The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer Page 9

  I love you and believe in you all the way and now try to accept the way it is with being way up there!!!

  Prayers and belief.

  Always and always and always,

  Beverley

  One of the many gifts I got from Beverley, along with an enormous amount of comfort and love, was my top, my high notes. She taught me how to open the back of my mouth. When I came to her I was leaving virtually no space in the back of my mouth when I sang high notes, so in essence there was not enough room for them. It’s not enough merely to open your mouth by creating space between your upper and lower front teeth; the jaw must literally unhinge. What works best for me is a square position that runs from the opening of the mouth to the back of the throat—not a long, vertical oblong, but a more horizontal placement. Different singers use different openings. Sam Ramey’s long, narrow position has certainly worked well for him, but for my bone structure that approach would never enable me to move into my higher register. I tried it—and everything else, for that matter.

  I also had enough tongue tension to choke on, and I regularly did. My tongue wanted to fall back, basically inhibiting the larynx from hanging freely and thus strangling my high notes, sometimes creating a gargling sound, sometimes cutting them off altogether. It wasn’t pretty. Beverley would have me place a honey drop in the center indentation near the front of the tongue to tame its unruly wandering back and down. Not wanting to choke on the foreign object, the back of the tongue rises slightly and stays forward. One has to keep the tongue relaxed and ungrooved as well, resting softly behind the front of the bottom teeth. With the honey drop, the only scales that can be performed are on an ah vowel, as any other vowel would indeed put one in danger of choking. Then I had to learn how to lift my soft palate. Using hard k and g exercises helped it to gain flexibility, and even plugging my nose as I moved up into the top of my range was useful. Every time I had a cold, I sang better, since this blockage somehow helped me to relax the palate into position.

  Covering came back into play when I picked up the “Song to the Moon” from Dvořák’s Rusalka again. This aria not only gave me so much of my success then and now but taught me how to sing the “money” note, a soprano’s B-flat. It was that blessed B-flat sung on an e vowel that led me to find the exact right combination of a square opening in the back of my mouth and a relaxed, low mental image of pitch. When I’m singing well, two and a half octaves feel like five pitches. There is absolutely no sense of an up-and-down direction, but only a forward one, which is led and never pushed. My top feels as if I’m not hitting high notes at all, but still singing comfortably in my middle range.

  None of these concepts on its own creates good high notes. I had to coordinate them all, while never losing the forward direction of my sound. (Holding a pencil between my teeth while singing on an e vowel helped reestablish the correct position if I got too far back in resonance.) The subtle interplay of all of these ideas with the body can ultimately produce a sound that is completely natural. Once I managed to figure all this out, listeners would tell me how fortunate I was to be born singing so easily. The first few times I heard this comment, I was frustrated, wanting my hard work to be acknowledged, but eventually I realized that this was the very compliment I should welcome, as it meant that everything was working properly and that the seams weren’t showing.

  I helped the search for the high notes along by incorporating some of the more finely tuned breath concepts I had been working on. I watched countless videos of singers and learned an incredible amount by studying how they used their mouths, how they held their chests, how they would take a breath. Watching Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, live, in a series of concerts at Carnegie Hall helped me to understand further the importance of chest expansion. He looked like a pigeon when he sang late in his career, with his chest puffed up to the extreme. From watching videos, I came to realize that all the great singers of that generation sang with very big, high chests. I don’t think that I ever supported properly until I figured that out. Tapes of the old Bell Telephone Hour program from the sixties, or in fact of any compilation of singers, should be a requirement for every vocal department in every music school in the country. I had the chance to watch Birgit Nilsson, Leontyne Price, Anna Moffo, Joan Sutherland, and all of the other wonderful singers of that era. Because they were all singing in television studios, I could really view them close up. So much can be gained from watching other singers, seeing what they do and what they don’t do, seeing how they look when they breathe, how wide they open their mouths for a high note.

  Another of the missing pieces of the voice puzzle came from an unlikely source: my job singing in churches. Choir singing is deathly difficult for a soprano, because choir directors are always telling us to blend, which requires mostly soft, high passaggio singing. I would die whenever I attempted this, for I was strangling, thinking I was never going to be able to sustain it. If the choirmaster’s so interested in soft singing, then why don’t we just drop out altogether? In fact, why doesn’t he just get rid of three of us sopranos? It felt impossible and frustrating to constantly have to hold back. But what I had been trying so hard to understand about support in school I finally understood when I was in church. I made the connection between intercostal expansion—the expansion of the muscles between the ribs—and the relatively high chest position I had observed in all of the great singers I’d been watching. I kept my shoulders relaxed, as well as my back, trapezius, and neck. I remembered what Jan had said about tension, and when I began to experiment with an even fuller expansion of my chest when I took a breath, I suddenly felt as if I had no neck. It seemed as if the distance between my chin and my chest was growing shorter and shorter, and that my neck was spreading out and in a sense dissolving into my shoulders. As a result, I never needed to reach my chin up for a pitch again. The other key was making sure I didn’t sing with any pressure in the voice. I realized that I had been singing with a high larynx for years. Every time I finished practicing, my speaking voice would be up an octave, and that’s a sure sign that tension exists somewhere it shouldn’t. Soon I was singing comfortably in the passaggio, and for long stretches—something I would need for a lot of the Mozart repertoire I eventually specialized in, not to mention Strauss’s Daphne, which involves extreme singing at its most intense. It’s so important that a young singer—and really, anyone at any stage of her career—remain open-minded, for you never know where you’re going to learn your lessons.

