The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer

by Renee Fleming

  When we get to the edge of the stage, Vicki drops my skirt and I am on, stepping out onto the bridge between the front of the world and the back.

  The world onstage is oversized. Like our voices and our jewelry, it must be easily accessible to every row. A giant chandelier looms overhead. The furniture is overstuffed with big, floppy pillows everywhere. This Zeffirelli production, with its red walls and gilt trim, paints a scene you can sink into, lush, soft, and beckoning. I begin singing, taking my energy from the audience and the other performers onstage and giving them mine in return.

  Even though this is the penultimate performance of my second appearance in the role of Violetta, I still discover five or six new interpretive refinements in the first act. In the first duet with Alfredo, I realize I haven’t fully explored the coloratura. Ideally anything we sing must have some purpose behind it. It isn’t enough to sing the notes well; there must be meaning in every phrase. For example, take the cadenza that falls at the end of the first duet. It can be interpreted as laughter, as ardor, or as hysteria; it can represent Alfredo’s pulling Violetta close and her pushing him away—any of those choices are valid. Nowhere in the score does Verdi specify: “This is the way I meant for this to be.” That’s exactly what makes the music so exciting: it’s intangible, it’s enigmatic, and it gives me the space to stretch out and experiment, to play it different ways on different nights and see what feels organic to the character, or even what feels organic on that particular night. At this performance I decide to let Violetta’s consumptive breathlessness also come to represent her yielding to romance, so I make her breathless in an almost aroused way. I see how I can associate these two ideas: she’s ill, but she’s also under the spell of a very charismatic young man. Creativity is like a muscle—the more often you use it, the stronger it gets, and the more you come to rely on it, even unconsciously. I believe that everyone is creative, but we have to train ourselves to be so in a comfortable and confident way. If I exercise my creativity frequently, keeping it as limber as I do my voice, I’m much more likely to make discoveries and improve my performance. That’s the real joy of performing: you do something for so long and with such discipline that it actually begins to look, and at times even feel, effortless.

  Another chance for expression comes at the cadenza at the end of the cavatina in the big aria, which offers me one of the most powerful opportunities in opera: to make the audience wait. If a performance is successful, the audience feels that it is experiencing something real, something that is happening in front of it for the first time. On the stage, we experience a similar sense of reality. One of the ways to maximize this potential for identification is with time and surprise. It was Frank Corsaro again who gave me my favorite surprise, the long pause before “È strano! È strano!” The guests from the party have left, the evening dies down, and everything is quiet again. Normally, the door shuts, Violetta turns around, and before she can forget the pitch, she sings, “È strano! È strano!” immediately. But Frank had a different notion of the scene. I want you to take off your shoes, he said, and go look at the fire. All of this sets up an element of tension with the audience, and tension is essential to the drama of music.

  In the musical line, I learned about tension from Hartmut Höll, who referred to it as tragen, German for “to carry.” Think of music as a piece of taffy that can be pulled and stretched. Rather than sing the line in a four-square, pedantic way, the heartstrings of the audience can be pulled with dynamics and legato, anticipating the next pitch just slightly or delaying it just a touch, to create tension in the line, giving voice to yearning and desire. This will actually draw the audience forward and bind them to you emotionally. Alternatively, an absolutely straight, pure, pristinely sung line will sometimes carry equal emotion for its sheer angelic quality. When Hartmut talked about tragen, he could demonstrate with his phrasing on the piano, which was infinitely more difficult to do than with the voice, because the instrument doesn’t sustain. This is another means of expressing what’s in our hearts and guts, and very few singers master it. When they do, I am more moved by this as an audience member than by all of the scenery chewing in the world.

