The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer Read online

  She stopped her pacing for a moment, looked at me firmly, and said, “I called you because of what you’re going through right now. I thought you might need some advice. You’re experiencing the noise.”

  “The noise?” I asked.

  “The noise, the hype, the demands that are being made on you from all corners.” She talked about people literally crowding around me, wanting this and demanding that.

  “Miss Price,” I asked, “would you mind if I took notes?” I was in school again, but she was more preacher than teacher, so impassioned was her speech. She nodded her head and I began to write.

  “You have to learn to tune out all of the noise and focus on one thing.”

  I looked up at her, and she tapped an index finger against her throat. “This is all that matters. Because the minute this goes, they’ll disappear so fast you won’t even know what happened.”

  And of course she was right. It was a moment of complete clarity.

  “I feel intuitively that you are in a place right now where you need to hear these things. You’re confused and torn by the decisions your success is forcing you to make. The priority is to stay focused here.” She pointed to her throat again.

  She said she wanted to be helpful because she thought we had some similarities. We were both what she called “three-prong singers,” which meant that we sang not just opera but recitals with piano and concerts with orchestra. She spoke of the strength she had developed when she faced tremendous racism at the beginning of her career. When she first toured with the Met, she was not allowed to stay at the same hotels as the rest of the singers and was forbidden to enter the theater by the same doors. Time after time she made her debut in houses where no black artist had ever sung before. But she always took the high road and maintained her dignity, over time developing a self-protective persona.

  She had had a career of extraordinary longevity, touring and singing into her seventies, but she had handled herself with tenderness and care. She never went to the theater, never went to hear other singers, explaining that she preferred to avoid the drafts created by air-conditioning. She had little interest in the business outside of her own career. After she retired from the operatic stage, she sang recitals and premiered the music of American composers, giving back to the profession, which adored her. She would sing a recital program that wasn’t especially strenuous or long, but then would return to the stage and sing six demanding arias back-to-back as encores—a feat I couldn’t imagine having the stamina to accomplish even now. Whenever people ask me about my favorite voices, hers is always the first one that springs to mind. I used to joke that I was hoping for her high C in my next life.

  When I was leaving, I stood at the door and held her hand. I felt as if I was touching someone who was a sacred part of musical history. I thought of how one day I would say to my grandchildren, “I once held the hand of Leontyne Price.”

  “I can’t begin to thank you for being so generous,” I said.

  “I can tell you this, I can be generous with you because I can still sing all of my roles.” She looked at me hard. “And I can still sing them in their original keys!” In short, she wanted me to know that if there was ever an occasion for us to be in competition, she could go head-to-head with me any day.

  And there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that she would win—over me, over any of us—every single time.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SUCCESS

  PICTURE THE EDUCATION of an opera singer as a beautiful country—say, England—full of museums and concert halls, palaces and rose gardens, where people can study and learn and grow. Now picture a career as a successful opera star as another country—say, France—and imagine it as being full of culture and couture, Champagne and the Eiffel Tower, where the power of a single voice is lauded and adored. Now picture the English Channel separating those two countries, with its icy gray waters and choppy waves. Having completed my stay at Juilliard in 1987, I found myself stranded on the English side with no boat, no plane, and no Chunnel, trying to figure out how to get across.

  I had loved my student days, and between college, graduate school, the postgraduate program at Juilliard, and the Fulbright grant in Germany, I had hung on to them for as long as possible. I was accustomed to living in a world where people told me what they expected of me and I worked hard to meet those expectations. But so little of what I learned seemed to have any bearing on this new period of my life. For competitions or apprenticeships, I would go into an audition room and sing for a group of people. In return they would look at me, unimpressed, and tell me no. They didn’t invite me to try again, or ask me what I could sing that might better reveal my talents. They wouldn’t even tell me what I was doing wrong. It was simply “Thank you,” and then the next soprano would come in and take her shot at it.

  For potential engagements, the catch-22 was that it was very hard to get an audition if you didn’t have a manager, and it was almost impossible to get a manager unless you’d won an audition. Beverley, as usual, paved the way by introducing me to a friend of hers, Merle Hubbard from the Herbert Breslin Agency. I sang for him at Beverley’s, and while he was very encouraging, he didn’t sign me. He promised to stay in touch, and I was back to auditioning for summer apprenticeships, competitions, and studio programs.

  For all the progress I had made with my voice and with languages, style, and musicianship over the years, I had advanced very little in my auditioning skills. I was fine on the stage once the part was mine and I could concentrate on working out its nuances, but in auditions I inevitably felt insecure. Everything about me had the air of an apology. I continued to believe that it was my job to impress people, to dazzle them with my bold choices, so I persisted in singing pieces that were beyond my technique. I auditioned with lyric and dramatic coloratura arias such as “Qui la voce” from I Puritani, when I should have been singing something like Musetta’s Waltz. Alternatively, I would select pieces that were perfect for my voice, but not perfect for an audition. I still refused to part with Anne Trulove’s “No word from Tom,” for example, which at that time seemed simply too long to hold a jury’s interest. While a student at the Aspen Music Festival, I had the opportunity to audition for August Everding, the great Munich intendant. Feeling very much in the know about the German theater system and its devotion to new and difficult music, I figured I had a leg up on everyone else there by choosing the Stravinsky aria. Mr. Everding, however, leaned over to the audition assistant and asked, “Why on earth is she wasting my time with this awful piece?” The faster you can go in there and show them what you’re made of, the happier they’re going to be. If there’s some other aspect of your voice they want to hear, they’ll ask.

