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

by Deborah Voigt

  The two roles I played within those few months—Amelia and Ariadne—would become signature roles for me over the next two decades of my career.

  A career that, in one moment on the phone in an ice-cold basement apartment in Boston, took a monumental leap forward.

  ( 11 )

  Leona, Leonie, Luciano: Breakthroughs and Breaking Up

  FIFTEEN MINUTES BEFORE showtime and I’m singing under an oak tree in the Bronx.

  It was the summer of ’91 and I was about to make my Metropolitan Opera debut as Amelia in Ballo in Van Cortlandt Park for the Met’s five-borough recital series, but I had one delicate problem: there was another diva sitting in my makeshift dressing room, prepping to go on and steal my debut.

  My very first contract with the Met was to cover Amelia and Ortlinde (one of the Valkyries in Die Walküre) in the annual summer concerts performed in various parks in New York. I was the understudy for Leona Mitchell, a Grammy Award–winning soprano who sang for eighteen seasons as a leading spinto soprano at the Met. My contract stipulated that of the six performances I covered, I would get to sing one for sure, and this was arranged to be my night. We’d had a lot of rain dates that summer, and quite a few postponements and cancellations—but finally my time had come. They had sent a glass carriage—a Town Car—to pick me up to ensure I’d be there.

  I arrived at seven p.m. to give myself time to change into my dress (these were noncostume concerts) and fix my hair and makeup in the trailers that were set up as dressing rooms. I walked into the trailer and . . . there’s Leona, warming up.

  “Oh!” I said, surprised. “You’re warming up?”

  “Yes, of course,” Leona answered quickly, getting back to her scales. Another singer in the recital, Erie Mills, who was singing the part of Oscar, was also in the trailer, getting ready. She exchanged a look with me that said: You and I know it’s your day to sing, but Leona doesn’t. But could I have been mistaken? Clearly, if the great Leona Mitchell is warming up, Leona Mitchell is going to sing. I stowed my bag in the corner of the trailer and tippy-toed out, heading two trailers down to find Jonathan Friend, one of the artistic administrators.

  “Mr. Friend, am I singing Amelia tonight?”

  “What do you mean? Of course you’re singing Amelia tonight. Why are you asking me this?”

  “Because Ms. Mitchell”—I pointed to the other trailer—“is in there warming up. She thinks she’s on tonight.”

  His face dropped. It was surely an honest mistake on Leona’s part, but this who’s-on-first soprano confusion had to be fixed, and quickly. By now it was 7:45, and time was running out—I had to warm up and get dressed. I moved as far away from the trailer as possible and hid behind a row of trees so that Leona wouldn’t hear or see me do my own scales while Jonathan handled this. I kept my eye on the trailer door, though, waiting to see signs of Leona descending.

  I had worked with her a year before in a concert performance of Aida where she was singing the lead and I was singing the voice of the High Priestess, an offstage role. She was friendly, a lovely person—and this must have been an awkward and humiliating situation for her, to be bumped by this unknown young soprano whom she met a year ago singing a disembodied voice and now . . . the main role.

  I felt terrible, but by now it was 7:50, and I had to get in there.

  In the trailer, Leona was gathering her clothes and bags with the help of an assistant when I slipped in and began doing my makeup.

  “Do you have all your things, then?” the assistant asked her.

  “No,” said Leona, “one of my bags is behind her.” She pointed at me. Yikes.

  She left, and ten minutes later I was onstage.

  Amelia’s first scene in Act I is the most difficult part in the entire opera—she enters with a great deal of urgency to meet with the fortuneteller to get love advice about her husband’s best friend. Not only is she desperate, she’s also afraid to be observed meeting with the seer in her hut. Her first few lines have to be whispered, with a tremor in her voice. By the end of the trio (unbeknownst to her, her husband’s best friend is also present but hidden from view, overhearing the women’s conversation) Amelia is singing long, arching Verdi phrases that give the audience their first opportunity to really hear the voice of the soprano. But I wasn’t nervous. It was a role I absolutely adored, and I could sing it in my sleep—I probably did—and I was in the bloom of my career and voice. I was more worried that the bugs swarming around the surrounding stage lights would fly into my mouth when I opened it. As I hoped, the performance went very well—smooth sailing, and singing.

