I said the Serenity Prayer over and over and over again:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
ONE SOBER YEAR and a half later, I floated up, up, up into the clouds in a hot-air balloon in Aspen, feeling weightless. I was performing at the Aspen Music Festival in the summer of 2010 and as a birthday present to myself, I took a balloon ride to see the world from my new perspective. As the balloon rose in the sky I felt free—free of 150 pounds of weight off my body (I had lost another 15 pounds from not drinking); free from the Mitches and Peters in my life; and finally, free from the disease and poison that was killing me, alcohol—I hadn’t had a drink in eighteen months (roughly 540 days, or 12,960 hours, and counting . . .) and I felt healthy and transformed, like I was soaring. I remembered that card a stage director gave me once, of an angel tethered to the ground. Now, twenty-two years later, I had cut the rope and freed myself.
I was also in love again, and this time it was going to be different.
Jason was in the chorus at the Met, and he was singing in Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer (“The Flying Dutchman”) earlier that spring as I sang the role of Senta. We’d noticed each other before but had never spoken until I ran into him on the street during Dutchman. We recognized each other from work and chatted as we stood on a busy Manhattan sidewalk. I was immediately attracted to him—he was my type in looks: tall, slim, dark, and with a sexy beard.
“Maybe we should have a coffee,” I ventured. “After all, we’ve been making eyes at each other for years now.”
He suggested dinner, and a week later we had a surprisingly relaxed and chatty meal in a cozy eatery on the Upper West Side, not far from the Met. During our date I confirmed some essential facts: one, he didn’t drink; two, he was divorced and was a doting father to his teenaged daughter; three, he wasn’t a religious freak; four, he wasn’t looking for a woman to pay his bills; and, five, he was dating a woman who also sang in the Met’s chorus.
“Well, you’re not married,” I pointed out, “and you don’t live with her.” We both laughed.
He told me all about his daughter, and I admired how he was so attentive to her, taking her out for dinners and movies and hanging out together, talking and having fun—the sort of moments my father and I never had together. I don’t remember doing anything alone with my father growing up, not even a stroll around the block.
Jason and I talked for hours; I felt completely at ease with him. Spending time with him was so unlike what it was with Mitch or Peter—I felt more comfortable with him than I had with any other man I’d ever known.
In fact, being with him was the only time I ever felt completely comfortable with myself, in my own skin. After dinner, Jason hailed a cab for me and before I got in he pulled me in to him and planted one hell of a kiss on my lips, loaded with chemistry and heat.
The next night, as I got ready for the show, I pumped a costumer friend of mine who knew Jason for tidbits about him.
“Oh, no, don’t go there, Debbie,” he warned me, mysteriously, “he’s not for you. Don’t do it.”
He obviously didn’t know that was the wrong thing to say to keep me away from a man. Besides, he didn’t understand how perfectly we clicked together and that we both felt it. Soon Jason and I were texting constantly (“Hi sexy!”) and making out for hours like teenagers on my living room couch and in my dressing room.
In Dutchman I was singing the role of a young woman in a sailing village who becomes obsessed with a portrait of the legendary Flying Dutchman, cursed to sail the seas until he finds a wife who will be true to him. Senta wants to save him from his horrible fate and can only think about being with him and wanting him to be in love with her. Every time I gazed at the handsome portrait onstage, while singing my love-drenched arias, Jason would be standing ten feet away offstage, behind the portrait, looking at me, irresistible in his fisherman’s hat and wool sweater. We’d lock eyes and share a secret smile. His outfit in Dutchman was rivaled only by his turn as a cowboy packing a big rifle when we did La fanciulla del West together at the Met at the end of that year.
At first, Jason was hesitant to have a romance with me because, as he put it, “you’re an international star that I’ve watched from afar for years.” But we got rid of that nonsense. And in due course, he got rid of the girlfriend. And somewhere between my first La fanciulla Minnie—a feisty, Bible-reading saloon owner and feminist before her time—in San Francisco in the fall of 2010, and my second Minnie, at the Met that winter, our romance was official and out in the open.
