The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer

by Renee Fleming

  Professionally, 1998 began very promisingly. In January I sang a televised concert with Plácido Domingo, Daniel Barenboim, and the Chicago Symphony, followed a week later by Strauss and Mozart in Cleveland. Everywhere I went I sang with incredible ease, loving every second I was onstage. I felt that things were settled for the girls, who would be accompanying me for a long upcoming opera engagement in Chicago, and who had been accepted into two different French schools. Although Rick and I were beginning to map out our divorce, we were managing to put the girls’ needs first and to work well together to take good care of them. I began to feel a tremendous sense of relief.

  Then, while I was performing the Countess at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, I experienced some stage fright during “Dove sono.” It caught me by surprise. That aria was never an easy piece, but it was certainly one with which I had had an enormous amount of experience. Suddenly I found myself growing nervous every time I heard the music coming up, and I couldn’t seem to shake it. The aria proved to be difficult to perform for the entire run, and there were a couple of phrases in particular that I started to dread, tensing whenever I had to sing them. Opera singers are rightly terrified of fear, because by affecting our relaxation it undermines our breathing. I recognized that I had good reasons to be feeling stressed. Besides the divorce, I was facing three new roles back-to-back in the coming months: the title roles in Arabella and Lucrezia Borgia, and Blanche in the world premiere of André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire. It made perfect sense that the pressure would show up somewhere. If it showed up in “Dove sono,” well, at least I had identified the problem, gotten through it, and could move on to the next engagement.

  I went to Houston and began the rehearsal period for Arabella with my beloved Christoph Eschenbach. I was glad to be starting a new opera, safe with my friend and with my art, my girls with me, away from home and the stress of the addition of lawyers to begin the process of separation. I didn’t have any trouble learning the role this time, but I had an incredible amount of physical tension in my shoulder muscles and neck—tension that grew so strong that I began to wonder if, by the time opening night came around, I’d even be able to get through the performance. Somehow I managed to calm myself down and find a great masseuse, who worked on me as if with a hammer and chisel, and I survived this beautiful but demanding role.

  From Houston, I went on to La Scala for Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia . I felt physically better, and with the love and support of the girls and my visiting family, I was able to put my previous experience in Don Giovanni behind me and think of this as a fresh start. I did have a slight run-in with the conductor, Gianluigi Gelmetti, over decorations and cadenzas that I wanted to add to the piece, to all of which he was patently opposed. They were beautiful and all stylistically correct, since Philip Gossett, a superb musicologist who specializes in nineteenth-century Italian opera, and with whom I had collaborated ever since singing Armida in Pesaro, had written them. Although Gossett’s scholarship is greatly respected, Gelmetti insisted, “We are in Muti’s house and so we will follow Muti’s strictures,” which meant to sing what was on the page only. Gelmetti, who was advancing in age, was making his own La Scala debut with this performance and was probably fearful of doing anything that might cause Muti any displeasure. After some discussion, I gave in on almost everything, with the exception of one particularly dramatic cadenza in the final scene that I lobbied to keep. Finally Gelmetti agreed, and I was pleased that we’d managed the whole issue in the spirit of civility and compromise. The final dress rehearsal was perfect, the chorus and orchestra were supportive, and we had an excellent cast. I thought that everything was going to turn out beautifully, which is a tribute to my particularly American naïveté.

  The first piece of troublesome news on opening night was that the tenor had canceled. I think he knew there was trouble brewing and had been advised to distance himself from it. Fortunately for me, my friend Marcello Giordani had been scheduled for the second company. We had worked together often in the past, and I was relieved to be sharing the evening with my friend. At the end of my first aria, just as I finished the last note, I heard a loud thud, and when I looked down I saw that the conductor had disappeared. There was a gasp from the audience. Gelmetti had collapsed, and Marcello and I continued standing in our places, peering into the pit, not even sure if he was alive, though at that moment I feared the worst. Eventually the curtain came down, and we learned that he had only fainted. After fifteen minutes he pulled himself together, and we resumed, though it was all downhill from there. At the end of my first big duet with Marcello there was some scattered booing, but I felt remarkably unscathed by it. It really wasn’t until the much-discussed cadenza at the end of my final scene that all havoc broke loose and the serious booing began.