  EVEN BEFORE MY strongly reviewed Boston Ariadne, I’d already auditioned for Met conductor James Levine and General Manager Joe Volpe and from that had gotten my summer parks contract; so you could say my foot was already in the door before Ariadne. But the day John Rockwell’s New York Times review landed on Jonathan Friend’s desk, they happened to be looking for someone to sing the part of Elektra’s sister, Chrysothemis, in their new production of the Strauss opera, to premiere in March 1992. I was singing a similar repertoire by the same composer, so everything came together at the right moment.

  They had already cast the well-known Hildegard Behrens, who was in her prime, in the lead role, and Leonie Rysanek as the mother, Klytämnestra. Rockwell’s review had prompted Jonathan to come to Boston to see me perform as Ariadne and arrange a stage audition for the role of Chrysothemis. What made this such a turning point for me was that it was a new production. For singers, especially when you are starting out in your career, performing in a new production is really important because it comes with a new director, new costumes, new staging, new set—and leads to more press attention than if it was a revival. And the director for this one, Austrain-born Otto Schenk, was already known for his lavish, realist, traditionalist stagings that always garnered attention.

  The character of Chrysothemis is a great part. She wants to leave home and marry and have children, but her sister, Elektra, who is trying to exact revenge against their stepfather for the murder of their father, wants her to help in her plan to kill him. At this point in the libretto I had my first panic attack while rehearsing. In the scene, Elektra is trying to convince Chrysothemis to sneak into the palace with an ax by saying, “You’re so thin, you could move between the crevices in the walls of the palace without being observed.”

  I flipped out. The Met wasn’t using surtitles yet at that point—English translations on screen—but those who were familiar with the opera or understood German would understand and be laughing their heads off. There I was, this gigantic woman who couldn’t slip through anything. I crossed my fingers that no one in the audience would understand the line and laugh.

  My next anxiety attack came when I first saw myself in hair and costume.

  Standing in front of the dressing room mirror with costume designer Jürgen Rose, I burst into tears. My costume was basically a muumuu, which made me look even bigger—like throwing a tent over an elephant—and he’d stuffed my hair into a skull cap to make me look bald. Apparently the lavish director was taking a decidedly nonrealistic approach this time around, and within his concept of the show, I looked like an enormous body with a tiny, hairless head—like an overgrown alien.

  “I can’t go onstage like this, I look like a pinhead! Can’t you . . .” I cried.

  “It’s your job to sing,” Jürgen snapped, “not tell me what to do with your costume.”

  I was horrified and mid-sob when in walked Met Artistic Director Sarah Billinghurst, who used to be at the San Francisco Opera in my Adler Fellowship days. Sarah’s known me longer than just about anybody in my professional life, and she’s used to hearing me cry—she’s the one I cried to on the phone that time from Munich during my Euro sojourn with Grandma Voigt.

  “What’s the matter, darling?”

  “He said . . . I can’t . . .”—I was sucking in gusts of air between sobs and words—“have any hair . . . and I’m . . . going to . . .
have my head wrapped. . . . And I can’t go onstage looking like this!”

  Sarah handed me a tissue and ushered Jürgen out the door.

  “There, there. We’ll put hair on your head. Don’t you worry.”

  And Sarah arranged it, God bless her.

  I was more sensitive about my size than usual because I kept growing and was now 320 pounds. And a conversation I’d had recently with John about my weight had lodged in my heart like a shard of glass.

  John usually sat in a house seat during my performances to get the audience’s reaction firsthand as I’d walk out for the first time. In our conversation, he was very delicately trying to tell me that there were times when I’d walk onstage with my 320 pounds cinched in by a corset and the audience would laugh at me.

