Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva

by Deborah Voigt

Jane watched all this happen as I sang in front of her, and she understood. She’d been a dramatic soprano herself and had sung the same repertoire I was working on. She was in her mid-fifties and saucy, smart, played in a rock-and-roll band, and loved all arts with a passion. Her studio was decorated with prints of her favorite painter, Gustav Klimt, and I stared at the vibrant posters of lovers kissing and nude bodies intertwined as we went through her big books of Brahms and Strauss for thirty minutes, twice a week.

  Unlike that squeaky voice teacher at Chapman, Jane and I clicked right away, and she immediately understood my strengths and vulnerabilities as a vocalist and performer.

  “You don’t want to sing in front of the mirror?” she asked me, “then don’t! Debbie, you’re not going to sing in front of a mirror for the rest of your career, you are going to sing from sensation.” Jane made a fist and put her hand on my heart and gave my rib cage a soft thump. “It’s not about how the singing looks from the outside, it’s about what you feel here—inside.”

  We got to work. She told me I had a very “naturally placed” voice, that I was very much “in the mask,” as we call it in the opera world, which means my voice was coming from a solid place at the front of my face. Many girls in the teen years go through a very breathy stage, but I never did; I always had a very focused, large sound, which was good, said Jane, and a good middle range. “But you have no top,” she noted. “You have a strong low voice, but your top needs work.”

  Because she got me so well, Jane could employ unique little tricks that helped me connect my emotions to the music in a way that I could understand.

  “Much of singing is imaginary,” she told me. “It’s not enough to have a beautiful voice. You have to have the imagination to know how to use it.”

  During one session, when I was trying to breathe from deep in my diaphragm, she said to me, “Debbie, you must imagine that you have a straw running up through your body and that the air is rushing up and pouring out.” And it worked.

  At that time there was a commercial on TV for the cereal Rice Krispies, and the advertisement showed an everyday American family sitting around the breakfast table, singing “Vesti la giubba,” the heartbreaking aria from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. Because the cereal box was empty, the family sang with intense dramatic suffering, “Noooo mooooore Rice Krisssssspiessssss!” It was funny, and Jane was fond of referring to it. Whenever I was singing and I wasn’t giving enough passion from the inside, Jane would tap her hand on the piano.

  “More Rice Krispies, Debbie! More Rice Krispies!”

  And I knew exactly what she meant and wanted—more emotion, more connection with the beating heart of the music. Because that is what touches people, she taught me. Yes, a technically beautiful voice touches people on its own, there’s no question about that. But there had to be something behind it, something under it—something giving it meaning. And that something, said Jane, is what separates the opera singers from the opera stars. It is what makes an audience feel. And you can’t teach that or buy that, says Jane—you must be born with it.

  Jane was a diligent musician, a whiz at the piano—and a real taskmaster, which I needed because of my history of skipping classes and sinking into a state of self-doubt and coconut cake. But Jane was also very kind and loving—perhaps what I needed most in a teacher, and in a friend. She provided a safe environment for me to expose my vulnerabilities as a young woman and as a singer. Singing is such a personal, intimate activity, you cannot separate yourself from it.

  So much so, that I often cried during my lessons when there was something I couldn’t get right.

  “I’ll never get it, I’ll never get it!” I’d moan.

  “Shut up and let me teach you!” She knew how to handle the likes of me. Jane understood my tears; she was a musician-whisperer.

  “Music is a journey, for the singer as well as the audience,” she’d say, consoling me. “To get to what happens beyond here,” she pointed to her lips, “we have to get to what happens here,” she pointed to her heart. “It is not like an instrument, where you make a mistake and you adjust your fingers. With singing, you are exposing yourself.

  “Now, for heaven’s sakes,” she’d say, getting back to business, “let me teach you voice instead of being your psychiatrist!”

