The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer

by Renee Fleming

  Jorge Mester was slated to conduct the production of La Bohème in which I would appear, and Graziella Sciutti, who had only recently retired from the stage, would be directing it. Musetta would have been her role, whereas I was anything but typecast. My extreme inhibitions prevented me from displaying any of the sass and sway needed for a seductive Musetta. Sciutti finally threw up her hands and said, “I cannot make this girl do anything!” That was when my favorite coach, Ubaldo Gardini, stepped in. Ubaldo would work with me for hours. “Why do you want to bang on that note?” he would whine, as I pressured out the high A in “Dove sono.” He also gave me some advice that I follow to this day: “Sing in the mirror. If it looks funny, it’s wrong.” He was as frustrated with my Musetta as Sciutti was, and he finally ordered, “Just walk across the stage and swing your hips.” But I couldn’t manage even that. Musetta, of course, is a legendary coquette, and I was a famously shy girl from upstate. Even if I could learn how to talk the talk, I was hopeless when it came to walking the walk. Still, I was confident that once I got my costume on everything would be fine. Back then, I could be Musetta only if I looked like Musetta. I had to be physically transformed before I could become a character onstage. Fortunately, I got over that. Learning to quickly assume a role is a necessary part of the profession. In my current rehearsal days, murder, rape, sobs, and vengeance often follow a coffee break. One has to swallow and simply take the plunge, embracing the dramatic, emotional language of opera.

  Of course, swinging my hips and batting my eyelashes as Musetta was a minor dilemma compared with what I faced in my next Juilliard production, Gian Carlo Menotti’s Tamu-Tamu. Then the question was whether or not I’d go onstage topless. Tamu-Tamu opens with a middle-class family reading the newspaper, talking about how tragic things are in a third-world country they’ve never heard of before. There’s a knock at the door, and suddenly all the people they’ve been reading about are standing on their front doorstep, grass skirts and all. I played the suburban mother, and at one point one of the girls, who was sufficiently covered by her beads and long hair, and I were supposed to exchange costumes, which meant I would be going topless. It was a scandal. My voice teacher walked into the office of Juilliard’s new president, Joseph Polisi, and said, “Under no circumstances will a student of mine be pressured into performing topless. There must be another solution!” In the end I wore a body stocking, with garishly painted nipples. Who knew that real nipples wouldn’t read in the house, and that painted ones would look more realistic?

  My memories of Juilliard fall into two distinct categories: On one hand there was the school, the productions I was in, the friends I made, and my beloved diction coaches, Tom Grubb, Corradina Caporello, and Kathryn LaBouff. On the other, there was Beverley Johnson. Certainly I have Juilliard to thank for providing the means for us to work together. But then Beverley became a force in my life so much greater than any school could ever be that when I think of her it’s not as part of Juilliard, but simply as part of my life.

  All Juilliard students were expected to find a voice teacher, and at that time they were allowed to study only with someone on the school’s faculty. Beverley taught there and at the Aspen Music Festival, so I approached her about a consultation. Within five minutes she had me on the floor doing sit-ups while she admonished me about several vocal issues. And that was that. We’d found each other. I was looking for the kind of detailed instruction I had gotten from Pat Misslin, and there it was, on Beverley’s living-room rug.

  Beverley had an extremely distinctive look, with a very long chin that she was forever, in all the years that I knew her, trying to hide. Not long after I met her, she decided she would never be photographed again. She was a very slim woman with such perfect posture that if you saw her from the back, you would think she was twenty-five years old, not the approximately eighty she probably was. She might not have had much luck hiding her chin, but she hid her age perfectly.

  Beverley wasn’t a very popular teacher when I began studying with her. Teachers go in and out of fashion over the years, and someone who had taught as long as Beverley had become accustomed to going from being the instructor everyone fights to study with to being last on the list and back again, two or three times in the course of a career. I happened to catch her when she was out of fashion, which was all the better for me because she had more time.

  Although Beverley had studied singing, she was trained as a pianist. Her husband, Hardesty Johnson, was a singer, and it was he who had originally been brought to Juilliard to teach. She eventually joined the faculty in 1964. The interesting thing about her being an instrumentalist was that she intellectualized the voice, studying it much more than a singer probably would have, which ultimately led to her becoming so strong a technician.

  I had technical issues that still needed to be resolved, and she was so technically oriented and focused on physiology that we responded to each other immediately. Between the sit-ups, her breathing exercises, and the way we were able to communicate with each other, it was almost like hearing the locks on a safe all tumble into their correct sequence. I ultimately worked with Beverley for sixteen years, and it’s safe to say that she did more for my singing than anyone else.

  Of course, Beverley wasn’t the only voice teacher who was asking her students to do seemingly strange things. In one master class, I had to sing before an audience while lying on the floor. Another teacher had me leaning against a wall, then leaning over the piano, then singing while bent in half, touching the floor. Teachers will do almost anything to encourage the body to release tension in some areas while maintaining strength and energy in others. It’s a coordination process that is technically complicated and difficult to achieve both physically and psychologically, demanding all available resources to get the necessary elements to line up properly. Beverley used to say that tension in your upper lip could ruin your voice for the day, a connection that you wouldn’t even remotely think of making. She would instruct me to take my finger and press down on my upper lip while I was singing, and suddenly the sound would free up. It seemed impossible, and yet I could hear the difference. There are so many different muscles that can affect vocal production that it’s almost impossible to check all of them off in your mind, and even more impossible to control them, since they are largely involuntary.

