The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer

by Renee Fleming

  In past times, a Jon Vickers could record his first Otello, as he did for RCA, before ever having performed the role onstage, and still have a chance to record it again, fifteen years later, and film it, too. More recently Plácido Domingo has made three recordings and several video versions of Otello. Nowadays, it is unrealistic to think that singers will have that many opportunities to record even their most central roles. So, the decision to make a particular recording, and at a particular point in a singer’s career, has to be very carefully weighed. Fortunately, there are a few advantages to this situation. Because I don’t have time to discover my limitations through the medium of performances, I tend to take more risks, especially with a conductor like Christoph, who doesn’t hesitate to test the limits. There is also a freshness in performing pieces for the first time that never quite returns as more depth is added to interpretations. This is one reason that I enjoy mixing some new works into my recorded repertoire as well as in recital programming. In actually choosing the repertoire, I hail from the school of pedantic research, so in the case of my recent Handel CD I needed to explore every suitable aria I could get my hands on. I never want to run the risk of accidentally passing over some lesser-known jewel because I wasn’t willing to take the time to dig through piles of manuscripts. Beginning with a list of music I already know, I often end up rejecting most of these original choices because I get so excited about new discoveries. Next, I had to decide what the focus of the recording should be: Italian arias? Secular or sacred? Mixed baroque repertoire, or only George Frideric himself? I’m aided in this process by the record company, its marketing staff, my management, and ideally the expertise of a musicologist. Polling is still one of my favorite tools, and I conduct it among my own professional advisers, friends, and parents.

  Recital programming is arduous to say the least. Jean-Yves Thibaudet and I spent countless hours reading through stacks of song literature to come up with our program for the recording Night Songs. We started without a clear-cut concept and through trial and error eventually realized that we were gravitating toward music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I wanted to be sure that Jean-Yves was pianistically challenged enough to warrant his collaboration, while also choosing pieces that suited me well. I approach every recording as if it could be my last one, which makes the selection process into a nail-biting frenzy. This same obsessive attention goes into the programming of my recital tours. My goal is to please most of the people some of the time: a balance of well-known gems, a few obscure discoveries, virtuosic display, and more intimate fare. It is difficult to second-guess the public’s wishes for an evening of song, but I try to consider the differences among audiences in Sydney, Zurich, and Kansas City, without repeating previous repertoire choices.

  During one of my first recital engagements, the presenter bemoaned recitalists’ loss of regard for the audience, prompting a quick decline in attendance and interest in the art form. He spoke of an earlier recital in which Jerome Hines had brought his costumes and sung complete opera scenes for an audience that might otherwise never have heard him perform live in his greatest roles. I took what the presenter said very much to heart and have ever since paid close attention to the public, reminding myself that we are first and foremost entertainers. Why should someone leave the comfort of his home, computer, and television if not to be moved, enlightened, and inspired, rather than lectured? I was a student during the period of declining interest that the presenter mentioned, and I remember being bored by recitals in which the most obscure—and therefore uninteresting—repertoire of single composers filled the recital halls in New York, when I had never even heard any of the best repertoire by these composers performed by great artists. I would have been so thrilled to hear just one “Erlkönig.” Still, stretching horizons and challenging the audience is an important consideration. One all-American world premiere concert I gave prompted hate mail, but I made sure the next program contained favorite arias. My program with Jean-Yves was time-specific, but it also introduced relatively unknown repertoire to an audience with already brimming CD collections.

  My daughters, of course, take precedence on any calendar I may be drawing up to help organize my life. School pageants, homework, doctor’s appointments, birthday parties, heart-to-heart talks, and solving disputes occupy my time as they would any mother’s. I now make sure I travel for only short periods, and I try to be someplace interesting where they can join me over school holidays. The girls delight in having a second home in Paris, where we often spend a month in the summer. Paris is an absolute playground for children, and we have been exploring some of its hidden delights. The Jardin des Plantes and Angelina’s hot chocolate are a must on every visit. I want them to enjoy and benefit from being the daughters of an over-scheduled opera singer. They have already traveled the world and are at home in many of the capitals of Europe and the United States. They have also toured Japan and Australia with me. To see the world through a child’s eyes is as great a gift to me as it is to them. These are adaptable, unflappable, independent children, much to my great fortune and pleasure.

  Of course, I can’t manage any of this alone. I have help on every front, from scheduling my Met engagements to packing a suitcase, and I always maintain that I’m nothing without a great nanny. But I don’t turn a blind eye to any corner of my life. It is my life, after all, my career, and the ultimate responsibility for making sure that everything stays on track is mine, as difficult as that sometimes seems.