  Even in the moments when I’m alone onstage, as at the end of Traviata’s first act, I’m never really alone, for I have the enormous comfort of Joan Dornemann in the prompter’s box. She averts train wrecks, gets people back on track when they’re ahead or behind, cues us when we forget what we’re supposed to say, and in a desperate case shouts out a word. As young singers we never had the luxury of prompters, but in the major theaters we become completely reliant on the extra security they provide, which makes their absence more than a little nerve-racking. I sang my first Manon in Paris without a prompter, which was especially stressful, given the dialogue in the piece. When James Conlon came in as the new music director of the Paris Opera, the first thing he did was install a prompt box. The prompter, after all, is an opera tradition, dating back to when performers sang different roles every night.

  Once act 1 is finished, I breathe a huge sigh of relief. This is not to say that the rest of the opera is easy; however, the opening act is not only where my anxiety lies but also the most exhausting of the acts, and if I don’t pace myself properly I start to wilt later in the evening. I also worry about injury in a demanding role. It’s amazing how even now I’ll sing a phrase slightly wrong and think, That’s it! It’s over. My voice is ruined. That may sound neurotic, but it’s certainly possible: you never know exactly when you’re going to oversing and shut down your vocal cords for good. Think of how a figure skater executes perfect double-axel-triple-toe-loop combinations all night long, only to slide her foot out the wrong way while skating straight ahead and pull a tendon.

  The curtain comes down, and after a bow to encouraging applause, I’m back to the dressing room. Off comes the cream-and-white wedding cake gown of act 1. Vicki slips over my head the blue-and-green-striped dress for act 2, scene 1: the courtesan in the country. The rhinestones are traded in for a large cross, the upswept wig is now long loose curls, and the jeweled hair picks are replaced by a modest straw hat. Plácido Domingo knocks on my door. I had no idea he was in the audience tonight; I had just seen him the night before in The Queen of Spades because Sage was singing in the children’s chorus. He gives me a kiss, takes both of my hands, looks at me seriously, and says, “You know I adore your voice.” When he leaves, the conductor, Valery Gergiev, calls on the dressing-room phone to tell me I’m doing wonderfully. Even at this stage of my career I need and appreciate all the positive reinforcement.

  I walk back through the winding hallways with Vicki carrying my skirt, past giant wooden storage crates labeled GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG and LUISA MILLER. The glamorous props of the first act have been pulled away, the chandelier now folded up and hanging two stories above our heads, safely out of the audience’s sight. The high life is now bucolic, a sunny room with endless windows.

  If you’re lucky, there are dozens of times in your career when you think, This is the best director I’ve ever worked with. This conductor is a genius. This tenor, this mezzo, this bass—I have never seen such talent. In a way, being an opera singer is like being a very romantic sixteen-year-old who falls in love with great passion and conviction every month. I especially love to sing with Dmitri, who is famous for his breath control and ability to spin out long phrases. He’s a perfect example of someone who understands tragen and can use it to pull and bend the very strings of your heart. If you lined him up against all the historic Germonts, you could discern his special gift immediately: he has perfect support and technique. Add to that the fact that he has a beautiful voice and he knows what to do with a phrase, and the scene passes like a dream. It also features some of my favorite acting in the opera, because it’s so subtle and tragic. This is the moment when we see who Violetta really is, when her goodness shines out and the audience makes a deep commitment to her.

  When the first scene of the second act is finished, I head backstage
to change again, and on the way a woman stops me and hands me an envelope. The principal performers at the Met are paid at some point in the middle of every performance, and while getting a paycheck is always gratifying, I’m always distracted, to say the least, and I often forget where I’ve stuck the check in the rush of getting out of one costume and into another. Several days after a performance, my assistant Mary usually has to say to me, “Um . . . did they ever pay you?”—at which point we start hunting for the check.

  Act 2, scene 2, starts with a party featuring the chorus and dancers. I’m not onstage at the beginning, and I have just enough time to get into the black gown that says “I have returned to the high life and now I am a miserable courtesan again.” It’s the biggest scene for the extras, and the costume people set up shop right at the side of the stage, ironing out jackets, fluffing up skirts. When the act is finished, I race back to get into my nightgown and prepare to die.