  Beverley kept a battered copy of Gray’s Anatomy close to her piano among the stacks of scores. She was forever pulling it out to explain something about the mechanism of the voice. “See that?” she would say, tapping on the page. She would show me a drawing of the pharynx and the larynx, the epiglottis and hard and soft palates, the breath cavities and the diaphragm.

  One of the first issues we addressed was fine-tuning my understanding of the principles of breathing and support. To think about breath, I first had to divide it into three parts. I had to learn the best way to take in a breath and to use the space in the lungs and body efficiently; the best way to control breath release; and the best way to support sound with breath. Unlocking the body’s ability to take in the most possible air is a process both of expansion and of releasing tension. Ask a nonsinger to take in a huge breath, and he will usually lift his shoulders and chest, pulling in his abdominal muscles, actions that are followed by a red face and straining neck muscles—not a posture conducive to beautiful singing. Contrarily, a singer learns to release her abdominal wall and back muscles outward, without pushing, as much as is humanly possible, allowing the diaphragm, involuntarily, to release down and the lungs to expand to their fullest. Crucial to this process is a release of the intercostal muscles, the ones that connect the ribs; releasing them allows the rib cage to expand outward and slightly upward as well. The chest rises last, but the shoulders and neck remain relaxed. This entire sequence should be carried out with as little tension as possible. Release, expand, visualize your torso as a barrel, imagine a low breath to begin with, release the back of your neck, make space in your mouth and nose, don’t suck in air, no tension in yo
ur mouth and nose either—these and similar instructions began to enable me to develop breath capacity.

  Second, breath control enables the efficient use of precisely the amount of air needed for any given phrase, whether a long, sustained line or a short, powerful burst. Contrary to what one might think, it takes more air to produce low notes than high ones. More air escapes through the vocal folds during the slower vibrations of a lower phrase than in the much faster oscillations of a top C. Think of how different pitches of whistling feel, or even of making sounds by blowing into different-sized bottles. The air flow is more concentrated for a higher pitch. It takes a singer time and physical maturity to develop the deep, sustaining breaths of a swimmer; negotiating a long passage of Richard Strauss is, in fact, a little like being underwater.

  The third requirement, breath support, is both the most complicated and the most controversial part of a singer’s breathing technique. This was one of the most important pieces of the singing puzzle I received from Beverley. Few are in agreement about the best way to support a voice, but it’s the support that allows a singer to manage a “cultivated scream” for three hours without causing herself pain and harm. When a singer uses her body and breath properly to support the voice, it takes the strain completely off the throat. My ear, nose, and throat doctor, David Slavit, marvels at the fact that we can sing for hours—a feat that ought to leave blood on the floor—yet come in the next day with baby-fresh vocal cords, showing no signs of redness, swelling, or strain. The same is rarely true of sports fans, who after shouting throughout a stadium match are generally hoarse or unable to speak. Stage actors have to learn support just as we do, or they could never withstand a regimen of eight shows a week, although the increasing presence of amplification even for plays is reducing the necessity for this kind of technique. Singers nevertheless rest between performances, for our Herculean “weight lifting for voices” needs a day off, just as power lifters would never train the same way runners do. Interestingly enough, the heavier the voice, the more such rest is necessary. A lyric voice such as mine, which less often engages in “extreme singing,” actually benefits from regular daily training, with flexibility being the key goal.

  How I support my breath is relatively simple to explain, but in practice a difficult process to really coordinate. Once I have taken in that optimal breath, and my abdominal wall is open, out, and expanded, along with as much of the rest of my torso as possible, I resist allowing these muscles to collapse again. “Resist” is the key word: if I continue to push out, I’ll lose the connection of the breath and create tension in my throat; if I allow it all to collapse quickly, I’ll have a breathy tone and not enough air to sing even a short phrase. Another crucial part of this formula is to keep the intercostal muscles out as well, and to prevent the chest from collapsing. I learned this particular technique from observing other singers, and there is a valid reason that caricatures of opera singers so often portray them as pigeon-chested. When I’m singing comfortably, I can actually imagine that my torso and my breath are doing all the work, while my throat is completely relaxed. Years of practice and experimentation led me to this optimal combination, which enables me to sing high-tessitura pieces, which are not by nature comfortable for me.

  While I was trying to understand how my own body worked, there was also music to learn and the entire concept of developing an artistic interpretation to wrestle with. For me, as for most singers, the process required a huge amount of time, energy, and practice. Of course, every now and then there’s someone who just happens to come by all of it naturally—the twenty-five-year-old who just opens his or her mouth, and by some miracle it’s all there. But even the greatest natural talent in the world needs to learn how to support and care for her instrument. In that respect the voice is like an inheritance: no matter how great it is, you still have to figure out a way to make it last. Everything breaks down at some point, and if the singer doesn’t know how to fix it, she will quickly fall by the wayside.