  For all the traveling I do, I still have a moment when I fill out the landing card at the airport and feel uncertain. What do I put down as my profession: Singer? Opera singer? Musician? Artist? Diva? Prima donna? If I’m landing in France for the summer, am I a cantatrice? A chanteuse? An artiste lyrique? I’m not sure I know the correct answer myself, which is some form of existential confusion. On career day in high schools, the halls are full of doctors and firefighters and engineers, but chances are that few students are discussing the career possibilities of becoming an opera singer.

  I have always wanted to understand what my professional place in the world is, and to do so has taken me years of putting together snippets of advice and wisdom, and slowly coercing people in my own management and record companies to share real information with me. I am a musician, and primarily a classical musician, and as such I believe that it is my responsibility to understand both the mechanics of the business itself and the changing role of classical music on contemporary culture. If your preferred image of me is as an artist above the fray, incapable of sullying her delicate mind with facts, figures, and marketing terminology, by all means please skip this section.

  While a new album of Strauss scenes is never going to have Madonna looking nervously over her shoulder, recorded classical music does have a significant audience; and unlike most forms of popular music, it can be marketed worldwide without the language barrier that limits the careers of many pop singers. As recently as the 1950s, classical recordings represented 25 percent of all albums sold in the United States. While we are not likely to see these levels again soon, classical music does hold its own, representing 3 percent of the U.S. market and 3.2 percent of the worldwide market, which translates into total annual sales of just under a billion dollars. To put it into perspective, however, as of 2003, 37 percent of all recorded music worldwide is sold in the United States, so even a 3 percent share of this, the world’s largest music market, is significant.

  While we’ve been allowed to remain fairly rarefied for most of history, classical musicians are now as subject to marketing principles as any other performers. We have to think about the percentages our records sell, as well as the demographics of our audience. We are now a brand, and every brand vies for the attention of the nineteen- to thirty-nine-year-old disposable-income buyer, although the AARP set, the over-fifty demographic, which is largely ignored, has 35 million members with a larger overall income. (In the rest of the record industry, they’re even targeting the purch
asing power of thirteen- to sixteen-year-olds.) What’s more, older people are more likely to be operagoers. We have to be willing to explore how to sell to both groups if we plan to stay alive in the business. Most people today have had less exposure to classical music than their parents and grandparents, who grew up believing that classical music, like serious literature, was “good for you.” Husbands get dragged to concerts by wives, or the boss brings along a handful of executives courtesy of a corporate sponsorship program, but that isn’t enough. We need to spread the passion for music that makes some people such enthusiastic concert- and operagoers.

  There’s no arguing the fact that a night at the opera can be expensive, but we do pay equivalent amounts for other forms of entertainment. Fifty-yard-line seats at a football game, or front-row Knicks tickets for a family of four—once you add in the Cokes, hot dogs, and Cracker Jack—aren’t going to be cheap. Broadway tickets are often one hundred dollars apiece now, and can reach dizzying heights beyond that if the show is hot and sold out. Yet while seats for a Pavarotti performance may have approached the three-hundred-dollar mark, they also went as low as ten dollars for standing room.

  Sometimes all people need to rethink their position is a little incentive. The Handel and Haydn Society in Boston was able to increase its top-price ticket sales 20 percent by throwing in free parking. Some companies are adding packages with restaurants and offering a free drink at intermission. None of these measures diminishes the music; they merely say, “If you make an effort, we’ll make an effort.” Because of the nature of the art form, opera companies have been able to take the lead in marketing and advertising: they recognize that they have drama to sell. Opera can be marketed as something that’s sexy and hip, and no longer just for the canary fanciers. Orchestras are finally starting to catch up with this idea. Still, it can be a hard sell when you have a young audience that grew up without any sort of musical education that reached farther back than the Grateful Dead. Singing in choirs and studying piano and other instruments were once normal parts of a child’s upbringing, aided by amateur groups, churches, and schools. These programs planted the seeds for a love of serious music that bloomed in adult-hood. What we’re finding now is often a case of no seed, no bloom.

  The problem isn’t only one of getting people into opera houses and concert halls. It’s also figuring out how to sell records. More people are listening to classical music than ever before, but most of them are doing it via the radio. Anyone wanting to hear my recent performances as Arabella, as Imogene in Il Pirata, or as Violetta in La Traviata would have been far more likely to encounter them on a live radio broadcast than through any other means. Part of that is simply a matter of price—CDs are expensive to make and expensive to sell—but part of it is also a matter of saturation. After all, how many recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony does a person actually need?