  I’ve always struggled with how best to look emaciated and waiflike in the final act, and this year I took a great tip from Susan Graham—a bust flattener. She wears one when she sings trouser roles in Handel and Strauss, and it occurred to me that its use might aid me in appearing less healthy, so I put one on underneath my lavender nightgown. Victor comes in to take off the extra blush I put on before the first act and gives me dark circles, and then I get a long, disheveled wig that sends a clear message that I’ve been sweating through a high fever for days. I trade in my cross for a large, sentimental locket that no doubt holds a picture of Alfredo, along with the portrait I will give him as a keepsake of our love. The handkerchief I carry now is large and blotched with blood. I look like an Edward Gorey drawing. Vicki takes me back to the stage and helps me into bed. The carpenters have stuck an enormous wooden pole in the middle of the set and are noisily drilling something above my head, but it’s the third act, I’m in bed, and everything is right with the world. The carpenters remove the pole, straighten up, and are gone. From the other side of the curtains I hear the music and try to rouse myself.

  I am so grateful for the times I’ve been able to work with Valery Gergiev. Our artistic sensibilities are complementary, and we play off each other well. Valery has a way of bringing virility to the orchestra that I find gutsy and exciting, and in response I’ll sing more passionately, which in turn inspires him. He gives the music a much more strongly rhythmic reading than what I usually encounter. We performed Otello together in 1994, and because I was in the second cast I was able to watch many of the rehearsals. The storm scene was so fiery and alive that I actually felt terrified. I don’t have to watch him constantly, for he’ll stretch a phrase, and then I’ll hear it and innately feel that my next two phrases need to push forward to balance out that stretch. It’s that constant give-and-take, the risk and trust, that can make a production of La Traviata feel like an opera you’ve never seen before.

  My favorite performance analogy has to do with love. Leonard Bernstein said that conducting was like making love to a hundred people at the same time. I’ve also heard it said that to see Kleiber conducting Ileana Cotrubas as Violetta—the way he never took his eyes off of her, and the way they responded to each other musically—was to imagine that he was in love with her. And a jazz musician once told me that Miles Davis had said that his job wasn’t done unless the women in the audience fell in love with him. No wonder we try to replicate the most powerful emotion in the human existence.

  One of the moments requiring the greatest interpretive skill in the opera comes in the third act, when Violetta reads the letter she has received from Alfredo. The letter scene can make or break a Violetta, because it is so nakedly revealing. In Houston, Frank had her seriously angry that Alfredo hadn’t come yet even though he knew she was dying, a powerful concept that led compellingly to her scream of “It’s too late!” But at the Met, my reading was more pensive, in keeping with the production’s overall gentler vision of Violetta. The letter reading is about the meaning and beauty of the language, as one is infinitely more exposed when speaking a language than when singing it. In singing, every vowel is stretched, and you can get away with a lot more and still sound authentic; but in speaking, there’s no place to hide. It involves the kind of detail that I can get very obsessive about, even more so than with a difficult vocal passage.

  Finally, Alfredo and Germont do return. Alfredo and Violetta reaffirm their love and all is forgiven. She has one brief instant of joy, thinking she’s fully recovered and that they can have a beautiful life together, and then she drops dead on a high B-flat—difficult, to say the least, to make believable. When we walk out together from behind the curtain, the audience roars. It sounds like the ocean, like a single enormous wave of love and approval crashing down on us. People tear up their programs and throw them into the air, and though this is expressly forbidden at the Met, I am not about to be the one who tells them to stop. The pages rain down on us, and the applause seems to go on as long as the opera. Suddenly I feel that I could happily stay up all night.

