Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva
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“I think it’s a great idea, I think it’s wonderful.”
“But what if we have a bad night, what if we crack a note?”
“Ben, we’re human beings, and our audience is, too. If we are willing to admit that to them, and say, ‘Wow, that really didn’t go the way I wanted it to,’ and talk about how that makes us feel . . . that’s only going to endear us to them. The idea that we’re these revered people on a pedestal who make no mistakes and have only confidence and only put out the best performances . . . it’s not humanly possible.”
That’s me, the anti-diva. I’m all for making us human to the public, because the alternative is too difficult to live up to. I take great comfort in knowing my fellow colleagues get nervous, or make mistakes, like me.
I remember the first time I interviewed someone who had a “bad night.” I was the HD host for La traviata and the role of Violetta was being sung by soprano Natalie Dessay. As every soprano who has sung the role knows, there’s a perilously high E-flat at the end of Violetta’s aria that’s a killer. It’s not written by Verdi that way, but somewhere along the way it became tradition, and not everyone can do it. The rest of the opera doesn’t require that kind of vocal pyrotechnics, but that one note. So Natalie got out there and went for that high note, and it really wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. I knew it and she knew it.
When she came offstage she was shaking like a leaf.
“I blew it!”
I grabbed her hand and we started the interview.
“Ah, that was not such a good note,” she said, embarrassed. I told her, on camera, that it was just one note, and what she brought to the role was so much more than that one note.
Even Plácido gets nervous when he’s acting as HD host for the night. He was assigned the job during one of my Brünnhilde performances in Die Walküre and as I walked off the stage and we hugged like old friends, his glasses fell to the floor and we both fumbled around, trying to pick them up. Everybody was momentarily flustered, especially Plácido, and then . . . everything was fine.
None of us is perfect, we are only human, as Jimmy used to reassure me. And it’s important that we bare and share our humanness with each other—it’s the main reason I’m writing this book. And it’s the main reason why I developed Voigt Lessons with playwright Terrence McNally and my Chicago Salome director, Francesca Zambello.
Voigt Lessons is a one-woman, ninety-minute autobiographical theater piece in which I talk about the ups and downs of my personal life and my career, much as I’ve done in this book, and sing the songs and arias important to me throughout my life. I also talk about the eight words that saved my life: “My name is Debbie, and I’m an alcoholic”—followed by a rendition of “Smile” (. . . though your heart is aching). After a year of writing and rehearsing, we showcased the piece in Boston in November of 2013 to see if an audience would be open to a truthful, honest Debbie. Deborah Voigt, unplugged. I’m happy to report that they laughed and cried as much as I did.
It feels good not to live a dual life anymore. A friend helped change my life when she told me it was time to stop being one person onstage and another in private. Incorporating the two Debbies together means I have to accept my flaws; I hope others do the same. As Shane, my new “spiritual advisor” says, I’ve spent way too much time beating myself up and it’s got to stop. Out of the mouths of babes, and it’s good advice for all of us.
Last Christmas I went to visit my family in Wisconsin, and Mom and I went through boxes of old photos that we hadn’t looked at in decades. We sat on the couch and the memories spilled out of the boxes. Here was the pic of Mom in her beautiful black dress on New Year’s Eve (when Dad told her she needed to lose ten more pounds) . . . there was the pic of me as a curvaceous teenager, right around the time I met John . . . here was a pic of the family during “devotional time” . . . and so on, and so on. My mother and I both had simultaneous reactions as we held the photos up: “Look how slim and pretty I am!” And yet neither of us knew it then. Instead, we wasted precious time, torturing ourselves about our bodies.
MY NEW PERSPECTIVE—TO accept myself as I am and bare my flaws and mistakes to the world—feels like hang-gliding, something I did for the first time a few years ago emboldened by my earlier paragliding experience with Peter in Hawaii. I was in Zurich playing concert performances of Salome and driving into the city from the airport when I looked up and saw dozens of people flying through the sky. The next morning, at six a.m., I was driving up the side of a mountain to meet my hang-gliding instructor, the person to whom I’d be tethered for the ride. Here were his instructions:
“We’re going to start running, and we’re going to come to the end of the little hill, and whatever you do, don’t stop running!”
