The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer (33 page)

Finally, Alfredo and Germont do return. Alfredo and Violetta reaffirm their love and all is forgiven. She has one brief instant of joy, thinking she’s fully recovered and that they can have a beautiful life together, and then she drops dead on a high B-flat—difficult, to say the least, to make believable. When we walk out together from behind the curtain, the audience roars. It sounds like the ocean, like a single enormous wave of love and approval crashing down on us. People tear up their programs and throw them into the air, and though this is expressly forbidden at the Met, I am not about to be the one who tells them to stop. The pages rain down on us, and the applause seems to go on as long as the opera. Suddenly I feel that I could happily stay up all night.

And that should be where this story ends, with my resurrection in front of a loving audience, in the company of my colleagues and friends, but the evening is not quite over. Back in the dressing room, the wig is tacked onto its Styrofoam head and the nightgown goes back on its hanger. I take out the pin curls, wipe off the dark circles as best I can, and get back into my own clothes. When I am composed I open the dressing-room door and greet everyone whose name is on the backstage list, a group that ranges from Met patrons to someone I went to third grade with, other singers, fans from other states or other countries, close friends, friendly acquaintances, and almost everyone in between. There is an art to meeting, greeting, and keeping the line moving along, for while I appreciate these visits, I want to make sure the people at the end of the line don’t have to stand there until two a.m. There are photographs and hugs and little presents. After I’ve spoken a few words with everyone, I go back to the stage door, where the long line of fans who didn’t manage to get their names on the backstage list wait. These are the troupers. It is very late by now and very cold, but they want me to sign their programs. Many of them are young singers, and I remember the days when I used to wait at the door to tell someone how much I appreciated her performance. I try to talk to everyone for a minute. It is after midnight by the time I get to the end of the second line. These are the moments when I love New York the most. The city waited up for me. It doesn’t feel lonely or in the least bit shut down. A friend has invited me to join her for a late salad and a glass of wine if I have the energy, and suddenly I have all the energy in the world, at least for a little while longer. I walk down Broadway, away from Lincoln Center, and chalk this one up as a good night.

 

 

 

 

I
CANNOT IMAGINE a more satisfying calling than my own: beauty, humanity, and history every day, combined with the cathartic joy of singing. And as a classical musician, I have the luxury of a long career, if I can maintain my voice. The complexity of the art form and the ability to grow artistically can hold the attention of a loyal following for between twenty and forty years, which is not usually the case for performers of more popular music. The greatest advantage it has given me is choice: what role or concert to accept, when, and, to some degree, with whom.

I will continue searching for new and challenging repertoire and developing other operatic and concert world premieres. How can any art continue to grow if the flow of enriching new material dries up? Imagine if every year we had two or three new operas to record, with major stars and an eager and hungry public as interested in these releases as they are in a new book by Ann Patchett or a new film by Pedro Almodóvar. As I grow as a recitalist, I will explore the endless reams of song literature while continuing to savor the opportunity for creating a recorded legacy. The same qualities that have made me so eager a student are also enabling me to expand my horizons and explore theater, art, and an interest in education and the importance of music and the arts in our culture.

Only recently have I felt secure enough to appreciate how truly fortunate I am. I think back to Jan DeGaetani bringing every class to tears when telling us what a privilege and an honor it was to be a musician, to be an artist. At the time, we could scarcely relate to that sentiment, since at that point in our careers we were lucky to reach the end of a single aria without coming to grief, but I understand it very well now. Often in the middle of a performance I find myself completely overcome with a deep feeling of gratitude for the fulfillment inherent in this work. Music enabled me as a fragile young person to give voice to emotions I could barely name, and now it enables me to give my voice the unique and mysterious power to speak to others.

I am also fortunate to be grounded by extraordinary friends who provide an interpersonal exchange that rejuvenates me and allows me to gather strength for the pressures I face every day—a veritable oasis. There are treasured friends from my youth, colleagues, new friends who face similar challenges of high-profile careers, and admirers and friends from all strata of society who are highly educated appreciators of the arts. I’m an Olympic ruminator, and without the sounding board of this loving, sensitive inner circle, my sister, and my family, I’m not sure I could withstand the rigors of my life.