A FEW MONTHS later, I embarked on the role of my career.
I had sung Sieglinde a dozen times all over the world, but to take on the more mature Brünnhilde in Wagner’s epic Ring Cycle of four operas—Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung—is a monumental challenge and turning point for any dramatic soprano and a demanding role that must be earned. One has to wait until her voice matures, you can’t sound like a young little bell. You don’t come out of a conservatory singing Brünnhilde, it’s a gradual journey that leads to her. You have to sing a few Toscas, Minnies, Ariadnes, and Chrysothemises first and, if you’re lucky, those roles take you to that great and fearless Valkyrie shieldmaiden.
My voice was ripe for it, and my leaner body was the right size. (Though, ironically, the famous expression “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings” is supposedly a reference to Brünnhilde’s famous sacrificial fire scene at the end of Götterdämmerung.)
The new production was to be helmed by Canadian film and stage director Robert Lepage, and his vision and concept for the set was controversial. It had over two dozen removable planks that were set up like a line of seesaws in a concrete jungle. I and the rest of the cast called it, unaffectionately, “the Machine.” I always referred to the set as female in gender, and always capitalized her pronoun, because She was the biggest diva in the entire production. She was the one who was the most temperamental, the most prone to mishaps, very particular about her lighting, and She was the heaviest—the stage floor had to be reinforced to bear Her weight. And She was definitely overpaid—She was more expensive than the combined fees of the entire Ring Cycle cast.
I started studying the libretto six months ahead of time, which would still be considered last-minute cramming for most sopranos, who’d begin studying Brünnhilde years before their first performance. I pored over the thick binder of text for hours on end and worked especially hard on my technique. The role has a lot of “middle voice,” and as a soprano my voice likes to live a little higher, so I had to spend a lot of time “anchoring” my middle register—the very opposite of what I had to work on when I first walked into Jane Paul’s studio decades earlier. But each opera in the cycle has its own specific challenges. For Die Walküre, it was very important for me to be hooked into the middle voice, whereas for Siegfried, I had to send high C’s into the balcony. Götterdämmerung is more an exercise in pacing and is very dramatic vocally. It’s as if each one was written for an entirely different type of soprano. I worked especially hard with my voice teacher, David Jones, whom I’d been with for a few years at that point. I also flew to Cardiff, Wales, to spend a week working with conductor and opera coach Anthony Negus, who is known as a “Wagner specialist.”
I also concentrated even more on my acting. I was surprised to discover that one of the biggest challenges to playing this role was acting the part when I had nothing to sing. I remember reading an interview with Meryl Streep in which she was asked what the most important quality a good actor needed to have, and she said that “acting is listening” to the other characters. As Brünnhilde, I had a lot of listening to do. The foundation of the opera’s story is the complex relationship between Brünnhilde and her father, Wotan, which I studied carefully. When we first meet her, she’s a young woman who is teenager-like, both vulnerable and willful. Her wrathful f
ather, Wotan, who is the Chief of the Gods, passes harsh judgment on her for disobeying him by siding with her nephew in a battle. He strips her of her Valkyrie status and banishes her to an eternal magic sleep on the mountain, where she is prey to any man who happens by. (Hmmm. It all felt so familiar to me, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it . . .) For much of the opera, Brünnhilde must endure and listen to all of her father’s angry monologues, and it takes a lot of energy to absorb and react to all of that.
With all its physical and emotional challenges, the part is also a daunting one to play because it is such an iconic Wagnerian role, any soprano who sings it is automatically compared to the great performers who came before her, like Birgit Nilsson and Hildegard Behrens. Even Bugs Bunny played “Bwunhilde” and donned the helmet! And in that same “What’s Opera, Doc?” cartoon, Elmer Fudd hums the leitmotif to the Act III “Ride of the Valkyries” tune when he sings his famous “Kill the Wabbit” aria. Now that’s a hard act to follow, folks.
