The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer Read online

  A third requirement is the interpersonal factor. A teacher needs to be able to read her students. She has to be able to know who is sensitive and who is thick-skinned, who is bullheaded and who is stubborn. She has to teach differently for different personalities and for different stages of development. She must also have a keen sense of how she is being perceived. If she is so aggressively negative with a young student that he begins to shrink into a little ball at the side of the piano, singing smaller and smaller, and worse and worse, then the teacher should have the sensitivity to know that her approach isn’t working. She’s going to have to try another approach, which may simply mean being encouraging on that particular day. Some teachers have achieved enormous success by doing nothing more than stroking egos and holding hands.

  And lest you think that the students are absolved of all responsibility, they face a challenge as well. Some of the greatest talents have the most fragile egos, unable to accept even the gentlest criticism and explaining away every fault. Needless to say, these singers don’t go very far. The student’s job is to stay open-minded, to quell the knee-jerk defensiveness we all possess in the face of suggestions for improvement, and to maintain patience when faced with a process that is often slow, confusing, and frustrating. On top of all that, the student must possess an unerring intuition about whether the instruction fits his particular needs. If not, he must be able to risk the necessary confrontation and move on to another teacher. Many young talents enter a studio, only to emerge three or four years later singing worse than when they began. A singer colleague of mine who had more drive and energy than I ever dreamt of having, not to mention tremendous vocal ability and intelligence, just didn’t have the right intuition about what sort of teaching would benefit her most. She gave up after ten frustrating years, several teachers, and an enormous expenditure of money and hope. If singing were easy, that would never happen. Perhaps it’s not intuition that guides a student but luck, or most likely a combination of both. Why did I have the good fortune over a period of ten years to keep finding the right keys to the doors, while my colleague failed? Although I used to joke that if I wasn’t born with a particular vocal flaw, I would do my best to seek it out and try it on for size, eventually I found my way. Ultimately, it’s the student who has to stand alone in the practice room and explore, using her creativity and imagination to flesh out the teacher’s suggestions. In the end, singing isn’t a science, but a highly cultivated, almost perverse use of our natural voices, and it requires persistence.

  Sitting in my hotel room at two a.m. after a recital and perhaps a CD signing in which a hundred fresh young faces waited to meet me, after flipping through the 169 cable channels at least five times to wind down, I often wonder just what will become of those bright talents when their dreams of a life on the stage aren’t realized. A conservatory director recently related to me the story of a young New York City taxi driver whom he complimented on the music she was playing on the radio. After he introduced himself, she burst into tears and said, “I’m a Juilliard graduate, and this is the only work I can get with my degree!” He rightly commented to me that her talents and top-flight education would have been put to better use helping our dwindling audiences grow, so that she could indeed at some future time have a chance to perform. One major study observed that in recent years, we have done a magnificent job of turning out fabulously trained performers with no place to play. More encouraging news is that employment options and a real strategy for developing the arts are becoming part of many conservatory curricula. My young singer friend eventually moved to Colorado Springs and started her own music school, using her vitality and drive to produce a new generation of starry-eyed musicians and, more important, providing a wonderful service to her community and, just perhaps, a new audience for the future.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MENTORS

  HAVING FINISHEO my Fulhdght year, I tried to stay on in Germany and auditioned for La Traviata at the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz in Munich. I couldn’t quite sing Violetta, but in my typical fashion, I rolled up my sleeves and tried out for everything. This time, no matter how hard I worked I couldn’t get hired anywhere. One morning I was just about to head for the train to audition for a small opera company in Bern, Switzerland, when they called and canceled, leaving me standing with the phone in one hand and my ticket in the other. At another audition for a small theater in the far north of Germany, the intendant said, “I’m terribly sorry, but your G is wrong! You need to fix your G. Don’t even think about having a career until you fix that pitch!” That was certainly the most original complaint I had ever received.

  Starting out as an opera singer, you have two ways of establishing a career: one is to get management directly and begin the audition process, and the other is to get exposure through winning competitions. Managers were not beating down my door, so I entered as many competitions as I could. During my time in Germany I had two incredibly fortunate opportunities. First, I was chosen by Eastman to represent the United States in a competition in Chile. I went to Viña del Mar, which is on the ocean, not too far from Santiago, where I lived in a hotel for a month and seemed to have one extraordinary experience after another. I was chased by Gypsies in the park and later befriended an American astronomer and his Chilean wife, who lived at the top of a cliff that hung directly over the Pacific. The other international competitors and I all ate together at my hotel every night, and we had a ball, even surviving an earthquake, which hit during one poor tenor’s audition. I often wondered if that prompted him to move on to another career or if he is the reigning Pavarotti of his country. I performed to the best of my abilities and won second prize.

  I was, in fact, the greatest second-prize winner of all time. More than Manon or the Marschallin, the Underdog has always been my favorite role. I loved the comfort of being number two—just high enough to make me feel validated but not so high that I felt the air getting thin. Being number two was a powerful incentive to keep me continually working and striving. I’m so goal oriented that I don’t know how my career would have turned out if I had found real success at such an early age. I felt as if the jury was saying to me, “You have promise,” rather than “You’re ready to have a career.”