The central challenge I face in all of this is making sure I have enough time with my children. I openly discuss everything about my work and my traveling with Amelia and Sage. They know exactly when I’m leaving and when I’m coming home and when they get to go with me. We make calendars; we e-mail and call each other every day. We never lose our sense of connectedness. I stay completely informed about everything that’s going on with them. I work very hard to make it clear to my daughters that they come first with me, and they seem to know that they do. They’re also at an age now when they’re aware of my Herculean work ethic and the necessity for multitasking to the extreme, but they also know deep down that if push came to shove, there would be no choice: it would always be them. I never close the door on them when I’m rehearsing. They can come and sit in my lap. They can interrupt me if they need to. I’ve never wanted them to feel they were competing with music for my attention, and so far, so good. They love music. I don’t push it, but it’s always there, and they’re welcome to it. My general philosophy as a parent is to expose them to as much as is humanly possible—as many kinds of interests, as many kinds of people, places, and situations.

Untold amounts of love go into making sure their needs are met on a daily basis, and happily, I’m now finding it possible to better balance my personal life with my professional life overall. I feel grateful that my mother worked and instilled in me an understanding that while she was different from my friends’ parents, I could be proud of her. We don’t teach our daughters to be dependent anymore, but that wasn’t the case in my mother’s generation. Recently, Sage performed in the children’s chorus of a Russian opera, and when I went backstage to pick her up after the accolades, I said, “Sweetie, you’re skipping rope onstage and you’re supposed to be having fun. May I please have one of your most stellar smiles next time? And sing out!” I had to laugh when I realized that history was repeating itself. I’m not only caretaker of the girls; I’m also their role model. I tell them that I hope they’ll find a life’s ambition that makes them as happy as mine has made me: something they feel passionately about.

One beautiful day in Connecticut, I was driving the girls on errands when my older daughter, who was ten at the time, started singing one of the Queen of the Night’s virtuosic arias from
Die Zauberflöte,
complete with high Fs absolutely perfectly in place. I keep a pitch pipe in the car, because I often warm up while driving (make a note to stay clear of sopranos on the road), and with it I verified that she was even singing in the right key. I looked at her and said, “Amelia, that’s amazing! Where did you hear that?” I had taken them to see the opera, but that was a year earlier.

She smiled and answered, “Oh, I saw it on television the other night. It was in a movie.”

“Oh, so you saw it a few times throughout the week?” I asked, thinking it must have been on the Disney Channel.

She shrugged, seeming totally unimpressed with herself. “No, just once.”

Musical memory is such an interesting gift. Of course, for a week after that both girls sang the Queen of the Night’s aria every time we got into the car, driving it into higher and higher ranges. It was hilarious to me, but deeply puzzling to any little girlfriends of theirs who were riding along with us.

Every time she sang, I told Amelia she was doing a wonderful job, until finally she said to me, “Well, you know, Mom, I
am
considering becoming an opera singer.”

Of course, being an opera singer was the furthest thing from her mind three days later, but for a second at least she had seen it, this thing I have known all along: there must be at least one note in my range that belonged to my grandmother, and certainly my mother’s soprano and my father’s deep love for new music have given much of the color and depth to my sound. Their voices are our inheritance, part of the amalgamation of who we are and what we have learned. We are unique, each human voice, not because we are completely self-generated, but because of how we choose to assemble the countless factors that made us. My voice carries in it the generations before me, generations of my family, of brilliant singers I have admired, of dear friends. It goes on in this book, not the sound of my singing but certainly the work and thought and passion of the discipline. Tiny slivers of my voice will be incorporated into a student I teach in a master class or into the young singer who listens carefully, just as little glimmers of Leontyne Price’s shining high C and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s expansive breath came into me. If this is the past of my voice, then I must believe it is the future as well. My voice will go forward in the same way, not only through recordings but through my daughters and through their daughters and sons as far as the line will take us. It doesn’t mean that everyone will be a singer, but that every one of us will find a passion in life to drive us ahead, and just maybe part of that passion will rest in the voice. People will hear it even in a word that is spoken: the wealth and wonder of all the music that came before.