Untold amounts of love go into making sure their needs are met on a daily basis, and happily, I’m now finding it possible to better balance my personal life with my professional life overall. I feel grateful that my mother worked and instilled in me an understanding that while she was different from my friends’ parents, I could be proud of her. We don’t teach our daughters to be dependent anymore, but that wasn’t the case in my mother’s generation. Recently, Sage performed in the children’s chorus of a Russian opera, and when I went backstage to pick her up after the accolades, I said, “Sweetie, you’re skipping rope onstage and you’re supposed to be having fun. May I please have one of your most stellar smiles next time? And sing out!” I had to laugh when I realized that history was repeating itself. I’m not only caretaker of the girls; I’m also their role model. I tell them that I hope they’ll find a life’s ambition that makes them as happy as mine has made me: something they feel passionately about.
One beautiful day in Connecticut, I was driving the girls on errands when my older daughter, who was ten at the time, started singing one of the Queen of the Night’s virtuosic arias from Die Zauberflöte, complete with high Fs absolutely perfectly in place. I keep a pitch pipe in the car, because I often warm up while driving (make a note to stay clear of sopranos on the road), and with it I verified that she was even singing in the right key. I looked at her and said, “Amelia, that’s amazing! Where did you hear that?” I had taken them to see the opera, but that was a year earlier.
She smiled and answered, “Oh, I saw it on television the other night. It was in a movie.”
“Oh, so you saw it a few times throughout the week?” I asked, thinking it must have been on the Disney Channel.
She shrugged, seeming totally unimpressed with herself. “No, just once.”
Musical memory is such an interesting gift. Of course, for a week after that both girls sang the Queen of the Night’s aria every time we got into the car, driving it into higher and higher ranges. It was hilarious to me, but deeply puzzling to any little girlfriends of theirs who were riding along with us.
Every time she sang, I told Amelia she was doing a wonderful job, until finally she said to me, “Well, you know, Mom, I am considering becoming an opera singer.”
Of course, being an opera singer was the furthest thing from her mind three days later, but for a second at least she had seen it, this thing I have known all along: there must be at least one note in my range that belonged to my grandmother, and certainly my mother’s soprano and my father’s deep love for new music have given much of the color and depth to my sound. Their voices are our inheritance, part of the amalgamation of who we are and what we have learned. We are unique, each human voice, not because we are completely self-generated, but because of how we choose to assemble the countless factors that made us. My voice carries in it the generations before me, generations of my family, of brilliant singers I have admired, of dear friends. It goes on in this book, not the sound of my singing but certainly the work and thought and passion of the discipline. Tiny slivers of my voice will be incorporated into a student I teach in a master class or into the young singer who listens carefully, just as little glimmers of Leontyne Price’s shining high C and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s expansive breath came into me. If this is the past of my voice, then I must believe it is the future as well. My voice will go forward in the same way, not only through recordings but through my daughters and through their daughters and sons as far as the line will take us. It doesn’t mean that everyone will be a singer, but that every one of us will find a passion in life to drive us ahead, and just maybe part of that passion will rest in the voice. People will hear it even in a word that is spoken: the wealth and wonder of all the music that came before.
The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer Page 26