  Because we were both dramatic sopranos, we found we shared a similar emotional depth and intensity—something one needs when singing the repertoire of grand characters with big, emotional arcs. The range of emotional growth and feelings experienced by Wagner’s shieldmaiden, Brünnhilde, during the course of the epic Ring Cycle, for example, can’t be compared to that of Mozart’s young chambermaid, Susanna, in The Marriage of Figaro. Jane and I were made of the same stuff in that way, and that also added to our kinship. I felt so comfortable with her that I could talk to her and cry to her about anything—even my weight.

  While at Cal State, the numbers on the scale kept rising. I was living at home and had resumed my fast-food-in-the-front-seat habit. By my early twenties I had reached size 22—my biggest yet. But opera singers were allowed to be big, right? I had my Tosca photo of Caballé, and I knew Beverly Sills was hefty in her earlier years before she lost seventy-five pounds.

  A friend of Jane’s who was also active in the opera world, set me straight on that delusion.

  I had recently endured a costume fitting at school for an upcoming performance, but now nothing was fitting, of course, and I was telling Jane about it when in walked the chain-smoking friend—he always had a cigarette in his mouth and a vodka in his hand. He called me “Doobie”—I’m not sure if it was because he was always tipsy and he wasn’t enunciating, or because he had a predilection for mind-altering substances. Either way, he had heard our chat and gave me the hard dope on my size.

  “You will have this problem in every costume fitting you go to, my dear,” he said, sloshing the ice around in his glass, “if you don’t do something about your weight.”

  Jane started to give him a look, like, Don’t go there. But he was determined to give me sage advice.

  “Doobie, the best way to lose the weight is with cocaine. You should try it.”

  Jane and I were both startled, and in my mind I thought: Like I really need another addiction.

  EVERY SEMESTER AT Cal State, the voice majors had to perform in front of a “jury” and it was nerve-wracking. It was like a vocal exam, and I had to present ten songs I was working on and have them memorized. Memory work was a challenge for me. I had no problem as a little girl memorizing pop ballads, or entire Broadway albums at age three. But learning these operas in other languages was difficult for me and I never felt completely ready. Even today, I experience that same feeling of terror and unpreparedness whether I’m about to perform at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, or in front of a table of college professors in Southern California. I always procrastinated and began preparing too late, never felt ready, and would show up at Jane’s studio before each jury in tears.

  “The jury is tomorrow and I can’t remember a word,” I cried. “I can’t do this.”

  Jane would sit me down and hand me a tissue and talk me through my nervousness.

  “What other songs do you know? Let’s put together a list, you can change the lineup, they won’t care. All they want is to see progress in your singing technique.”

  Jane saved my sanity too many times to count over the two and a half years I was at Cal State, and many times during the years and decades after that. I think maybe she was the very first person I truly, truly trusted in my life. That’s probably why she was the very first person I told my secret to.

  We were in her studio and I was, once again, in tears—this time it was about something to do with John, I can’t remember what. Jane kept trying to talk to me about getting out and auditioning, but I was sulking over John in that insecure, clingy way I had.

  “Debbie, how dedicated are you to your career as an opera singer?”

  “What do you mean? I’m very dedicated!�
�� I told her. I had been entering competitions and winning money at that point. I remember winning $1,000 as a prize, and that was a lot of money for me at that age. I felt a certain amount of authentication that I’d actually won and earned that money, it was big. But that was just the beginning, in Jane’s eyes. And she didn’t want anything to get in the way of what lay ahead.

  She was concerned about my relationship with John, she went on to say, and how it would impact my career choices. Will I be willing to travel, to uproot myself, to live out of a suitcase if I stay with John?

  “He lacks ambition,” she said. “I’m worried you won’t push forward if you stay with him. And you have so much talent.”

  I looked up above her piano and stared at her poster of Klimt’s Kiss for a moment. I wasn’t sure how to explain to Jane that my seriousness and dedication to my career wasn’t a random choice, it was divinely inspired. It had been nearly ten years since that early dawn light streamed into my bedroom and I’d heard the voice of God. I had never spoken about that experience with anyone—not my parents, not anyone at church, and not even my close friend Sue. I wasn’t sure how to word it, how to start.