Jason popped into my dressing room all through rehearsals to give me encouragement and kisses and was my date for opening night of the season at the Met in the spring of 2011. We were so crazy about each other that during the entire performance that night (it was the first of the Ring operas, Das Rheingold, the only one of the four in which my character does not appear) he kept rubbing his leg against mine in our seats in the audience. At the dinner party afterward, while I was seated next to director Lepage and having an in-depth conversation with him, I felt a foot crawling up my leg—Jason, from across the table, trying to distract me. We exchanged knowing smiles. I was so, so happy. I was in love, I had beat drinking, and I felt healthier than I had in my entire adult life—physically, emotionally, and mentally.
My family arrived for the premiere of Die Walküre a few weeks later and were amazed to see the gargantuan banners with my face, a hundred feet high and just as wide, hanging majestically from the rooftop of Lincoln Center. My mother and my brothers stood outside the Met and looked up at my face and their jaws dropped. I think they were proud of me. They didn’t say it in words, but I think they finally “got” how big a deal it was, and how famous and successful their sister and daughter had become.
Even I was impressed. One afternoon I hopped into a cab after rehearsal, and as I looked up at the banner and gasped, I did something totally out of character for myself.
“Hey,” I said to the cabdriver, tapping on the plastic partition to get his attention and pointing. “You see that face up there on that building? That woman with the long, red hair? That’s me!”
“Nah, get outta here! That’s you? Nahhh!”
I smiled. “Uh-huh.”
“Wow. That’s sumthin’ else. That’s really sumthin’ else. Good for you, lady.”
OF COURSE, ANY bravado this diva might have been feeling was completely demolished on opening night, when I made my entrance onto Her. All I had to do was step from the apron of the stage onto the high-tech, mechanical, She-machine and walk up her. I was excited—it was my big moment, my first Brünnhilde! But I guess She decided the Met stage wasn’t big enough for the two of us, that one of us divas had to go, and the bitch took me down.
I stepped on my dress and slid—down, down, down—along the steeply inclined planks, landing with a thud downstage. I could almost hear Her yell out Brünnhilde’s “Ho jo to ho” cry.
The New York Times:
As Ms. Voigt started to climb the planks that evoke the hillside, she lost her footing and slid to the floor. Fortunately Mr. Lepage and the cast had correctly decided to play this scene for its humor. . . . Ms. Voigt rescued the moment by laughing at herself. She stayed put on the row of flat, fixed beams at the front of the stage and tossed off Brünnhilde’s “Hojotoho” cries.
The problem here was not just that in this crucial dramatic moment, with Ms. Voigt about to sing the first line of her first Brünnhilde, Mr. Lepage saddled her with a precarious stage maneuver. The problem was that for the rest of the scene, whenever Wotan or Brünnhilde walked atop the set, the beams wobbled and creaked.
If you’d had a tape recorder inside my head at that moment, what you would have heard on playback was a rather more X-rated fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. At least by now I’d learned my lesson and didn’t say it out loud.
The New York Times:
Among the cast Ms. Voigt had the most at stake. A decade ago, when she owned the role of Sieglinde at the Met, she seemed destined to be a major Brünnhilde. . . . The bright colorings and even the sometimes hard-edged sound of her voice today suits Brünnhilde’s music. I have seldom heard the role sung with such rhythmic accuracy and verbal clarity. From the start, with those go-for-broke cries of “Hojotoho,” she sang every note honestly. She invested energy, feeling and character in every phrase.
Playing such an intense role and hearing Jason talk about his relationship with his own daughter made me think a lot about my own sometimes tumultuous journey with my dad over the years. We’d both done some growing up and maturing since the days when he was my food and date marshal. We’d reached a better, stronger, place finally and I knew he loved me and I loved him, even though we didn’t say those exact words to each other and didn’t always know the best way to show it. I thought of my father when I was onstage and related to Brünnhilde’s struggles with Wotan. Every night at the end of each performance, I’d be drained. I wondered if the night Dad and Lynn sat in the audience he, too, might be moved by the story and the relationship between Wotan and Brünnhilde. A few weeks after he and Lynn saw the show, I received a letter in the mail from him.