  Now, just to set the record straight, the protagonists in this drama were a very small group of men, probably fewer than ten, who were sitting in the very top reaches of the theater. Rachelle and several friends who were there witnessed it all from the audience. Fortunately, those of us on the stage are very limited in what we can hear clearly in the house, and if I’m actually singing I can hear almost nothing at all besides the sound of my own voice, which in this case was a blessing. So I am relying on others’ reports when I say that many audience members in the orchestra section and other areas in the house began screaming at the catcallers, warning them in no uncertain terms to stop the disruption. Nevertheless, the screaming and booing continued throughout the final scene, which is Lucrezia’s scene entirely, as she realizes she’s just poisoned her own son by mistake (one of opera’s more ludicrous plots). I kept my focus and stayed with the music. Thankfully the force of what had happened didn’t hit me until it was over. And then I began to shake, and I shook for days.

  When the curtain went down, Gelmetti turned to the auditorium and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “Well, it wasn’t my fault,” and then left us to face the audience on our own. The cast bowed together with me in solidarity. Naive to the end, I called the clinic to which Gelmetti was admitted and inquired about his health. He wrote me a telling letter that said simply, “Your Lucrezia is very special.” “Special” is not a compliment in the Italian language. At its very best it implies ambivalence, and at its worst it implies no ambivalence whatsoever.

  I managed to stay and sing two further performances, rather than the five I was scheduled for. There was virtually no booing after opening night, and the critics and journalists were sympathetic, criticizing the loggionisti for ruining the performance and, further, for frightening away top-flight singers. After the fiasco in which Pavarotti was booed in Don Carlo and swore never to return to La Scala, one is now likely to encounter an obscure Gluck opera being staged there alongside the riskier cornerstones of traditional fare. I never did find out the true reason for my own clash with the claque—whether they were paid by someone to contest me, whether they were honoring the memory of Maria Callas or Leyla Gencer, or whether it was simply a nationalistic slur. (Anti-Americanism was rampant that summer because, earlier in the year, a U.S. Marine jet had sliced through a ski-lift gondola cable in the Italian Alps.) A live radio broadcast of Lucrezia exists, so anyone curious enough can decide for himself if indeed this was a conspiracy or simply a spontaneous response to my performance.

  I did find the courage to return to La Scala six months later for a recital. One of my Robert Mitchum-style uncles said, “You’re a Fleming. Of course you’ll go back.” Leyla Gencer herself sent me flowers and told me not to worry about it, that the whole affair meant nothing. “That happened to me all the time,” she said. “If you’re used to the culture, it isn’t so bad.” But I wasn’t used to the culture. If I wasn’t the thin-skinned girl I had been in my youth, this still was a decidedly unpleasant experience.

  When I returned to the Met, Renata Scotto stopped me in the hall and congratulated me on joining that long and illustrious list of performers who had been booed at La Scala. It turns out that singers sav
e up their own La Scala horror stories and swap them like baseball cards. “Fiorenza Cossotto got booed. She was singing Orfeo beautifully, and they booed her. Why on earth would they contest someone singing Orfeo?” Renata mentioned Luciano and then told me that after it happened to her, she never went back. “You can sing recitals, but forget about the opera,” she said, giving me a kiss on the cheek before she left.

  Even Mirella Freni was kind enough to tell me how she had been badly booed (I love the fact that there are even degrees of being booed) when singing Violetta at La Scala. It was a debut in the role for her, a fairly early engagement, and she undoubtedly sang it beautifully. “I was scheduled to sing Bohème right after that, and I thought it was impossible. Still, the conductor told me I had to get right back up on that horse. I resisted. I said no, I couldn’t do it, but he said there was no other way.” She somehow got her courage up to sing another famous Italian opera a month later and she had an enormous success with it. If they gave medals for valor and bravery in opera, Mirella Freni would get one studded with diamonds and rubies for that.

