The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer Read online

  Thanks to the instrument of my voice, I have been fortunate enough to be invited to step onto the stage at great national and international occasions. I have seen the world from the vantage point of the greatest opera houses and recital halls. I have been incredibly fortunate in my career, and people often remark to me, “What a wonderful gift you have—how glorious it must be to open your mouth and have that voice pour out!” While it’s a fact that a voice begins with natural talent, any talent must be nurtured, cajoled, wrestled with, pampered, challenged, and, at every turn, examined.

  As I set about my education as a singer, I devoured the autobiographies of my predecessors, hoping to find the kind of advice that would improve my singing, but mostly what I found were entertaining accounts of celebrated lives. As much as I enjoyed the stories of intrigue at Champagne receptions, what I desperately needed was practical advice: When did these singers learn what they knew, and who taught them? How did they survive their early auditions, stage fright, and rejection? How did they learn all those roles once they finally succeeded? How did they maintain their voices over the course of a demanding career? I searched for such a long time for the book I wanted to read that finally I decided my only recourse was to try to write it myself. What I came up with in the end was not the story of my life, but the autobiography of my voice. My voice, after all, is my calling and my career, just as any performer’s talent—whether singing, acting, or dancing—compels her to find her place on the stage. I hope that The Inner Voice will be a valuable companion to anyone striking out in this daunting but exhilarating profession.

  The story of my singing has a plot not unlike those of the horse novels I loved in my youth: A child finds a wild horse whose true potential only she can see. She loves it and cares for it, trains it tirelessly. The girl and the horse have a commitment to each other that no one else can get in the way of. She sticks by the horse through injury and doesn’t believe anyone who says the horse is all washed up. When the horse is thriving, she turns down all offers to sell it off. In the end, the horse proves to be a winner, and in return for her work and devotion, it takes her to victories she had never dreamed possible.

  This is the story of how I found my voice, of how I worked to shape it, and of how it, in turn, shaped me.

  CHAPTER ONE

  FAMILY

  I HAVE LIVED A LIFE with a soundtrack. So many of my memories have music attached to them. Sometimes the music is at the center of the story, and other times it’s only an afterthought, a song that one of my daughters half-sings under her breath while we’re walking to the bus stop in the morning. Music can propel the story in a perfectly quiet room when I’m alone and learning a score. It has taken me around the world and brought me home. I can trace back so many of the dearest people in my life, my teachers and colleagues who became my friends, to a certain set of pitches. My memories so often involve someone singing, or me singing, or someone striking the first notes on a piano, that it becomes difficult even to imagine the precise place where those memories began. So while I can’t remember first hearing music, I can at least remember the night when I first fell in love with it.

  I was thirteen, and my family was living in a suburb outside of Rochester, New York, in a tract subdivision that had shiny new houses based on one of two models—the ranch and the split-level. It was summer, and the streets stayed light until late. The kids played in their yards, running games of tag through neighbors’ lawns, shouting to one another, until it finally grew dark and their mothers came out onto the front steps and called their names and one by one they went inside. It was warm, and because everyone kept the front door open, we could hear the calls of “Good night” and “See you tomorrow” and the slamming of screens, and then the world quieted down again, the sound of voices giving way to the sound of crickets and the cars driving past. On this particular night, I was in our living room and my parents were singing. They were both music teachers, and all day long they listened to singing—the endless scales, the songs learned and repeated again and again, practiced until every note was perfect. My father, Edwin Fleming, a high-school vocal music teacher, listened to legions of voices every day, while my mother, Patricia, taught at a small private college. They sang and listened to singing until you would have thought that by the end of the day every note would have been squeezed out of them; and still when they came home they would find it in themselves to sing even more, as if the music at their jobs hadn’t tired them out in the least. On this night they were singing for each other and for me and my younger sister, Rachelle, and brother, Ted. My mother played the piano and my father stood beside her, and together they sang Gershwin’s “Bess, You Is My Woman Now.” The Porgy and Bess duet was one of their greatest hits, a song that was romantic and yearning and completely suited to their voices, his baritone supporting her beautiful soprano. I stretched out on the living-room rug with my dog, Bessie, and felt a kind of perfect contentment.

  My father was handsome, with a soft lower lip and shining black hair that fell across his forehead in an Elvis Presley curl. My mother looked like the kind of leading lady Hitchcock always favored, a cross between Tippi Hedren and Kim Novak. They were a glamorous couple, and when they sang together, everything was right in our lives; we were all happy. I always associated the music they made with happiness, because how could the world not be perfectly in balance when such harmony existed in your own living room? I could have lain there forever, listening.