June, 2011
Dear Debbie,
I’m writing you this letter because for a long time I’ve wanted to assure you of something very important. From the beginning of our courtship, your mother and I were very much in love. Our parents thought we were too young and moving too fast and wanted us to take a break, but we wanted to be together. We decided that if we had a baby, our parents would let us get married. From the moment we knew you were coming, we were so happy. I wanted to make sure you knew that we planned to have you and we always, always wanted you. . . .
I was shocked and I immediately phoned up my mother to confirm this new bit of family history Dad had revealed. “I don’t know what your father is talking about,” she told me. “We didn’t get pregnant on purpose. Why would he say such a thing?”
Of course, no parent wants their kid to think that she was a mistake or was unwanted, and perhaps he was trying to ease my pain in that area. Maybe he connected my suicide threat three years earlier to me not feeling sufficiently loved. If so, I had to give him credit for thinking about it and writing to me about it; trying to unravel the past was a big step for him, for both of us. Except for that brief moment in San Francisco when my father sort of apologized for contributing to my weight problem, we’d never talked about anything personal from our past—not the moment at the piano or the spankings and soap in the mouth or the food regulating or his breakup with Mom. With this letter, whether he was right or wrong in his facts, it was at least an attempt to reach out and help me, and I appreciated that.
In therapy, I had begun to see that choosing unavailable men in my life could be linked to growing up with a distant and strict father. Mitch was unavailable emotionally, the married Dane was unavailable technically, and Peter was unavailable sexually. Not to mention the strangers I dangerously picked up on the Internet. My therapist pointed out that those one-night stands were a way for me to get temporary fixes of the intimacy, attention, and love I craved, but with men who couldn’t possibly sustain it. They were more extreme examples of what I was doing in my relationships—falling in love with men who were unable to give true intimacy and commitment. And then, when I tried to force them closer to me, they’d only distance themselves further.
With Jason, for the first time in my life, I felt I had found a man whom I connected with and could be close to.
AND RIGHT ON cue, Jason pulled away.
The same month my father sent me the letter, I invited Jason to join me at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, New York, where I was singing Annie Get Your Gun. I rented a beautiful house in a wooded area and transformed it into a romantic getaway, filling it with beautiful flowers and all the foods and games Jason loved. We had a sweet, sexy, and easy time together doing jigsaw puzzles and swinging in the backyard loveseat and dipping our feet in the pond and laughing. After we got back to Manhattan, I reminded him he was my date for the openings of the New York Philharmonic (where I’d be singing arias from Tannhäuser and Salome live on TV, with Alec Baldwin hosting the event) and the Met—both of them black-tie galas and only a few weeks away.
He shuffled his feet. Keeping the dates will be difficult, he admitted, because he was seeing his ex-girlfriend again. He wasn’t breaking up with me, to be clear. He cared for me (like my father, Jason had difficulty saying the L-word). But he couldn’t bring himself to give up the chorus woman, either.
“And does your ‘girlfriend’ know of this new arrangement?” I asked.
He shook his head.
I went home and cried and analyzed the situation. It was easy to do intellectually: he told me that he could not and would not be available to me in the way I wanted him to be. This was my cue, I had learned in therapy, to break my unhealthy pattern and stop seeing him. It was the only logical step a rational woman with a shred of self-esteem would take. Problem was, I wasn’t so logical, rational, or self-esteemed. So instead of breaking up with Jason, I spent the next seven months on one end of a tug-of-war, pulling at him, while the girlfriend pulled from the other end. I suppose my pride was hurt, never mind my heart. But I didn’t want to stop seeing him. So I endured months of broken and forgotten dates and vague texts, dotted with days of focused attention and intense intimacy that I gorged on like a feeding frenzy.
Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva Page 22