  Even with all the invaluable words of encouragement from other sopranos, the stress of that year had accumulated until I felt as if I was in some sort of vise and the whole world was squeezing in. It was affecting me physically to the extent that I never knew if I was going to be able to sing from day to day. Any exposed pitch in my middle voice had become terrifying and unreliable, making me feel as if I had just woken from a dream and found myself naked onstage. Still, my fears were all internal, an anxiety I was feeling rather than displaying, until a chamber music concert at the Ravinia Festival. I was performing before a small audience in a place where I felt very comfortable, and Christoph was the pianist, which is a rare luxury for me. There should have been no pressure in this engagement, but when I got to the middle of Schubert’s “The Shepherd on the Rock,” I suddenly suffered a paralyzing attack of stage fright. Nothing had happened to precipitate it, nothing had changed, but without warning, my throat closed up entirely. I was miserable, and for the next couple of days I sat in my hotel room thinking, You know, you’re just going to have to give up singing. I had some very high-profile engagements coming up, including the world premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire, followed by a new production of Le Nozze di Figaro at the Met, and I couldn’t decide whether it would be more humiliating to cancel or to go through with them in my uncertain state.

  Why not quit now? After all, I had had a wonderful career. I had already accomplished more than most singers could ever dream of. I had certainly accomplished more than I had ever dreamed of. What profession was worth enduring this level of stress? I could find myself a nice teaching job somewhere in the Midwest, raise my girls, and call it a day. I would get all the details of my new future worked out in my head and then would suffer another crushing wave of anxiety that was both physiological and psychological, leaving my hands shaking and my teeth chattering. I had no idea what was happening to me; I knew only that I was in a state of abject misery. I remember sitting at the window of the dining room of my house a few weeks later, looking at the ancient trees and praying that this would stop.

  I had always been such a positive, can-do sort of person that this pain felt incredibly debilitating, though of course it would have been debilitating to anyone. I couldn’t function. The simplest things, like getting dressed or making breakfast for the girls, felt nearly impossible and required all the fragile will I could muster.

  In the middle of my dark night of the soul, 60 Minutes was filming a piece on my glamorous life as an opera singer. The program’s staff followed me around for about six months, during which I somehow managed to keep my state of mind from them. I remember one particular morning when they had come to the house to tape, and I pulled my publicist, Mary Lou Falcone, aside and said, “Look, I cannot do this.” I was shaking. I was, as I used to say back then when things were especially bad, going into the tunnel. It was as if everything was happening at some great distance from me. Once I went into the tunnel, it became very difficult for me to focus on what people were saying. It was a symptom of panic, which didn’t happen often or last for long, but when it came over me it was terrifying. Mary Lou, who has been a constant rock for me, looked me dead in the eye with the calm firmness I would have received from Beverley had she been there, and said, “Of course you can do this.” She fixed me up, and sent me out to meet the cameras.

  Through this entire period, I never stopped, I never backed out, and I never canceled. I give much of the credit for my ability to continue to the people who worked with me and to my friends and family, who looked out for me. I often think that if I had stopped at this point, it really would have been the end of my career, for I might never have found a way to get going again. The remarkable thing is that I can look at that 60 Minutes tape now and see that no one would have suspected that I had been in the bathroom only five minutes earlier, looking in the mirror and saying, “I can’t do this . . . I can’t do this.”

  Through all of this, my girls were the only ones who could lift me out of the fog. They would come home from school with the pictures they’d drawn and their books and all their stories and kisses, and I would simply melt into them. I knew who I was whenever my girls were with me. I was their mother and I loved them.

