The week’s festivities proceed, and my parents, my grandparents, and I all wait for any further indication of trouble with my health. It never arrives. When our rescheduled show proceeds two days later, I’m up on stage belting tunes and high-kicking with the rest of my siblings. The performance is a smash. As our vacation winds down, my fainting spell begins to recede like a strange dream.
And anyway, there are more pressing issues to be addressed. Will I return to America or stay in Europe? I call Cathy, my voice teacher of the past three years in Denver. I can always count on her for solid technique and wise counsel.
“Charity,” she mutters with a kind of excited gravity, “this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. You have to stay.”
I’ve spent my life trying to keep up with my older siblings, but it’s been getting harder recently. I’ve done my best to mime their life goals—the stellar academics, the campaign jobs, the government internships—but, if I’m being honest, following that template of accomplishment has always been harder for me than it was for them. I’d like to think I’m a one-in-a-million kind of person—a talent to be discovered and ushered into greatness. But I’m the only one who seems to realize it. That is, until last week. Last week, a panel of the best singers and voice teachers in the world validated my innermost ambitions. They told me that I belong with them. That my voice belongs with them. Deep down, I know they’re right.
I kneel down to pray. When I was a child, our family car broke down. A lot. Whenever it would splutter to a stop on a highway shoulder or a gas station parking lot, I’d recommend we pray. Unfailingly, the car started up again after “Amen.” That was the beginning of a long and productive relationship with the power of meditation and prayer. As I grew older, my prayers grew less practical and more introspective. I began to use prayer as a tool with which to garner insights from God or the Universe or the wisdom that we all have the potential to collect, deep within our own souls. I trust it completely.
This time, I ask God whether I should stay in Europe, and I’m overcome with a profound sense of warmth, peace, and reassurance.
I have to stay. I want to stay. I’m going to stay.
My family leaves a few days later, but I remain in Hungary. A friend living in the States lets me stay in her Budapest apartment. My Hungarian is limited to a few folk songs, but the notoriously challenging language is in my ear and my blood. Of course I’m apprehensive about navigating a new city on my own, separated from my family, my home, and my belongings by one of the larger oceans on this planet, but mostly I’m excited. Five-year-old Charity was right. I’m going to be an opera singer.
There are many paths to success in opera, but very few are well-traveled. Danielle de Niese, an Australian-American lyric soprano, blew up after winning a TV talent show when she was nine years old; Keith Miller went from star fullback for the University of Colorado Rams to leading man at the Met; Beverly Sills took eighteen years off singing to raise her children before going on to lead the New York City Opera, the Metropolitan Opera, and Lincoln Center. These stories are the exceptions. Typically, a singer must train at one of a dozen or so prestigious conservatories or voice studios to even have a chance in the business. From there, summer programs and singing competitions offer an entrée to directors and conductors. By graduation, singers are lucky if they’ve nabbed an apprenticeship or young artist position that offers a small salary (generally under $30,000 a year), along with more coaching and opportunities for small roles in large productions. More likely, they move on to graduate school where they take on more debt and hope to extend their opportunities for roles and auditions within an academic setting. Each aspirant believes that if they only receive this degree or that exposure, they’ll finally have the career of their dreams. In truth, the positions available to performers are extremely limited. Consequently, the stages are filled with a disproportionate number of heiresses and paupers.
A less common route for singers is to audition for a spot at a handful of European conservatories. These academic programs are significantly smaller in size and, due to state subsidies, largely affordable or free. While they typically lack the dramatic productions common in American schools, singers receive more personal attention and mentorship from faculty; the smaller European pool of conservatory graduates gives qualified singers more opportunities to audition for national and regional opera houses. The Liszt Academy is one of the premier conservatories in Europe, and Budapest, an invigorating stage. War, fascism, communism, capitalism, and corruption have taken their toll, but somehow, the city’s pockmarks make its beauty pop.
At the academy, I’m slated to study with Éva, one of the most heralded singers of the twentieth century and, perhaps, the greatest Hungarian singer of all time. I’ve just arrived for our first lesson. Standing in the doorway of a beautiful hall with a small stage and floor-to-ceiling windows, I’m unsure of how to proceed. Before me sits Éva, shoulders squared with plum-colored scarf thrown resolutely around her neck. She’s well into her sixties, but could easily be twenty-five years younger. She possesses a beauty that stems from the confidence of being truly great and deeply loved. I, on the other hand, am the youngest, least-experienced student in the entire program. While I have raw talent, I lack the musical education of my classmates—many of whom have been studying music almost exclusively for over a decade.