  Once I got a taste for singing softer, I was adamant about learning how to sing softly. I was in awe of Montserrat Caballé, who was famous for her pianissimo. She seemed to be able to use that skill at will, anytime, in any place, and in any piece. It was a spectacularly beautiful sound. Some would criticize it as an effect, but I loved it nonetheless. With Beverley’s help, I began to find this space, which involved two concepts. First, I learned to aim the sound mentally into the two slight indentations on either side of the nostrils. The result is not at all a nasal sound, but this technique aids in focusing the use of resonance and in lifting the soft palate. I still use this concept often, particularly in extended passaggio and pianissimo singing. Second, I imagined leading the tone rather than pushing it. It was helpful to visualize this process with images like serving the tone to the audience on a platter, pulling taffy with a phrase, or extending spaghetti out of my forehead to the back of the hall. (Food-related images work well with singers, of course.) The best exercise for practicing these ideas is the messa di voce—which begins very softly on one tone, crescendos to a forte as loudly as is comfortable, and then scales down to pianissimo again—moving evenly up and down the chromatic half-steps on a scale. This is a painstaking and slow process, but it can teach all there is to know about dynamic control.

  There are many pieces involved in assembling the puzzle of the voice, and no one teacher can provide everything that is needed. I can still trace the origins of all the key elements of my own voice: the foundation from my mother and then
Pat Misslin, the most important pieces and a solid understanding of technique from Beverley, the contributions from Schwarzkopf, from Jan DeGaetani, and from choral singing. These were all crucial components, but there were also dozens of smaller lessons from other coaches and teachers along the way, and I brought them all together in incremental stages. I still discover something new with every engagement. Today, it often involves learning how to incorporate new repertoire and how to manage the voice from day to day, when stress, fear and other emotions, hormones, acoustics, colds and other health issues, diet, and the interpersonal dynamic of a cast and conductor can all have an effect on my singing.

  I look back at myself at six, sixteen, and twenty-six, and I reflect on how much of my identity was tied to my relationships with my teachers. I never stopped being a good student, for I genuinely like to learn and I have always been eager to please. Even after I left Juilliard and began to make my way in the world, I still worked with Beverley, and I always kept my eye out for other people who had something to offer. I found a whole new crop of mentors when I was a young adult, and I found them in a group of women some might regard as a highly unlikely source of sisterly support: other sopranos.

  Sopranos are burdened with a stereotype that is rivaled perhaps only by librarians and mothers-in-law: we are, as a group, invariably labeled divas and prima donnas, though neither term had a negative connotation in its original usage. We are selfish, high maintenance, and hugely demanding. We drink only Swedish spring water without ice from a Lalique glass that has been chilled to exactly sixty-seven degrees; if it is sixty-eight degrees, we simply will not perform. We call our managers from the backs of our limousines so that they can call our drivers and ask them to adjust the air-conditioning. We wear scarves copiously, and preferably Hermès, Gucci, or Loro Piana. We speak in high voices, à la Julia Child, in a “continental” nonaccent; or we don’t speak at all, but write on little personalized pads; or if we’re terribly modern, we type on our tiny laptops or personal organizers, which are also cell phones, iPods, Palm Pilots, and digital cameras. We travel with an entourage of assistants, so we needn’t actually speak with a hotel receptionist or flight attendant (what a waste of the five thousand utterances we may have left), a dresser, hairdresser, and, as I recently observed of a very famous tenor, a personal hat maker. Before performances we eat only carbs, avoiding apples and any gas-inducing vegetable, or we eat only protein, and apples to combat phlegm. We never consume an acid-producing tomato sauce or spicy food, and we wouldn’t dream of eating past seven p.m. for fear of causing the dreaded reflux (I’m crossing myself ten times in both the Western and Russian ways just thinking about it). We drink lactose-free, low-sodium, soy-based, and decaf everything. We don’t drink alcohol before a performance, since it dries the throat. We instruct our secretaries to call ahead and make sure our hotel rooms have not one but two humidifiers running at least twenty-four hours in advance of our arrival. We have not touched our own luggage since we graduated from high school, lest we stress the trapezius. We wear spike heels and have our hair teased, straightened, colored (an absolute three-color minimum), and cut to within an inch of its life for rehearsals. Some of us wouldn’t feel dressed without false eyelashes, while others won’t allow anyone in the theater to actually look at them. We’re not very collegial, especially within our own voice type—i.e., with the competition. Did I miss a stereotype? Trust me, I’ve heard them all, even though I’ve seen little to support these images. I much more often encounter a group of generous women who are happy to share what they know.