  Choosing repertoire is a critical part of a great presentation. Some juries will want to hear only the most popular pieces, which give them a standard by which to judge you. Other, more experienced judges will throw your biography in the trash if you force them to listen to yet another Juliette’s Waltz. They would be interested instead to hear one of the two never-sung short arias from Thaïs. It is often difficult to second-guess any jury, but for an audition like the regional Met finals, tried-and-true might be safer. For a large company or studio program, which typically has a jury that auditions hundreds of singers every year, something off the beaten track might be refreshing to tired ears. If nothing else, you would be presenting yourself as an inquisitive and thoughtful musician. Since five arias are often requested, a mixture of both might be the most solid choice.

  Since there was no such reference book as The Soprano’s Handbook for Landing a Spot at the Met, I had no choice but to keep dusting myself off and trying again. At one point, an acquaintance asked me to audition for a competition with which she was involved. I was excited because it was clear that she was familiar with my talent and would put in a good word for me. It was a three-round competition, and after I sang the first round I felt that I had done my best, but I was immediately passed over. It was too much. I went t
o my sister’s apartment in abject despair.

  “You can’t invite someone to sing and then kick them out in the first round!” I complained. “I hadn’t even planned to go to the audition. They pulled me in just to squash me!”

  “You just had an off day,” Rachelle said.

  “When am I going to face up to the truth? I have to stop doing this. I have to get a job. I have to get going with my life. How many people have to tell me they don’t want me before I start to get the message?”

  “Renée, you have the talent, and you’ve worked so hard. You know that.”

  But I felt that I couldn’t stand the rejection anymore; I was wearing down.

  Rachelle put her arms around me and then took me out for a cup of coffee. Over the course of an hour she very gently talked me down from the ledge on which I was so precariously perched.

  There are some things that a book can teach you, and others you figure out just by virtue of showing up over and over again. Through the latter method I finally learned to use my acting ability when making a presentation. I still might not have felt completely confident, but then again, I hadn’t felt like a coquette when I was rehearsing the role of Musetta. If I was a good enough actress to fake sexual confidence, then I surely could fake self-confidence as well. Simply losing the self-consciousness that was immediately apparent in my presentation was difficult, if not impossible, because I knew I was being scrutinized—which is, after all, the whole point of being in an audition. So I pretended. I learned to enter the room with a warm smile, to introduce my pieces without mumbling, to suppress the apologetic body language and nervous twitches and shuffling feet. Naturally, my being at ease put the jury at ease as well. Although I was still having a hard time grasping the fact that they didn’t actually want or expect me to fail, I learned not to stare the judges down or sing directly to them, as they probably weren’t eager to feel my adrenaline-crazed eyes pinning them to the back wall. If I was performing a declamatory piece that required contact with the audience, I would include them, but if it was an interior piece or a dialogue with another character, I found I was better off picking a focus that was just over their heads or to the right or the left of them.

  It is always critical in an audition to tell whatever story you have to tell, to enact your dramatic scene and let that process take the place of vocal self-consciousness and whatever terror you’re feeling. Staying connected to the text can help you avoid the following inner dialogue:

  Watch me tense up as I lead up to the phrase with the high B.

  Yup, I’ve stopped acting altogether, my fists are clenched and my legs

  are shaking, but wasn’t that a good turn of phrase there? And how

  about that pianissimo?

  Darn! While patting myself on the back about nailing that last pitch,

  I lost my concentration, and that long decrescendo that was going

  so well just ended in a machine-gun stutter.

  And while worrying about its ending badly, I forgot to prepare for the

  top phrase, and now it’s too late.

  I’m trying not to grimace, but I can’t help it.

  The extra tension provided, thank you very much, by my nerves has

  just caused me to blow the top B-flat, and at the same time my peripheral

  vision just saw my right arm rise in perfect Frankenstein

  fashion, seemingly unattached to the rest of my body, as the perfect

  visual accompaniment to this perfect disaster.

  I can see the disappointment on your faces.

  You were hoping you could choose me and pay lip service to the other

  two hundred sopranos waiting outside the door.

  Once, my accompanist got lost on the last page of music after a cut, and despite a bit of fumbling to find his place, he finally simply stopped playing. I kept on going and reached up for the high E-flat at the end, but without piano support, I was so distracted that my top note, which would have been difficult in the best of situations, was quite simply a scream. The two judges immediately hunched over, shoulders shaking, pretending to write furiously in the hopes of disguising their laughter—not that I could blame them.