  Not long after that, I was asked to represent Juilliard in South Africa. I had a lot of doubts about going there during apartheid, but I wanted to see things for myself. I lived in Johannesburg for a month with an Afrikaner family while I sang in Pretoria. There was political struggle and unrest in the country, yet at the same time it was an absolute paradise of physical beauty. The trip broadened my experience in a way that makes me believe strongly that all young people should travel if they possibly can. In South Africa I had the opportunity to reprise my role as the Underdog, coming in second to Marion Moore, an African-American soprano. Her victory made an enormous statement, and I was grateful that I was there to see her win. It was a rare meeting of music and politics.

  Even though I relished second place, I was not above taking some pleasure in a win. I finally landed first prize in a competition in Verviers, Belgium, at the end of my Fulbright stay. Rodney Gilfry, the wonderful American baritone, and I were there together, staying with a family who didn’t speak a word of English, and between the two of us we managed about three sentences of French. Rodney was hysterically funny, and for the two weeks we were there I never stopped laughing, which I’ve always thought was the reason I won. We saw one contestant faint dead away two phrases into her aria and wondered how much of a deterrent this would be to her, like the tenor who suffered the earthquake in Chile. Years later Rodney and I premiered Stanley and Blanche in André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire; he still makes me laugh.

  I went on to sing in several competitions in Germany, but I never got very far, which once again proves the theory that my greatest victories were often in losing. If I had won first prize in a major competition in Germany, I most likely would have stayed in the German system. Looking back, I’m sure my vo
ice would not have withstood the rigors of a Fest, or fixed contract, with demands to sing many different roles, sometimes back-to-back, because my technique simply wasn’t secure enough. The German network of theaters functions quite differently from those in the United States and the rest of Europe in that it is somewhat insular. Unless one is fortunate enough to break out, one rarely has an international career. The trade-off is a civil servant’s security, great benefits, and the only place in the opera world where a singer can practice his art full-time, and in one country. It is a great foundation for raising children and a fulfilling home life.

  During my Fulbright, I sang in the Munich competition, which is a high-flying operation with television coverage, contracts, and prize money. I made it, I believe, to the third round. The following year I went back and was released in the first round. The only one as disappointed in my performance as I was, was my pianist, who said, “You know, Renée, just go. Don’t do this anymore, just go work.”

  Although I didn’t realize it at the time, a big part of my problem wasn’t how I was singing but what I was singing. I was still being far too ambitious about the arias I chose. There was no such thing as a career adviser back then, so I didn’t have anyone guiding me on how I should be presenting myself. I thought I would impress people by performing extremely difficult music, so I sang Lulu’s aria by Alban Berg, the first-act scena from La Traviata, Constanze’s arias, and other music that was simply beyond me vocally at that time—not to mention obscure Wolf lieder. I feared I would fail to attract any notice if I sang simple pieces, but really, that couldn’t have been further from the truth. If I had sung a soubrette aria—say, “Deh, vieni, non tardar” from Le Nozze di Figaro—and shown that I had mastered it, just presented the sound of my voice, then I think things would have come together for me much sooner. Still, I’m glad success didn’t come quickly, because I really couldn’t count on my high notes yet, and sooner or later anyone who hired me was going to find that out. It took a few more years of struggle before I could approach a high note without a creeping sense of panic. Was it going to come out this time, squawk, or abandon me altogether?

  Since there was nothing left for me in Germany, I came back to New York for another semester at Juilliard. By now I was completely confused. Of the many vocal souvenirs I’d brought home with me, one was Schwarzkopf ’s covering, a technique Beverley didn’t believe in and wouldn’t teach. She was adamant that I give up the concept altogether, which sent me into a complete crisis. Being someone who likes to take polls, I was forever going up to people and saying, “Okay, covering sounds like this”—then I’d sing them a line—“and not covering sounds like this”—and I’d sing the same line again. “Which one do you prefer?” It was all about sound, tone, and projection: What’s more beautiful? What works better? Ultimately, I realized that Beverley didn’t mind covering per se, but had been urging me to avoid it because she didn’t want me to overcover. It all goes back to teachers’ and students’ finding a way to communicate about the voice. It’s a bit like talking about God: you almost have to talk around it, because there is no exact language for the thing itself. And the lack of an exact language is always going to cause a great deal of misunderstanding. The frustrating thing is that while I’m perfectly capable of making a decision by myself on most subjects, I can’t remove my ears from my body and place them in the back of the room for a vocal check. What we hear while we’re singing just isn’t true, so we are always dependent on someone we trust to take the role of our “outside ears.”

  In fact I was obviously overdoing the covering, because when I came back to New York everyone kept saying to me, “What happened to your voice?”

  “What happened to your voice?” is not a question a singer wants to hear.