  And that should be where this story ends, with my resurrection in front of a loving audience, in the company of my colleagues and friends, but the evening is not quite over. Back in the dressing room, the wig is tacked onto its Styrofoam head and the nightgown goes back on its hanger. I take out the pin curls, wipe off the dark circles as best I can, and get back into my own clothes. When I am composed I open the dressing-room door and greet everyone whose name is on the backstage list, a group that ranges from Met patrons to someone I went to third grade with, other singers, fans from other states or other countries, close friends, friendly acquaintances, and almost everyone in between. There is an art to meeting, greeting, and keeping the line moving along, for while I appreciate these visits, I want to make sure the people at the end of the line don’t have to stand there until two a.m. There are photographs and hugs and little presents. After I’ve spoken a few words with everyone, I go back to the stage door, where the long line of fans who didn’t manage to get their names on the backstage list wait. These are the troupers. It is very late by now and very cold, but they want me to sign their programs. Many of them are young singers, and I remember the days when I used to wait at the door to tell someone how much I appreciated her performance. I try to talk to everyone for a minute. It is after midnight by the time I get to the end of the second line. These are the moments when I love New York the most. The city waited up for me. It doesn’t feel lonely or in the least bit shut down. A friend has invited me to join her for a late salad and a glass of wine if I have the energy, and suddenly I have all the energy in the world, at least for a little while longer. I walk down Broadway, away from Lincoln Center, and chalk this one up as a good night.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CODA

  I CANNOT IMAGINE a more satisfying calling than my own: beauty, humanity, and history every day, combined with the cathartic joy of singing. And as a classical musician, I have the luxury of a long career, if I can maintain my voice. The complexity of the art form and the ability to grow artistically can hold the attention of a loyal following for between twenty and forty years, which is not usually the case for performers of more popular music. The greatest advantage it has given me is choice: what role or concert to accept, when, and, to some degree, with whom.

  I will continue searching for new and challenging repertoire and developing other operatic and concert world premieres. How can any art continue to grow if the flow of enriching new material dries up? Imagine if every year we had two or three new operas to record, with major stars and an eager and hungry public as interested in these releases as they are in a new book by Ann Patchett or a new film by Pedro Almodóvar. As I grow as a recitalist, I will explore the endless reams of song literature while continuing to savor the opportunity for creating a recorded legacy. The same qualities that have made me so eager a student are also enabling me to expand my horizons and explore theater, art, and an interest in education and the importance of music and the arts in our culture.
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  Only recently have I felt secure enough to appreciate how truly fortunate I am. I think back to Jan DeGaetani bringing every class to tears when telling us what a privilege and an honor it was to be a musician, to be an artist. At the time, we could scarcely relate to that sentiment, since at that point in our careers we were lucky to reach the end of a single aria without coming to grief, but I understand it very well now. Often in the middle of a performance I find myself completely overcome with a deep feeling of gratitude for the fulfillment inherent in this work. Music enabled me as a fragile young person to give voice to emotions I could barely name, and now it enables me to give my voice the unique and mysterious power to speak to others.

  I am also fortunate to be grounded by extraordinary friends who provide an interpersonal exchange that rejuvenates me and allows me to gather strength for the pressures I face every day—a veritable oasis. There are treasured friends from my youth, colleagues, new friends who face similar challenges of high-profile careers, and admirers and friends from all strata of society who are highly educated appreciators of the arts. I’m an Olympic ruminator, and without the sounding board of this loving, sensitive inner circle, my sister, and my family, I’m not sure I could withstand the rigors of my life.

  The central challenge I face in all of this is making sure I have enough time with my children. I openly discuss everything about my work and my traveling with Amelia and Sage. They know exactly when I’m leaving and when I’m coming home and when they get to go with me. We make calendars; we e-mail and call each other every day. We never lose our sense of connectedness. I stay completely informed about everything that’s going on with them. I work very hard to make it clear to my daughters that they come first with me, and they seem to know that they do. They’re also at an age now when they’re aware of my Herculean work ethic and the necessity for multitasking to the extreme, but they also know deep down that if push came to shove, there would be no choice: it would always be them. I never close the door on them when I’m rehearsing. They can come and sit in my lap. They can interrupt me if they need to. I’ve never wanted them to feel they were competing with music for my attention, and so far, so good. They love music. I don’t push it, but it’s always there, and they’re welcome to it. My general philosophy as a parent is to expose them to as much as is humanly possible—as many kinds of interests, as many kinds of people, places, and situations.