“Sit,” beckons Éva. And so begins my musical education.
My schedule at the academy is packed tight. Éva works with me and each of her six other students two to three times a week. My other coaches and I spend time together every day. They help me with my languages—French, German, Italian, Hungarian—as well as more general repertoire. Classes in piano, music theory, German, music history, and occasional workshops in acting and movement easily fill the rest of my weekdays. My classmates are as varied as they are talented. The Liszt Academy is one of the few places in the country where ethnic Roma, Asian migrants, and Hungarian nationals study together as equals. While a connection might get someone an audition, the faculty has a reputation for brutally egalitarian honesty; the education is excellent and practically free, creating a musical meritocracy for a select group of the world’s most promising talents.
Éva greets me warmly, then directs me to a music stand holding an open score. The pianist begins to play Susanna’s famous aria from Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro. But for the first time since I learned to read a musical staff, the page in front of me becomes nothing but a mess of black lines and dots. I miss my entrance once. Twice. Three times. My face tenses. The pianist begins to play once more. I close my eyes, relax my neck, my throat and body. Finally, I’m singing. For a moment, I feel at home as the world slows and the sun’s amber rays dance with sound. Then the dancing stops.
“Megáll!” Éva shouts. She charges at me, pushing my lower belly and grabbing my jaw. “How you plan to sing like this?!” She pauses, wading through the thick Hungarian language to find the right English words. “Singing is sport. Nehéz fizikai munka,” she says in the Hungarian-English hybrid that is to become the language of my musical education. “What sings?” she asks. “Hogy énekelsz?” she repeats in an exasperated tone.
I pause. “. . . My voice?”
“No! This sing. You sing here,” she says, jabbing my lower belly. “Not here!” Éva grabs hold of my neck. “Ismét vagy újra—Again!” Bewildered, I repeat the phrase, hoping for an improved result.
It becomes routine: I sing my heart out and Éva forcefully explains why my heart isn’t good enough. She mercilessly dissects every measure of every aria and handles my body with medical precision, tugging and pushing at my chin, cheeks, shoulders, stomach, and butt while barking out Hungarian instructions that I instinctively understand.
My insecurities motivate me. When I’m not in class, I’m Éva’s shadow. I listen as she teaches other students, hoping to glean stray wisdom while I wait to start my lesson. Once she goes home for the day, I lock myself in one of the school’s many practice ro
oms. When I’m happy with an aria, I’ll open a window and begin again. As I sing, I watch people on the square below try to find the source of the music wafting down from above. The longer they search, the more confident I become. But at night, as I lie in bed listening to my heart’s valves snap open and closed, I wonder what on earth I’m doing here.
Over time, I begin to recognize Éva’s prods as deft technical manipulations instead of unwelcome violations of my personal space. In classical singing, natural talent can be as much of a hindrance as a help. Gifted singers become dependent on old, oftentimes bad habits in lieu of building solid vocal techniques guaranteed to produce the same sound over the course of an entire career. Ultimately, the physical act of singing primarily requires coordination. Artistry can always come later.
By now, I already have my share of habits to get over, but I’m beginning to understand a basic set of principles for good singing—the most cardinal of which must be applied before a sound ever exits my mouth.
Rule number one? Breathe.
Make no mistake, learning to breathe—really breathe—is no simple feat. First, there’s proper posture: bones and their surrounding muscles from the thighs up to the forehead have to be engaged—but not tense; loose—but not sluggish; active—but not forced. As I prepare to warm up with a complicated set of arpeggios, Éva calls out a precise cue for me to expand my lungs—
“Emlékszik, böveteni . . . most!”
A chord sounds on the piano and Éva pats my lower abdomen. As I relax the muscles at the base of my torso, my diaphragm lowers and my lungs fill with air. The inhalation expands my belly, which in turn naturally moderates the exhalation. Everything starts with breath.