  “Jane,” I said, quietly, “something happened to me when I was a teenager that I’ve never told anyone about. It was surreal . . .”

  I told her every detail—the light, the voice, and what He said—and Jane’s eyes welled up with tears. I started to cry, too. I was both embarrassed and overwhelmed at finally saying the words out loud to someone, the moment had been locked up in my heart and imagination for so long.

  “You don’t doubt what happened for a minute, do you?” she asked. For Jane, what I described did not take a leap of faith to believe. She and I had talked about God before and she knew how I felt about my faith.

  “I don’t believe that was a dream for one second,” she said, standing up as if for emphasis. “The first time I heard you sing, I knew you had a voice that could do anything and that you were meant to use it.”

  We hugged, cried some more, and then got to work on the next piece. Now more than ever, Jane was determined to make sure I fulfilled my God-given instructions.

  At her urging, I auditioned for two major opera companies even though I still had another year to go at Cal State.

  The first was for the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions (every year the Met sponsored a competition to help develop new young singers). I went to New York, and among my listeners that day were: the famous pianist and conductor James Levine; the Met’s longtime general manager, Joseph Volpe; and Matthew Epstein, who was both the guru of the opera world at the time and an impresario at Columbia Artists Management. (Joe Volpe began his career as a carpenter at the Met and moved up the ranks until he was running the place—a lot of people respected him greatly for that.)

  But the illustrious company didn’t make me terribly nervous. That’s the irony of the early auditions and performances: you are so new and nobody knows you, and you don’t know them, so you don’t feel a heavy weight of pressure. You go out there and open your mouth and there’s this young, big, beautiful Voice with a capital “V” that no one’s heard before and they get all excited and say things like, “We haven’t heard a voice like that since Jessye Norman!”

  So I belted it out on the Met stage, singing the arias Jane and I worked on, and I was one of a handful of winners. Everybody was buzzing as I got off the stage. I passed by Matthew Epstein, who was known to be very opinionated and blunt. He congratulated me.

  “Your career’s about to start,” he said. I smiled, and probably blushed a bit.

  “Now all you gotta do,” he added, “is sustain it for the next twenty-five years.”

  I laughed at what he said, not knowing that years later his words would prove to be absolutely right. I was soon to enter the honeymoon phase of my career where I couldn’t get a bad review, couldn’t take a wrong step, couldn’t lose a competition. I would soon become a new, glittery toy that everyone would be excited to play with. But that’s the easy part—then you’ve got to sustain it. What are you going to do ten years, twenty years down the road to keep an audience, and yourself, interested?

  I never forgot his words. And looking back, I realized that most of the joy I experienced in my career indeed came during that early phase. There were no expectations, and you’re the new kid—you’re fantastic. You open your mouth, you’re dumb, you’re naïve, but the voice just comes out. You love it. They love you. You don’t really know if you’re bad or good, but . . . look what I can do. It isn’t until the audience and the press and the administration at the opera houses start to know you that the bar gets raised.

  Actually, right after I’d won the Met audition, you might say my “fantastic” quality had already begun to diminish. At least in the Met’s eyes. But it had nothing to do with my voice. As one of the winners, I was served my first dose of weight discrimination. I was invited to have a one-on-one meeting with the executive director of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, Larry Stayer, who was looking for candidates for the Met’s Young Artist Development Program. He ran the program with Risë Stevens, the wonderful, retired mezzo-soprano from the Bronx, who was also famous for being very beautiful and very thin. I was clearly one of the best singers they’d seen that year, but they didn’t invite me to join the Young Artist’s Program.

  “We’re not sure we want to take you right now,” Ms. Stevens told me, “but . . . don’t accept any offers from any other programs until you talk to me first, okay?”