So I did what he said, I kept running and running, and the next thing I knew we were in the air . . . flying. We flew over the hills in the middle of a fog and could hear cowbells ringing below us.
I laughed—it was heavenly and liberating. It was the kind of feeling I get when I sing.
Last year began so horribly, but ended so beautifully.
Before Christmas, I performed several concerts in Utah with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. The staff treated me like a princess all week, sharing their spirit, soul, and faith with me, and after we finished our last show they presented me with a gift.
“Debbie, if you would please turn around and face the choir,” said the choir leader. The smiling group of 360 looked at me and sang the hymn “God Be with You Till We Meet Again.” It’s a hymn you sing when someone is going away and will be missed.
God be with you till we meet again!
When life’s perils thick confound you,
Put His arms unfailing round you.
God be with you till we meet again!
I felt so touched, appreciated, and loved, I burst into tears. It had been a difficult year—filled with “life’s perils thick confound you”—and their Christmas gift gave my year a happy ending. A big part of my life began when I heard God’s inspiring voice encouraging me onward, and now the most difficult year of my life had ended the same way—comforted by it.
On the night of December 31, back home in New Jersey, I sent out a video—taken with my iPhone—to friends and family of my faithful Steiny and me. In it, we lit candles by the fireplace and sat by the decorated Christmas tree, sipping hot chocolate (me) and eating doggie cookies (Steiny). I wore my flannel pajamas, and it was so cozy, the two of us.
I was able to be alone, yet I wasn’t alone. I had loved ones who cared for me nearby, and I had myself. Finally, I had myself.
I thought of those little lights peeking out from the darkness down in Cassadaga and they reminded me of a children’s gospel song I used to love as a child. I hummed it for Steiny as the clock turned to midnight and the fireworks went off in the east, over the Hudson River, signaling a New Year and a brand-new start.
This little light of mine . . . I’m gonna let it shine . . . let it shine, let it shine, let it shine . . .
My name is Debbie. I’m a daughter, a sister, and a friend. I sing for God and I sing for others. And now, more than ever, I sing for myself, too—and that makes me happy.
About the Author
A Chicago native raised in southern California, soprano DEBORAH VOIGT is increasingly recognized as one of the world’s most versatile singers and one of music’s most endearing personalities. A leading dramatic soprano, internationally revered for her performances in the operas of Wagner and Richard Strauss, she has also portrayed some of the heroines of Italian opera to great acclaim. Voigt has an extensive discography, has given many enthusiastically received master classes, and is an active recitalist and performer of Broadway standards and popular songs. She is also co-creator of Voigt Lessons, a one-woman show she developed with award-winning playwright Terrence McNally and director Francesca Zambello.
Deborah Voigt appears regularly, as both performer and host, in the Met’s Live in HD series, which is transmitted live to movi
e theaters across the U.S. and overseas. Among her appearances as a TV and radio host was a special five-night presentation of Wagner’s complete “Ring” cycle on the PBS series Great Performances from the Met. Robert Lepage’s visionary new staging, which starred Voigt as Brünnhilde, was also released as a Blu-Ray DVD set that won the Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording of 2013.
Audiences have seen Deborah Voigt in many important national media outlets, including a CBS 60 Minutes profile, appearances on Good Morning America, Charlie Rose, and CNN, and features in People and Vanity Fair. Voigt is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of South Carolina. She has won many awards, including Musical America’s Vocalist of the Year and an Opera News Award for distinguished achievement. Known to Twitter fans as a “Dramatic soprano and down-to-earth Diva,” Voigt was named by the Los Angeles Times as one of the top twenty-five cultural tweeters to follow.
www.deborahvoigt.com
www.facebook.com/DeborahVoigt
twitter.com/debvoigt
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Credits
COVER DESIGN BY ROBIN BILARDELLO
COVER PHOTOGRAPH © HEIDI GUTMAN
Copyright
This is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed in order to protect the privacy and/or anonymity of the individuals involved.
CALL ME DEBBIE. Copyright © 2015 by Deborah Voigt. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN: 978-0-06-211827-1
EPub Edition JANUARY 2015 ISBN: 9780062118295
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