  The sad Murphy’s Law of auditioning dictated that at exactly the moment when I became good at it, I no longer needed to be, for I was finally getting hired without submitting to this difficult and sometimes humiliating process. Try to make the experience your friend far sooner than I did. I’ve given enough master classes by now to know that the thing that really distinguishes an individual, voice and singing aside, is Personality with a capital P. Charisma. Touch me, move me, take me out of this stuffy little room with its fluorescent lights and dropped ceiling, its linoleum floor and badly tuned upright piano. I want to hold Rodolfo’s hand while he tenderly explains his life, all the while seducing me—er, I mean, Mimì. That kind of conviction and engagement will win the audition and, later, the audience.

  In the end, I felt things really started to turn around for me when I began auditioning with the “Song to the Moon” from Rusalka. It wasn’t a widely known aria yet, but it was perfectly suited to my temperament and voice. It was Merle Hubbard—who, true to his word, did continue to check in with me from time to time—who had suggested that I sing it. Not only had I learned to sing it in English at Potsdam with Pat, but I later studied it in Czech while at Eastman. My friend Charles Nelson Reilly sent me a Dorothy Maynor recording of the aria and told me about her extraordinary career. Maynor was a wonderful African-American soprano who was never invited to sing opera on any of the major stages, and so made a concert niche for herself in much the same way Marian Anderson had. She provided a wonderful service to music lovers by recording unusual and obscure repertoire, which she sang with a voice of unparalleled sweetness. Charles always maintained that it should have been her recording of the aria in the film Driving Miss Daisy, because she deserved the recognition and because her recording actually coincided with the period of the film. Once I picked up the aria again, it felt as if I were slipping my hand inside a glove. This coincided with the period in which the aria’s final B-flat, because of the approach to the note and the vowel involved, enabled me to crack the problem of how to sing above the staff. The ease with which I performed the piece gave me confidence, and this confidence in turn helped me to embark on the beginning of my career.

  Dear Richard Bado, my friend and accompanist from Eastman who had played for me at my disastrous first audition for the Met competition, was at that time working for the Houston Grand Opera. He suggested I audition for its young artists program and promised to give me a good character reference and perhaps pave the way for me if he could. Once I passed the first round in New York, I was flown to Houston for the finals, where David Gockley, still the acclaimed general director; Scott Heumann, the artistic administrator; and the composer Carlisle Floyd made up the jury. The audition was set up as a competition for a place in the studio program, which I won, but at the end they took me aside and said, “We really think you’re beyond the studio level. We’re going to keep you in mind for a main-stage role.”

  Beyond the studio level? I hadn’t come close to being accepted by any of the studio programs, and now I was beyond them? I felt as if I had been toiling away trying to get a spot in the secretarial pool and was now being handed the keys to the executive washroom. I floated back to New York on a cloud—though still without any work.

  More good news came quickly after that. I won the Metropolitan Opera competition a few months later in a year when the other winners included Ben Heppner, my friend Susan Graham, and Heidi Grant Murphy. A week later, I won the George London Prize. Fortunately, grants from the Shoshana Foundation, the Sullivan Foundation, and the Musicians Emergency Fund had been supporting me with the money I desperately needed to pay for voice lessons and coachings in preparation for this sudden rash of wins. Nothing succeeds like success. I finally had my arias worked out, my confidence in place; and when Merle Hubbard signed me, I then h
ad a manager as well. Drenched, frozen, exhausted, and completely exhilarated, I was pulling myself out of the English Channel and onto the glorious shore of France.

  In all my years as a student, I had been undermined by a very negative inner voice, a little nattering in my ear that said, “Don’t do that. . . . Don’t do this. . . . That’s awful. . . . What a horrible sound! . . . You’re grabbing. . . . You’re holding. . . . Your breath is tight. . . . Your tongue has gone back. . . . Your palate is down. . . . The top is spread. . . . Relax your shoulders!” I carried inside me a running monologue of nagging complaints that wore me down as effectively as any rejection from an opera house ever did, and so I made a very conscious effort to rid myself of it. I read books like The Soprano on Her Head, Zen and the Art of Archery, and Performance Anxiety, and I came to the conclusion that it was as essential for me to work on my attitude as it was to work on my voice. I decided that I was going to start repeating mantras to myself, to fill my head full of positive thoughts to counteract the infinite loop of negativity I was feeding into my subconscious. I would ride the subway between Queens, where I was then living, and Manhattan, saying to myself, “I will win the Met competition. I will win the Met competition. No, I am winning the Met competition.” I found that if I gave myself a list of positive tasks to concentrate on during a performance or an audition, I would have something to think about other than the success or failure of the aria at hand. Without those tasks, fears would start to creep in. I always did better when my mind was occupied. I would think, Tonight my job is to keep the back of my neck open, relaxed, and free. I will find more space in the back of my mouth for my high notes while easing up on my breath pressure, so that I’m not forcing them out. I will review the text carefully before the performance, so that when I go out it will be fresher and clearer and delineated with more detail. I will keep my visual focus simpler and not become distracted by the audience. With every performance I tried to come up with something new, something positive to focus on, instead of something negative to worry about. I still use this technique when singing multiple performances of the same piece, and for exactly the same reason.