  Then she added some off-the-record advice: “I think you have a glorious voice, but if you don’t do something about your weight, you won’t have a career.”

  I was hurt by the comment, of course. I figured if they really wanted me, my weight wouldn’t matter. So I didn’t call them before accepting another offer.

  My other audition that year was for the apprentice program at the San Francisco Opera company. Every year they held rigorous auditions for up to a thousand hopefuls and winnowed the number down to twenty-three singers who would then enter the company’s prestigious Merola Opera Program, a summer of intense voice, body, and acting training. From there, one could advance to their Western Opera Theater tour that lasted five months, and finally to the program’s third tier, the two-year Adler Fellowship program in residence, where you take master classes, do small roles at the opera, and understudy leads.

  Jane and I worked hard for months preparing five arias that would be my go-to audition arias in the future: “Leise leise, fromme Weise” (from Weber’s Der Freischütz); “Come scoglio” (from Mozart’s Così fan tutte); “Il est doux, il est bon” (from Massenet’s Hérodiade); “Ernani, Ernani, involami” (from Verdi’s Ernani); and “Nun eilt herbei, Witz, heit’re Laune” (from Nicolai’s Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor). When I got onstage for my audition, I had that coming-together feeling of preparation meeting opportunity: I won a place in the Merola Program for that summer.

  I had done well at these two auditions, but in general, auditions would never be my strong suit. I never felt good about them because I was sensitive about being judged in general, and my weight added to my self-consciousness.

  It’s not that I’m not competitive—in fact, when I was in a competition I usually sang the piss out of whatever I was singing—and won. That’s because in a competition it was all about “the voice”—and that voice could come in any package (or at least, in those days it could. Maybe not so much anymore).

  But when I was auditioning, I walked into the room knowing that the person I was singing for had a preconceived idea of what they wanted the character to look like. Singers deal with that all the time, losing jobs sometimes even if they have the wrong eye color. After all, even Tosca is supposed to have brown eyes, telling the painter Cavaradossi to paint the Madonna’s eyes brown to match her own. I was a blue-eyed, 300-pound Tosca and managed to pull that off. Had I auditioned for that role, I would have known from the outset that I didn’t have the right lo
ok, and knowing that would have affected my performance.

  I could never get to the same level of performance in an audition as I could in a competition, because how I looked was being scrutinized so closely. I can’t recall a time when I ever got a job from an audition. In the early days, I often got roles by winning contests that had a performance attached to them—like the Tchaikovsky competition in 1990. The prize was a performance at the Ravenna Festival in Italy. From that, Italian conductor Riccardo Chailly heard me and invited me to sing in Bologna. I won a lot of roles when I paired “Leise leise” and “Sola, perduta, abbandonata” from Puccini’s Manon Lescaut together in a competition, because the two arias are so dissimilar they showed my versatility. American conductor James Conlon, the current music director of the Los Angeles Opera, heard me sing those two arias at a competition very early in my career and it led to many future roles with him, starting with my debut and only official performance at La Scala in Weber’s Oberon (though I must admit I cringe when I remember it: I squeezed all 290 pounds of me into a lime-green harem-pants-and-turban costume—not a great look for me).

  The only audition I ever remember feeling sure I aced was for the Grand Opera of Geneva. I sang a Mozart, a Weber, and a Verdi—and sang them so well I was certain I’d get the job. Nope! I found out later from my manager that I didn’t get it because I was so heavy—and that they’d made their decision about me the moment I walked out onstage. Still, they let me sing three very difficult arias. It’s no wonder I was so sensitive about the audition process.

  THE DECISION TO leave school early was one of the easiest decisions I ever made. I was twenty-four years old in the summer of ’85, and my bags were packed and in the car, and so was John. We decided he’d leave his classes at Cal State, too, and come to San Francisco with me and we’d live together in sin. My parents weren’t delighted about that, but they knew they couldn’t tell me what to do anymore.

  I didn’t leave town without a little farewell performance, however. Two, to be exact.