  “Honey, you know that you’re a big girl—bigger than most of the girls onstage. And you know that there are certain angles that are not going to be flattering to you in any way, shape, or form. And there are moments when you come onstage and there is a tittering of laughter. For some people, it’s shocking to them to see someone of your size walk out there. It takes them a little while to get used to it.”

  I started to cry. John was not a malicious man, I knew he was telling me the truth, but the truth in this case was hard to hear. It was my job to play characters who were in love and loved by men; but if people were going to laugh at me as soon as they saw me, how were they going to believe me onstage? John, I was sure, loved me no matter what my weight was. In fact, I assumed he rather liked my size.

  “John, if you were going to marry someone else again, you’d choose a big girl again, wouldn’t you?” I was obviously trying to make myself feel better. The one person in the world who is supposed to accept and love you as you are is your husband. But my plan to get John to admit this backfired right in my face.

  “I’d . . . you know, Deb”—he was tripping over his words—“I guess I’d probably choose a thinner woman.”

  At that, I went beyond crying into silence. I didn’t have any words, or any tears, just numbness.

  The soprano singing the part of the mother and murderous Queen Klytämnestra, Leonie Rysanek, was the major Strauss-and-Wagner diva for decades at the Met along with Birgit Nillson. Leonie was especially known as the leading Chrysothemis of the day—maybe of all time—so I was doing a role she’d done for years, and was, in a way, taking over her role. Leonie had been a dramatic soprano her entire career but now, well into her sixties, she had moved a notch to mezzo-soprano.

  It was pretty daunting, and I was very nervous and wondered how she was going to react to me. On the first day of rehearsal I tried to let her know I was humbled to be following in her footsteps.

  “This is my first Chrysothemis,” I said, during a break, “and I’m excited, but nervous. Please, give me any advice you want to give me.”

  She smiled graciously. “Don’t worry, I will!”

  For the rest of our production she was completely supportive, she never said to me, “This is how I did it,” or “You should do this,” and never advised me to do anything different from what I was already doing, encouraging me to go further with it. “You’re on the right track!” she kept saying. I adored her and admired her, as a person and an artist.

  I had met her once before, back in my San Francisco Opera days. She’d come to sing a lead in an opera in which I had a little part. I had a photo that was taken during one of the rehearsals that pictured her in the foreground, and me, standing in the shadows, in the background. Now, years later, she surprised me with a memory from back then. She had heard me sing from backstage, she said, “and I wondered . . . who does that voice belong to?”

  I learned a lot from Leonie and Hildegard Behrens during that run. One bit of acting advice I got from Hildegard I still use to this day. Back then, opera singers weren’t expected or required to “act” their roles much. We used to call it “park and bark”—just get onstage and sing great, no need to do much more than that.

  Hildegard and I had a very dramatic scene together—my big singing scene—where we are sitting on the floor and I’m wailing to her about how we sit there, day after day, in anguish. As we rehearsed the scene, I’d reach out to touch her to try and convey Chrysothemis’s pain.

  During one rehearsal, she gently stopped my hand and said quietly:

  “Why don’t you reach for me but not really touch me. It’s stronger, lonelier, that way.” She was right. The director loved it. Opera singers were so used to playing it big back then, we didn’t know yet that a subtle gesture can move an audience even more than a grand one. For the first time in my fledgling career I felt like I was entering the Big League. Backstage, in my dressing room, I had a piano, a shower, a fabulous chaise longue. I kept my door open as people ran by in the hall, pushing costume racks, running in and out of dressing rooms, wishing each other “Toi, toi, toi!” (opera-speak for “break a leg”). I could hear the other singers warm up in their dressing rooms and the director and conductor giving last-minute notes. Fifteen minutes before showtime for opening night, I did what I always do: I shut the door and sat quietly for a moment and said a prayer:

  Dear God. Please help me sing well for you tonight.