  While I had experienced stage fright before, it had never followed me off the stage. By the time I began rehearsals for Streetcar every interview was excruciating. In the past I had always joked, “You want the soprano to talk about herself? Be sure to cut me off after two hours so I can get to my next interview.” But now all I was thinking was, How do I form an intelligent sentence? How can I control this intense anxiety? Every minute that I was talking about my work, I wanted to crawl out of my skin.

  Oddly enough, the very thing I would have thought would send me careening over the edge turned out to be my saving grace, and that was playing Blanche DuBois. There were days when I really did question my sanity, when I wondered if I was ever going to be well again, and the character of Blanche, with her darkness and fears, gave me a place to pour all of my own. I also, blessedly, had André Previn, in whom I could really confide, to work with. He was consistently reassuring and had a deeply calming influence on me.

  In fact, everyone involved in that production was stellar. The director, Colin Graham, through his quiet organization somehow managed to assemble this piece of enormous musical and theatrical complexity in only three weeks. Thankfully, the role of Blanche fit me like a glove, so there were no vocal obstacles to overcome. André had been open to several changes in tessitura, adding glamour to what were initially middle-voiced passages on my behalf, and generally being wonderfully collaborative throughout the process—which is one of the satisfactions of working with a living composer. All I had to do was focus on holding myself together for the run of performances.

  By this point my stage fright was a full-blown reality. Fortunately, though, through this period and any other time I’ve had it since, most of my misery comes in advance of actually having to go onstage. I wake up in the night drenched in sweat and walk around consumed with terror at the thought of having to perform, but once I take the stage, something in my brain kicks in and says, Okay, she’s suffered enough. We’ll back off and let her perform now. It’s a strange phenomenon, but one that enabled me to continue. The alternative—that I would feel fine offstage and completely freeze up once I got on—was far worse. I thought so often about the story of Laurence Olivier’s having to stop in the middle of a play because he simply couldn’t continue. That was what I kept dreading would happen, and over and over again I pictured myself staring at the audience, frozen, until I finally had to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t,” and find a way to walk off with some semblance of dignity.

  Just before beginning Streetcar rehearsals, I went to see my internist, Dr. Postley, in New York and said to him, only half joking, “Please just tell me I have a brain tumor.” I was shaking so much that I had begun to think there had t
o be something physically wrong with me. He said that it was probably just anxiety (just!) and that he knew the perfect person to help me, Dr. Ellen Hollander, a psychiatrist whose specialties included success conflict. I spoke to her every day on the phone during the time I was in San Francisco, feeling as if my connection to singing and performing, not to mention my equilibrium, was hanging by a single thread of spider’s silk. Dr. Hollander was very helpful in pulling me through the crisis, explaining that many factors can trigger a success conflict. She told me about an actress who had achieved overnight success and then walked away from it. Throughout her life she said it was the right choice for her and she never looked back. I think I would have said the same thing had I jumped the tracks, given it all up, and become a teacher, and I have no doubt that I would have been happy doing so. I would have looked back on the life I’d led and reflected, “Well, it was perfectly fine, but you couldn’t pay me to do that now.” Think of Barbra Streisand, who left the stage for more than twenty-five years, Olivier for seven, and Carly Simon; in our own world, Carlos Kleiber, Glenn Gould, and Rosa Ponselle left the stage at relatively young ages.

  The psychiatrist explained my fears in general terms as a result of the subconscious mind more or less saying: “You’ve gone too far. You weren’t supposed to step away from the pack. You’ve strayed from your roots. You are by your nature an underdog, the second-place winner, and you shouldn’t be here on top.” This syndrome is by no means limited to successful individuals. It can affect a waitress who’s just gotten a job in the best hotel as easily as it can the president of the country. Think of the number of overnight successes in performing, for example, who soon sabotage their careers with drugs or alcohol, or even commit suicide. It’s an entirely relative operation and, in many ways, not rational. It was no accident that this came over me at the same time I was getting divorced, which proved to be more than my psyche could handle. Divorce is terribly painful on its own, but to then add the possibility of losing my identity as a singer, losing my career, was really too painful.