  It was something that happened regularly, the two of them singing after dinner, but on this summer evening their voices carried out across the lawns, and the children who had been playing put down their balls to listen, and the mothers who had come out to call them went back inside to get their husbands, and one by one the neighbors made their way to our house. They were moths and my parents were a single, irresistible flame. Some of them stepped inside our screen door, but most stood in our front yard, their faces close to the big picture window. Everyone I had ever seen in our neighborhood was there. It was a street made up of immigrants, mostly Italian families newly arrived in upstate New York. My parents now began to sing to them, popular arias and the first-act duet from La Bohème. My mother was working on her master’s degree at the Eastman School of Music, and she sang the Puccini arias she was rehearsing for her graduate recital, “Mi chiamano Mimì,” “In quelle trine morbide,” and “Vissi d’arte.” After every piece the neighbors applauded wildly, unable to believe their good fortune that such singing existed right there on our little street. The applause kept my parents going, and they performed until it grew late, holding hands, smiling, bowing, making their way through every duet they knew. Finally, it was over, and the thrilled and exhausted neighbors wandered back to their own houses, and my parents sent us to bed. I was Eliza Doolittle, too excited to sleep. I was the luckiest girl in the world to have parents that other people marveled at, to live in the center of such singing.

  “But it didn’t happen like that,” my mother said recently when I was recounting this memory.

  It didn’t?

  Of course there were plenty of nights when the two of them sang together, and people would come by; but on the particular night that seemed so unforgettable to me, my father wasn’t even home. My grandmother was visiting from out of town, and my mother was accompanying herself at the piano.

  Memory often works that way, splicing together its own greatest hits, so that the perfect night is matched with the perfect song, and the perfect moments of physical beauty and family harmony are set side by side. I would like to say that I completely trust myself to remember the details of my own life; but it was also my mother’s life, my father’s, Ted’s, and Rachelle’s, and each of us would tell a different story. But the most important element would be true for us all: there was always singing. Music was language in our house. It was air. Someone was playing the piano; someone else was setting the needle down on a record so that we could listen to the Schubert and Wolf lieder my father loved. It was practicing,
teaching, rehearsing, but it was also spontaneous, unstudied, unconscious, as pervasive as the heat blowing up through the vents on the floor to push back the cold New York winters.

  When did my life in music really begin? With my first curtain call at the Metropolitan? My first Elton John record? Or was it my parents’ meeting at Indiana University in Pennsylvania? They once held hands while reading a bulletin board in the school’s hallway and had their hands slapped apart by an elderly professor who was walking by. “Stop that!” she warned them, but they didn’t listen. They married while they were studying to be music teachers, and the three of us graduated from college together, my mother holding me up with her diploma to smile at the camera, the two of them in academic gowns and mortarboards. My mother had meant to be an opera star, or even a movie star—everyone said she was headed in that direction—but the surprise of a baby put an end to that.

  I spent my infancy in a playpen beside the piano where my mother gave voice lessons at home while my father went off to teach music at a nearby high school. I remember her students warbling through their lessons. One girl wore a body brace and sang “When Love Is Kind,” committed forever to my memory in the sparrow-light voice of this girl who stood unnaturally erect in front of my mother in the afternoons.

  I have to wonder now what aspect of that exposure would be more beneficial to a baby opera singer: the music itself or the constant repetition, the never-ending drill of practice. My life might have turned out entirely differently had I been born the daughter of ticket takers at an opera house and so had grown up seeing opening nights, glamorous, glittery productions of the sort that would fill a child’s head with big ideas. I count myself lucky to have aligned my own beginning with the beginning elements of music: notes, scales, the constant hunt for the right pitch. I feel certain that if I absorbed any lessons at all in the first months and years of my life, they must have been about the work that went into making a beautiful sound.

  My mother says I was late to talk and early to sing, that she could call out a string of tones and by the age of one or so I could parrot them back to her, which is pretty good for a baby who didn’t have the skills to ask for apple juice. Before I was three, I was standing on the hump in the backseat of the car (having been born in those pre-carseat dark ages), making myself just tall enough to lean into the front seat between my parents while my father drove. Together we sang three-part rounds of “Frère Jacques” and “White Coral Bells.” Learning my part, I planted myself firmly between two wonderful teachers.

  So how is it that I had no idea, even at this early age, that I wanted to be a singer? I should have seen it at the very latest by three, when I gave my first solo performance as Suzy Snowflake. I was practically born into the job, and yet somehow it never occurred to me to take it. What I wanted were buckets of approval and love, and to be good. I was a notorious teacher’s pet, a straight-A student. Pleasing the English teacher meant producing a carefully written paper, just as pleasing the music teacher meant singing well. Seeing as how the music teachers were my parents, I sang and sang.

  For a child, the desire to please can push almost every other consideration aside. I was naturally shy—doesn’t every actor, dancer, or musician claim a childhood crippled by shyness?—but if I was told to get onto a stage, then that was where I’d go. If left to my own devices, though, I would always find a book. I could read instead of sleeping, read while I walked, read at the table, read in the car. It drove my father crazy after a while, especially when we took long family vacations, a whole world of scenery shooting past my window while I kept my head in the pages of Black Beauty. “Look up!” he would say, watching me in the rearview mirror as he drove. “Stop reading for five minutes and look at something! I don’t know why you’d want to spend so much time reading novels, anyway. They don’t teach you anything.” He was an avid do-it-yourselfer, instruction book always in hand.

