cavalier King Charles spaniel, is barking manically at the two designers who have just shown up to take measurements for the built-in shelves I’m having installed. This chaos is not the exception but the rule. After the kitchen is done, there will be something else to take its place. If I were a delicate person who needed quiet and concentration in order to work, I would be doomed to spend the rest of my life singing the Countess in
Figaro,
because there would never be an opportunity to learn a new role. My world is thrilling, rewarding, demanding, and almost never peaceful. When the work needs to be done, I simply need to find a way to do it, regardless of what is going on around me, and I probably wouldn’t have it any other way.

Although I’ve always taken great pleasure in working with the different elements that go into making an operatic character, from the music to the costumes, the most gratifying aspect of developing a character is the moment of discovery. Just when I think I really know the woman I am singing, something will happen that reveals another facet of her personality. Call it divine inspiration or the exercising of a creative muscle, but whenever I suddenly see a novel way to react to dialogue or a different movement or an unsuspected motivation, I feel newly alive in the role. It can happen during a rehearsal or a performance, or it can be a layered experience that extends and grows across several productions, but the building process never ends. What makes it so exciting is that the combined effort of reading the original book or play on which a libretto is based, studying the period and historical context, and, most important, immersion in the text and music itself creates a completely whole and complicated person on the stage. The more you put into it, the more you and the audience will get out of it.

Fantastical characters, such as the water nymph Rusalka or the sorceress Alcina, are generally difficult to flesh out, since the essence of what they need or want must be uncovered and imbued with nuance. Performing Alcina for the first time seemed like a series of variations on “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover” (Ruggiero) and fifty ways—or, more specifically, five fiendishly difficult arias—to express the loss of love (Alcina). By today’s standards, the sketchy, convoluted, or downright absurd stories on which some baroque and nineteenth-century Italian operas are based require the most imagination in staging and benefit from a director who can work conceptually. Some heroines are also virtuous to a fault, perched on an imaginary pedestal for all time. Contrarily, complex characters with real human lives, such as the Marschallin or Manon or Violetta, are the easiest and, for me, usually the most satisfying to bring to life.

I remember that the first time I saw a production of
Otello,
I couldn’t help thinking that Desdemona had been the victim of a childhood lobotomy. What other explanation could there be for her utter obliviousness to her husband’s jealous rages and to the real motivation for his line of questioning about the nature of her virtue? But while preparing the role, I came to see her as a true innocent: she believes so completely in the love she shares with Otello that she can’t conceive of anything coming between them. That realization enabled me to play her with enormous love and confidence. Our director in Chicago, Sir Peter Hall, took her confidence in her marriage a step further, having Otello implicitly assign her to the role of the one and only calming influence on him. She then interprets his rage against her as a sign of anxiety, needing only to be soothed with loving words. She realizes too late the seriousness of his accusations. Every time I sing the role now, I look to find even more goodness and trust in her, and in doing so I hope that my portrayal helps to explain to the audience the depth of her nature.

Singing Dvořák’s
Rusalka
is the equivalent of a sensuous moonlight swim, but bringing the character and the story to life is a challenge. The ending of this opera, particularly, took me a great deal of time and discussion to understand. What happens to her? Or to the prince, for that matter? Add to that a second act in which the protagonist is mostly mute, necessitating that Rusalka express everything she is experiencing with her face and body alone, and I can honestly say that I needed all seven productions in which I have performed in to get to the heart of this role. Robert Carsen, the director of the Paris Opera production, seized on the implicit sexuality of the story and on Rusalka’s attempt to “become a woman” and made a finely wrought psychological drama of the opera, in which the Water Gnome and the Witch became Rusalka’s parents. I asked the choreographers of several productions to help me find a physical language to express her despair and what she terms her “neither woman nor nymph” state, once she is partially transformed into a human, for performing an act without singing seemed at first to be comparable to a violinist’s performing a concert without a violin.