  The first in my own career was Renata Scotto, who kindly gave me a private lesson in Beverley’s apartment in advance of Scotto’s master class at Juilliard. She laid the music out in front of me and told me to read what was on the page, to do that and nothing else. “Just sing what the composer asked you to sing,” she instructed. Because Scotto is famous for being a brilliant singing actress, I had thought she would care more about the theatrical values than musical ones, but I was wrong. She has enormous integrity and intelligence. During a conversation at the end of the lesson, she said, “Have children.” I was young at the time, and that was a subject I hadn’t even begun to think about. She told me that after she had had her son, she approached singing from a much healthier perspective. “I don’t live or die on the stage every night,” she explained. “I have more than that in my life.”

  When I met Joan Sutherland, I actually was pregnant with my first child. (Good student that I am, I had taken Scotto’s advice.) I was singing in Geneva—my debut in Così fan tutte—and my manager, Merle Hubbard, drove me up to the mountain chalet where Sutherland lives with her husband, the conductor Richard Bonynge. It was for me, as it would be for anyone who loves opera, a dream come true. The Bonynges’ living room was painted a dark hunter green, and every inch of its walls was covered with drawings or needlepoint. The entire house was full of needlepoint, which was Sutherland’s hobby between acts, while traveling, and while waiting around at rehearsals. Bonynge was an avid collector, and he had stacks upon stacks of original manuscripts and scores, including first editions of obscure Massenet operas that he brought out to show us. I had a chance to gingerly ask Joan Sutherland a few questions about singing, and what I most wanted to know about was her extreme high notes. How had she managed to sing them? She told me she aimed them directionally, not just out of the front but more toward the back of her head as she climbed into the stratosphere. She also said she loved not singing anymore; her grandchildren were the greatest joy in her life. “Absolutely have children, and don’t worry about when. Years after the last engagement, a beautiful child will be loved, and the engagement will be completely forgotten.” It was her most impassioned piece of advice.

  Marilyn Horne has been a great friend ever since we sang together in John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles. I love her no-nonsense, down-to-earth style. She knows what she thinks and she’ll always tell you. One day during rehearsals, I took her aside and told her that someone had asked me about singing Norma. She stared directly at me and said, “OOOOOH, no, you don’t! I’ll tell you right now that role would be a terrible mistake for you.” And of course, she was exactly right at the time. I had asked Joan Sutherland about it, too. “It’s not that there is anything on the page that is so difficult,” she explained. “It’s just that the role is incredibly long. One has to have an enormous amount of stamina to get through it.” Fortunately, though I have tended to consistently work too much and have been known to spread myself too thin, I’ve always been naturally disinclined to take on anything that has the potential to harm my voice.

  Marilyn has also been a real mentor to me, advising me about repertoire. She suggested that we do an album together, for which we rehearsed, but after both of us became ill during two different scheduled recording periods, the record company gave up on us. She’s always been so generous whenever I’ve called on her, as has Frederica von Stade, who helped me through a difficult personal time. Singers don’t get together just to talk about music, after all.

  When I think of the remarkable singers I’ve met in my life, the one who took my breath away was Leontyne Price. She had said to a mutual friend not long ago, “Tell Renée I would like to meet with her,” and so I went down to her home in Greenwich Village, a house that once belonged to the first mayor of New York.

  Though I was paying my first visit to her home, it was not the first time I had met Miss Price. When I was ten years old, my mother took me to see her in a song recital at the Eastman Theatre. After the performance, we stood in a long line that wound up a narrow staircase, all of us wanting to pay our respects to her backstage. I listened to my mother talking to another music teacher about Miss Price’s technique, how her neck stayed soft and showed no signs of strain when she sang, and they agreed that this was something of a miracle, considering the power of her voice. This conversation, the hushed and serious discussion of her voice, was indelibly etched in my memory. I nodded slowly in agreem
ent, feeling as if I had just been allowed into some exclusive club. When we got close enough to see her, I watched as she signed programs and greeted fans, one after another; but when my turn came, she smiled hugely and took my hand. I told her I wanted to be just like her, even though I didn’t understand precisely what that meant at the time. I doubt I even meant that I wanted to sing like her; I simply wanted to have her beauty and power and presence. She wrote out my name across my program—“To Dear Renée”—and then signed her own name close to mine with a flourish. I walked down the staircase pressing it to my heart.

  Of course, I told her none of this when we met again. I am old enough myself to know how often a soprano hears “You’ve been my role model since I was ten years old.” None of us likes to be reminded of our relationship to time. “Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding,” to quote the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier. I simply shook her hand as I had done the first time and told her what an honor it was to meet her.

  When I walked in the door, the first things I noticed were nineteen Grammys displayed on a table in the living room. I could only think, If I work for the rest of my life I will never achieve anything like this. Miss Price was surprisingly petite and still very beautiful, and she paced the room while she spoke. “It’s funny the way people talk about the voice as if it is a separate entity, like it’s another being separate from us,” she said. “It’s not.” She had put the needs of her voice first for her entire life, and as long as her voice was in top condition, she was fine. Her voice was her comfort, and she had lived for the gift she had received.