  Not only is the industry badly in need of paying audiences and CD sales, but there are also gifts to be solicited to keep the opera and symphony alive. No one expects to be asked to make a donation for the upkeep of Britney Spears, but classical music is forced to reach out to patrons for support. In the 1950s and ’60s, charitable giving primarily benefited cultural institutions, as governments in Europe and America were more attentive to social concerns. But as public funds have been slashed on all fronts, the public is understandably much more likely to give its discretionary dollars to hospices, homeless shelters, and educational causes rather than the arts. The one partial exception is the construction of performance spaces, which involves tangible realities like bricks, mortar, and donors’ plaques, as opposed to an abstraction like the annual operating budget. As a general rule, people like to build things but are much less comfortable about being asked to sustain them.

  On every front there have been shifts in our cultural tastes in music including the newfound popularity given to the composers of film soundtracks, a genre I had firsthand experience with when Howard Shore asked me to sing on the soundtrack of the third film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King. When I first met Howard he said, “I’d love to have you to do this; however, I want to explain to you that we have a vocal concept and a musical concept that you might not want to fulfill.” He told me that he was looking for a medieval sound and that my singing would have to have a very pure, chantlike quality (words I expected to hear from William Christie!). I listened to the previous soundtracks and understood exactly what he was looking for, so I said, “I would love to try.” I recorded five three- to four-hour sessions for what ultimately became about ten minutes’ worth of music in the film.

  I was amazed by how different recording techniques are for a film score than, say, a collection of Strauss scenes. When we record classical music in the studio the process is not very far from a live performance, with just enough orchestra time to get through a piece two or possibly three times and then patch in a minimum number of corrections. In any three-hour orchestral recording session, fifteen minutes of usable music is about what is expected. Perfection isn’t even an option, since the finances of recording with an orchestra simply don’t allow for much repetition. It turned out that the people making movies from J. R. R. Tolkien novels did have endless time for perfect results, however, and could afford the London Symphony for months of work, thirty or forty sessions for a single film—an unimaginable luxury in the classical music world. Add to that the discussion of the proper pronunciation of Elvish, and I can definitely say that this was a unique experience.

  To get the degree of perfection in the singing that they wanted, I had to imagine beyond what a boy soprano could contribute. The producer asked me to take every ounce of expression out of my voice in order to make the cleanest sound possible, saying, “Remember, no vibrato, no connecting between tones, no dynamics.” Then he said, “Good, now could you add a little bit of emotion?” He lost me there, because to achieve the sound he wanted I had eliminated all the standard devices to express emotion: vibrato, portamento, legato, and dynamics. Without any access to those tools, I didn’t have the faintest idea of how to create something beyond the pitches.

  Amazingly to me, the final result sounds much richer and warmer than it did when I was singing it, and my short selections are incorporated into the film in a beautifully seamless way. I left that experience feeling a tremendous sense of respect for people who work in film. They have remarkable patience and stamina, given that the hours they put in are endless—or in this case, not just hours but years. Barely a month later, I recorded a disc of Handel arias and found to my delight that the experience of fine-tuning my ears to hear the tiniest change in vibrato and dynamics lent itself perfectly to the baroque style. A fortuitous side benefit to taking on the music of the Elves!

  Many people think the answer to the salvation of classical music is to tap into the obsession with celebrity, to find artists who can make the industry seem less classical. Others predict that what has been called “the cult of celebrity” is a sure path to ruin. I myself have spent most of the past ten years confused about the whole subject, and to make matters worse, my recording career began during one of the most difficult transitions the industry has ever faced. Just where do I fit into the larger picture of our culture?

  The demand for Enrico Caruso’s recordings single-handedly changed the phonograph from a curiosity to a commercial enterprise. Caruso dominated the musical world, and while he was always an opera singer first and foremost, he was equally beloved for his Neapolitan song repertoire, which sold as well as his aria recordings. All of his recordings are still in print, something that can be said of few recording artists.

  Thanks in large part to Caruso, opera singers became such celebrities in the early twentieth century that they were even sought out for silent-film roles. In Europe, the great beauty Lina Cavalieri made a film of Manon Lescaut, and in America, Geraldine Farrar did an incredibly popular version of Carmen, which is still screened to this day. This is particularly ironic in light of the fact that
the biographical films made about opera singers in the second half of the twentieth century featured nonsinging actresses whose singing was dubbed.

  Once sound came to the movies, singers were everywhere. Grace Moore, Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, and Mario Lanza all could be considered crossover artists, as they were well-trained performers who brought popular songs and light and core classics to a larger audience. And even though Deanna Durbin never had an opera career, she managed to sing (and sing well) at least one aria in each of the twenty-two musical films she made before retiring at the age of thirty. During the height of her fame in the 1930s and ’40s, she became the highest-paid woman in America, and in some years the biggest-selling female box-office star. All while singing arias!