  And He did. At the end of the evening when we came out for our bows it was clear from the applause that it was my night. One review described the response as “a roar in the opera house,” and Peter G. Davis of New York magazine wrote, “her shining soprano was balm to the ear and soared easily through the music.”

  The best review I got, however, was for my acting—and from one of the finest actors of my generation. My dear friend the casting director Jack Doulin, with whom I’d worked a few years earlier, was doing a play with actress Julie Harris at the time, and he’d brought her to opening night as his date.

  The next morning, he woke me up with her thespian critique: “Debbie, Julie thought you were amazing!”

  “What?” I nearly dropped the phone. “What did she say?”

  “She said, ‘She conveyed so much of her character’s complexity in her voice. She inhabited her character beautifully!’”

  As far as I was concerned, that was as good as an Academy Award.

  The run was a success and a boon for my career, but what I treasured the most was gracious Leonie. We kept in touch until she died, six years later, at age seventy-one, of bone cancer in a hospital in her beloved Vienna. A few months later I received a small package in the mail from her husband, Elu. In it was the black enamel, pearl, and gold filigree brooch that Leonie often wore. It was very old and quite fragile, nothing extravagant or expensive, but understated and suffused with heart and sentiment. It was a beautiful goodbye.

  MY CAREER WAS just taking off, and to take advantage of the momentum I’d hired a publicist. Not just any publicist, but the notorious Herbert Breslin, whose claim to fame was that he was Luciano Pavarotti’s longtime manager. Herbert was much despised in the business because he could do and ask for whatever he wanted and people had to do it, because he had Luciano. When he met me, he was bewildered, then annoyed, and finally amused by my undiva-like behavior—he was not used to it.

  “Kid, we have to create some kind of mystique for you,” he told me during our first meeting in his office. Herbert always talked like he was in a forties film noir. He slammed phones and swore at everyone and their mother and I’d heard he had the best table at Sardi’s reserved for lunch every day. He didn’t understand my good-girl suburban shtick, and he wanted me to bitch it up.

  “You’re too open. You’re too sunny!” he said, accusingly. “We’ve got to find some way to make you more . . . more . . .”

  I burst into tears, as usual.

  “Herbert, how am I going to do that? How am I going to create something and maintain it for the rest of my career? Something that’s false and not true?”

  He handed me a tissue. At least own my diva stature, he urged.

  “Come on, Voigt. After all, you’re Deborah Voigt. You’re not Miss Scr
atch-your-ass!”

  A few weeks after my Elektra premiere, I got a call from Herbert.

  “Hey, kid.”

  “Hey, Herbert. Um. What’s going on?”

  “I’m calling to tell you you’re the new Tucker winner.”

  The Richard Tucker Award was a coveted award for up-and-comers. Named after the famous American tenor, it was awarded to an American singer every year who was “poised on the edge of a major national and international career” in the hopes that the award money—a cool $30,000—could help the artist continue to great heights. For the award presentation, the Richard Tucker Music Foundation throws a big gala every year, aired live on PBS, and the recipient sings duets with other illustrious vocalists. It’s a major black-tie event.

  Herbert wanted me to embrace my inner diva-ness? I may have been too sunny and approachable to be a real diva, but I knew how to dress like one, and I planned to go to this gala looking like a queen. I contacted one of the best operatic gown designers in the country, Barbara Matera—famous for the dazzling dresses she’d made for Joan Sutherland—and we got to work several months in advance, with measurements and muslin fittings in her Hell’s Kitchen showroom. I was so huge that I couldn’t buy anything off the rack; but, anyway, this sort of gown had to be custom made.

  It was a wine-colored velvet with pieces of pink chiffon and georgette built into it and sleeves that puffed out, with gorgeous little crystals sprinkled down the front of the dress. The neckline was open, and there was a Flying Nun cap thing around my shoulders. The sleeves made me look like a linebacker, but the dress was, in the best diva tradition, truly over-the-top . . . it was spectacular. To this day it was the most I ever spent for a dress: $5,000. But that night, I felt like a million bucks.