  I’ve finally accepted the fact that singing takes ten minutes to explain and ten years to accomplish. This was all work I had begun as a high-school student. Each teacher brought me further along with different explanations of the same concepts; often my understanding of those concepts was a result of my own experience or discovery, and sometimes it was just plain luck. Learning how to sing is rarely a process that follows a straight line, and it’s rarely clearer than fog until one grasps it in its totality.

  Most singers are like me, building up every little note, every notch, as if the voice were a mosaic put together one tiny colored tile at a time. It’s the puzzle again. Because I wasn’t a natural, I had to develop a very intricate understanding of how my instrument worked, with a clear-eyed assessment of its strengths and weaknesses. I had to create a technique that was reliable regardless of how I was feeling. Someone once said that there are probably seven naturally good singing days in a year—and those are days you won’t be booked. What we must learn is how to sing through all the other days.

  At the start of my second year at Juilliard, I had to make a choice: I could stay where I was, continuing my work with Beverley and singing the lead in Gounod’s Mireille the following year, or I could accept a Fulbright grant for study in Frankfurt, Germany. I have always been a big believer in auditioning. I knew enough to realize that most of the things I applied for would never come through, so I always thought it was best to just go ahead and throw my hat in the ring for everything feasible and then decide what to do if I won. This was just part of how I worked: if there was a grant, a competition, a scholarship, I gave it a try. For me, it was all part of the Shoulds. I should do this. I should try for that. “Should” was my steady diet my whole life. The Fulbright application was part of the Should diet.

  John Maloy, my teacher from Eastman, was on the Fulbright panel that year, and he strongly encouraged me to accept the fellowship. Beverley was equally adamant that I should stay and continue my studies with her, arguing in an almost maternal way that my voice and I weren’t ready for the wide world. Fulbrights are extremely difficult for singers to get. Although I would rather have gone to France or Italy, Germany took the largest number of vocalists. In Germany I would also have the chance to study with Arleen Augér, whom I had liked so much when I met her in Aspen and who had fortuitously agreed to accept me as a student.

  In order to help me make a decision, I started polling people, which is another lifelong habit of mine. Getting others involved in my decisions is a little like having them worry about me just before a performance. Jan DeGaetani told me I’d be a fool not to go, that it was a great opportunity. “I so regret never having learned a foreign language,” she said. I talked over the matter with my parents, my friends, and my boyfriend. I tallied up everyone’s opinions, and then I made my own decision. In the end, even if every single person had told me to stay, I still would have gone. Ironically I am actually quite strong in my own judgments, for as much as I crave to hear everyone’s advice about what I should do, I always know to listen to my inner voice where my career is concerned. This intuition, along with resilience, has been a fundamental anchor of my professional life.

  I kissed everyone good-bye and got on the plane confident that I’d made the right choice, but the minute we took off I was mortified. What had I done? Was I out of my mind? I was shy, I hated being alone, I didn’t speak German. It’s a good thing that they don’t turn planes around, because at that moment I was convinced that what I really needed to do was to move home and get a job as a secretary.

  When I arrived in Frankfurt, the first thing I did was to go and find Arleen. She had already warned me in Aspen, “It’s fine that you’re coming, but I really won’t have much time to work with you. My career is taking off right now.” She had just sung at Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson’s wedding, and she was suddenly becoming a big star in the United States. She nevertheless promised, “I’ll be here maybe six times this year, and then we’ll work.” Because I was ha
ppy for any attention I could get, I told her that arrangement would be fine with me.

  In our lessons, she compared the voice to floors in a hotel, with each tone occupying its own floor. It was my job to find the optimum space and place and position for each tone. She knew what she was talking about. Technically speaking, Arleen sang better than anyone else I’ve ever heard. She made 150 recordings in her life, and they were all as close to perfect as it gets; her Konstanze in Die Entführung aus dem Serail is a particular marvel.

  Arleen’s floors-in-the-hotel analogy helped me to consciously even out my range. One of the first tasks for a singer looking to develop an operatic range is smoothing over passages, or breaks. A break is a transition in the voice, the best example of which is the kind of high lonesome yodeling that made Hank Williams Sr. a legend. Yodelers go from high to low with a huge, audible break in between, and while it’s charming in goat herders and country-music icons, it can sink an opera singer in the course of a single aria. Our breaks may not be as audible, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t still very much there. What a teacher has to do is to increase the singer’s range while establishing an even sound from the top to the bottom of it. We use the word passaggio, which is Italian for “passage,” to describe usually two transition points in the voice. A singer must make sure the passage is a smooth and seamless one. Within a range of anywhere from one and a half to three octaves, a classical singer, unlike a pop singer, needs to have a sound that’s homogeneous throughout, without any breaks the audience can hear. The sound also has to be beautiful, another burden that most pop singers don’t carry. In opera, vocal production must sound easy and effortless, and that’s where the challenge lies.