  So I did look up, for five minutes, and the world was everything he promised it would be: beautiful, green, mountainous. But the novels were teaching me something else: the world I really wanted to look at was in those pages, and in my head. I could imagine myself on the back of Black Beauty, galloping in the rain through an English countryside. And that, of course, is a critical element in an actor’s craft—the ability to project yourself into another person, in another time, in other circumstances. No one thought that reading was a waste of my time, just that I was veering toward being a singularly unrounded individual.

  My stage triumph as Suzy Snowflake stood alone until Rachelle and I came back as a sister act with The Ugly Duckling. In the seventh grade I was cast as the Mother Abbess in The Sound of Music. It was a bit of a stretch to play an aging nun in seventh grade, especially after I was nicknamed “Mother Abscess,” but I was the only one who could sing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.”

  At least that nickname was a change from my usual one in junior high, “Miss Perfect.” I wore a stretchy pink headband, three inches wide, to school every day, and that was about as close as I came to making a fashion statement. I longed to be a renegade, to smoke cigarettes in the bathroom and sneak off from school after lunch, but I never had the courage. Instead I kept up my A’s. I entered a competition to write a new school song and won with the inspiring verses:

  Gates Chili Junior High is the greatest of them all

  And to her name we all give praise while standing great and tall.

  We love thee, alma mater, for showing us the way—

  Glory we give to you, we love you more each day.

  Perhaps such a wrenchingly earnest child deserves to be taunted and mocked, but I died a little every day when the school bully sang my song over and over again in a high falsetto on the bus going home. I was all orthopedic shoes and slumped posture, secretly wanting to be something very different, something dazzling.

  I got my chance in the next school play, a full-scale production of My Fair Lady. At twelve I played Eliza Doolittle and sang every note of the role. Ralph Jurgens, a tall, broad-shouldered man who looked more like a cop than an English teacher, rounded up all the even vaguely musical eighth-graders and gave them British accents to play with. Now for the first time I was really learning a part. Or I thought I was learning one—until my mother came to watch a rehearsal a week before opening night. She waited until it was over and we were safely in the car before she announced that we were going home immediately because there was work to do. A lot of work.

  There can be no underestimating my mother’s role as a teacher in my life. It was she who first introduced me to the idea of a total performance, that singing did not mean merely standing stock-still beneath a light, closing your eyes, and opening your mouth. She explained to me that the line “Just you wait, Henry Higgins” could not be delivered as if it were being read from a phone book. She taught me how to move, when to look at the audience and when to look away. She would dance my steps and I would dance along behind her. Good student that I was, I had always learned my lines, but under her guidance I came to understand that memorization was not the same as acting.

  “Smile!” she told me. “Try to look like you’re enjoying yourself.”

  My mother was an incredibly gifted and disciplined performer. Back then, the Rochester Opera Theater was a thriving operation, based at the Eastman Theatre, a gorgeous old auditorium that seats over three thousand people. I was mesmerized by the giant chandelier that hung over the audience like a bright planet. My father, brother, sister, and I would sit in the front row on the nights my mother sang there, stunned by her voice and her beauty, by how she held the audience so intently. When my mother was a little girl who sang at church functions, her grandfather would sit in the back row and promise her a dollar if he could hear her—a pretty clever way to teach projection. Was this really the woman who made us breakfast? Her stage makeup could be seen from the last rows: a black line under the eye, another over the eye, a streak of white at the outer edges, and a red dot in the corner, her false eyelashes swee
ping her cheeks like Fuller brushes. Her costumes followed her across the stage in great, billowing folds. Heavy makeup and velvet gowns on your own mother—what could be more glamorous than that? Rachelle and I had the most exotic collection of dress-up clothes that any two little girls in upstate New York dared dream of.

  Mother sang Marcellina in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro and Fiordiligi in his Così fan tutte. In the title role of Puccini’s Suor Angelica, she was up there onstage in her nun’s habit, crying over her child who had died, and I kept thinking, She’s crying for me! And then I was crying for her. Of course I was mortified by my outburst, for weeping was sure to be met with unrelenting teasing in my family. Still, secretly, I loved surrendering to the pure emotional display, just as I loved having a mother who was a star. I was certain that all the children in the audience were wishing that she was theirs.

  But no matter how much I loved seeing my mother perform, I never had any sense of reverence toward her singing. “You were flat in the first part of the third act,” I was telling her by the time I was ten. And while she herself had the tact to take me outside, away from my friends, before critiquing my work, I shared my comments with anyone who happened to be standing around. She was wise enough not to take me too seriously, and even seemed delighted with my precocious musicianship. I know this was the case because of my reaction when my own daughters started critiquing me when they were about eight years old. Even if they were only pointing out that the lipstick I was wearing was not exactly a flattering shade, they made it clear that they were watching me and that they knew a mistake when they saw it or heard it. Like me, they had no intention of letting their mother get away with anything.