  What had happened was that not only was I working in a repertoire I couldn’t master, but I was now trying to make beautiful sounds that were more suited to lieder in a small room than to opera. The result was that my voice had shrunk and moved to the back of my throat. Now I had a lot of work ahead of me to undo all the work I’d been doing. The confusing part was that this new sound I was making was lovely in my own ear, in my mind’s ear, so I didn’t believe Beverley when she told me that I should stop singing this way.

  Along with this confusion came a fresh wave of stage fright, since I now felt unsure of every note. I sang in a master class at Juilliard that fall and broke down in tears, saying, “I just can’t do this!” Fortunately, Jan DeGaetani was passing through town the same day, and after I finished bemoaning my fate she said, “I never won any competitions. Nobody ever handed me anything.” In short, she gave me a brisk slap and told me to get to work, which was exactly what I needed. She also mentioned that it looked as though I had tension in the muscles in my chest. That one comment sent me on another exploration of physical tension, which later provided another piece of the puzzle, as I tried to understand how I could possibly survive my choral singing job.

  In the end, I could see that what I had learned wasn’t wrong, but that I had simply taken it to an extreme. My task now was to incorporate a brighter, healthier, more open style of singing. Taking a vague vocal concept from another singer is a little bit like sinking your life’s savings into a stock tip you overhear at a cocktail party: even if there’s a momentary boom, chances are it’s not going to be the thing that sustains you into old age. Such is the potential danger of master classes, which can begin to seem like smoke-and-mirrors once the “idol” has boarded the plane a few hours later. You finally have to learn to pull all the different kinds of teaching and training and coaching together on your own, so that your voice and body and technique form a sound that is consistent and solid. It sounds simple enough, but it took me forever to achieve. Still, I wouldn’t want to be someone who did everything right from day one, because then I wouldn’t have any experience with correcting small changes in vocal production myself. I would have liked it if things had come together a little bit more easily, a little faster, but I also know it could have gone the other way and taken me five years longer than it did. After all this effort, I’m confident now that I know what I’m doing and I have the tools to maintain my voice.

  Even though this was a time in my life when a lot of things were going wrong, the most important thing was suddenly right: Beverley and I were now in a state of perfect communication. Ever since I’d come back from Germany, we’d been growing closer, and our relationship only continued to get better for the rest of her life. It turned out that she had been taking a lot of prescription drugs for minor ailments in the years before I left for Germany and she had no tolerance for them. She must have had one particularly horrible day while I was away, because she flushed every last pill down the toilet and went to a new doctor, John Postley, who told her she couldn’t take anything from then on, not even an aspirin; and it turned out to be exactly the advice she needed. She was a different person, energized and excited by the world again. In her eighties she was learning new things every day. She was obsessed with learning more about the voice, singing, and physiology. She loved doctors, and I suspect to a great degree they came to replace her husband. Besides, she was especially fond of Dr. Postley and the famous Dr. Wilbur Gould, ENT to the stars. She stayed in close contact with them not because she was ill—she was rarely ill again until the very end of her life—but it was because she wanted to talk to them about the body. She was constantly inspired and would come up with ingenious new exercises. I would ask, “How did you think of that?” and she would tell me, “I don’t think of it. It just comes. It flows through me.” It was the richest time in our working relationship, which at times could also be oddly reminiscent of that of Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins. She wasn’t just working on my voice; she was working on me. She taught me how to walk and pick out dresses for auditions, how to stand, how to write a proper thank-you note, how to say no in a way that was kind but firm. I used to think, if only I’d known her in my jazz club days, she could have taught me the f
ine art of stage patter.

  We eventually became so attuned to each other that I could call her up from some foreign country and say, “You know, I’m having trouble with this note. Can I sing it to you over the phone?” and she always knew how to fix it. When I was especially nervous, she wrote me notes and e-mails that kept me on track.

  Dear One:

  Have you got a heating pad or hot-water bottle and a nice big bathtub that can be filled with warm water? Not too hot, just warmer than body heat. Now get into bed and put the heating pad on your neck and shoulders. Also, when you get into the tub of warm water, take a towel and wring it out of quite hot water and put it across your shoulders and then lie in the tub for at least twenty minutes counting from a hundred down. Don’t rub yourself, just pat dry and then put some moisturizer on and GO TO BED TRYING NOT TO WAKE UP AND SEE IF YOU AREN’T PHYSICALLY RELAXED. I BELIEVE MUSCLES TENSE UP TO MATCH ONE’S OWN INNER AND MENTAL TENSION.

  First, you KNOW HOW TO SING and telling yourself that will remind yourself how much you do know and how well you use that knowledge. There is NOTHING IN THIS PARTICULAR OPERA THAT YOU CAN’T HANDLE. That is the first thing to remind yourself of, and you have people around you that know it, too!!! Every one of your coworkers loves and respects you and will be helpful without their being aware of your tensions. I believe everyone at your level gets tense as they remember their responsibility. Try to snap your fingers at the so-called difficulties. They are there but you have handled much greater difficulties and come through with flying colors.