The final scene in Günther Schneider-Siemssen’s design for the Otto Schenk production, the version I have appeared in most often, is my favorite of all the realizations. In it Rusalka appears to be walking on water, though in fact it’s a sheet of Plexiglas that’s artfully lit and is embedded with metallic ribbons and threads. Rotating machines under the set gently move similarly decorated Mylar sheets to simulate the rippling of water under moonlight. The complete effect is really quite convincing, and what soprano wouldn’t like to walk on water just once? In the end, she can neither die nor go back to being a water nymph, and so she’s doomed to spend the rest of her days seducing men and leading them to their death from a dark place, deep in the water. At the heart of
Rusalka
are the themes of love and redemption, as is true of all of my favorite theatrical works, but one has to “dive” in to find the opera’s meaning. Rusalka swears she will not kill her lover, and yet she does so with a kiss, because he begs her to. He wants release from the shame and pain he has caused her, in the form of death. She asks God to take his beautiful human soul and returns to her own infinite, dark existence, to the tune of one of the most beautiful postludes in the entire operatic repertoire. Dvořák’s nymph is a far cry from the perky Little Mermaid in the Disney film, which is based on the same fairy tale of Undine, who winds up getting both her legs and her man.

Sometimes the challenge of taking on a difficult role can lead to such a high level of success with a particular production that it becomes a favorite, as was the case when I sang
Alcina
with the Paris Opera at the old Palais Garnier in 1999. Susan Graham sang Ruggiero, the object of my affection, or rather obsession, and for each of us, it was a first attempt at a Handel opera. We were fortunate to have Robert Carsen as director and William Christie at the helm with Les Arts Florissants, his baroque orchestra, in the pit. When I first met Christie, I fully expected that he would ask me to sing the role very purely with no vibrato and a very white sound, which I was more than willing to try, but he was adamant: “This music made people swoon when it was premiered. People fainted. That’s what we’re going for.” He told me to bring everything I had to the score, every bit of expressive wallop I had, all the sex, all the jazz, everything. I kept nervously protesting, “No, no, no. Wait, you can’t be telling me this. You can’t mean that. This is not stylistically correct.” But he insisted, and so finally I tried to sing as I would jazz, bending a phrase here, flattening out a note there. I would begin a tone without vibrato and then add it later on. Performing in this manner was such a shock because it was Handel, after all, who I thought would be stylistically in line with Mozart, but Christie assured me otherwise. The end effect was successful, because we were willing to risk failure by opening up.

Christie’s harpsichordist, Emmanuelle Haïm, and Gerald Moore and I worked out the embellishments and cadenzas for each of the da capo repeats of Alcina’s arias. This was a matter of tailor-making decorations that were expressive, interesting, and a perfect fit for my capabilities. By far the most time-consuming aspect of preparing a bel canto or Handel opera is memorizing, practicing, and reworking these embellishments, which usually go on until opening night. If I could, I would improvise them myself during every performance. The brilliant soprano Natalie Dessay, who sang Morgana, could, and did throughout rehearsals. When I mentioned to her that I was simply astounded by her singing and musical imagination, she laughed and demurred: “Oh, I sing them differently every day because I can’t remember what I did yesterday.”

Rehearsals are always fun for me, because there’s no yardstick against which we have to measure ourselves. It’s all about exploration. Performing before an audience is wonderful, because you can draw upon their energy, but you expose yourself to their perceived judgment as well; as you are working out your concept of a role, it’s better to be free of that. The basis of Robert Carsen’s talent is his vast cultural education and impeccable taste. He’s fluent in several languages, is wonderfully imaginative, and never hesitates to push me to give my best, even if it means creating tension in rehearsals. That tension never lasts, because I know that his motivation is to force me to take risks, and in doing so he gets results. Handel offers a tremendous challenge to a director in that his operas contain few ensembles or even duets, and their confusing and complex stories move forward slowly and usually only in the short recitatives between multiple long arias. This can be impossible for a director who needs to work realistically, but it is a wonderful opportunity for an abstract and imaginative thinker. Not only was this production musically perfect, it was also visually beautiful, thanks to the designer Tobias Hoheisel. The
Alcina
set was a white box, with doors that would open onto images of green forests and meadows, pictures of gorgeous and glimmering nature projected onto the back wall to give the illusion of depth to infinity. Thirty or forty men were arrayed onstage to portray Alcina’s victims as “rocks” (which also served as the real furniture), as Alcina is a sorceress who feels it is her calling to seduce and destroy men, until she falls in love with Ruggiero. Many of the men were naked, which, although slightly distracting at times for Susan and me, was certainly never dull.
Alcina
was one of those magical events in which the ideas were genuinely fresh, and both the critics and the audience loved it—a rare combination.