The next set of exercises are octave leaps on the vowel sound ah. When I hear Éva shout “Nyitva!” I obediently open my entire singing apparatus, pushing the apples of my cheeks toward my ears and my forehead toward my scalp. By lifting my cheekbones, I open my nasal cavity and ready the amphitheater of my own skull. During the next series of exercises, sung on the ee vowel, Éva takes the back of my neck and chin in her hands, massaging one and rotating the other back and forth. “Lazit,” she croons, and I relax, allowing air to travel through my larynx and sound waves to resonate off of my sinuses, unhindered by muscle tension. As we move from warm-ups to “Caro nome” from Rigoletto, Éva continues to adjust me. She rolls my hips forward, elongates the back of my neck, and rotates my shoulders back and down like a high-end yoga instructor.
Increasingly, I thrive off this intensive apprenticeship. I grow to appreciate my mistakes. My voice is like the city: beautiful and flawed. But my teachers and conductors don’t care for preconstructed ideals of vocal perfection. They’re interested in what makes a voice different. And my voice, it turns out, is very different. As my first semester comes to an end, I have requests for concerts and performances, invitations from other great European conservatories and visiting orchestras.
But in the midst of this rapid professional progress, I’m having trouble keeping up with basic activities. In February, I faint while running to catch the streetcar a block and a half from my flat. Two weeks later, I swoon into the arms of a handsome Hungarian student during a Valentine’s Day dance. In the abstract, it sounds almost romantic. In reality, it’s terrifying.
That night, I kneel by my bed and offer a fervent prayer:
Dear Heavenly Father, I am so grateful. To be alive. For my family. For the amazing opportunities I’ve been given. But I’m afraid something’s wrong with me. This is probably foolish, but if I’m all right, please, please, Dear Lord, comfort me.
I open the scriptures at random to the Book of Judges. The tale of Japheth’s daughter—a sacrificial virgin—looms up at me. Not exactly the encouragement I’m looking for right now. I call my mother, exasperated, scared, and crying.
Mom wasn’t raised religious, but she has always been a seeker. When she left home, after being admitted to the first class of women at Yale University, she dabbled in Far Eastern religions, evangelical Christianity, and Judaism. She finally found the truth she’d been seeking in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, converting to Mormonism during her freshman year of college. As my grandmother tells it, she and Didi never told Mom that she wasn’t Jewish. Then again, they didn’t tell her that she was, either. When Mom discovered her Hebrew roots, she moved to Israel. Then, after studying journalism at Stanford, she returned to New Haven for divinity school. That’s where she met my dad—a dashing, tipsy undergrad who stumbled over her one day in Woolsey Hall. He hadn’t grown up religious either, but Dad found faith when he found Mom.
It was my parents who taught me to pray and search the scriptures when I needed guidance. Still sniffling, I describe my predicament and the Bible passage I’d read to Mom over the phone—knowing she’ll understand why I’m so upset by it. There’s a moment of silence before she responds, likely filled by a brief, silent prayer on her end—
“Charity,” Mom asks calmly, “do you want to come home now?”
“No,” I reply after a pause.
“Then be careful. Go see a doctor. Don’t push yourself. We’ll figure things out when you get back.”
A few days later, a recommendation from Judit in hand, I don full winter gear and slowly scale a small hill to catch a streetcar that runs along the city’s ancient border. Rushing past Buda’s snowy hills, giant pieces of ice crash down the Danube. I finally arrive at the doctor’s office. In the examination room, the doctor takes my weight, temperature, vital signs. As the puffy blue pressure cuff loosens its grip on my arm, she speaks—
“You have low blood pressure,” she says, her accent more continental than Hungarian.
“Is that a problem?” I ask.
“Not really,” she replies, shaking her head. “Patients get a bit more caffeine or eat more salt and it goes up again.” She turns to organize her papers before catching herself. “Now, there is a very small chance it could be something more serious—”
“No,” I interrupt her. “Low blood pressure runs in my family. That must be it.” I’m not lying—Tillemann-Dicks rarely break 100 over 60—and I don’t want to hear anything about “something more serious.”
My prescription is simple and delicious: dark chocolate and salty food. They become mainstays in my diet while taxis take up an increasing portion of my budget. As my energy continues to wane, I spend more and more of what remains trying to convince myself everything will be just fine. Ambient exhaustion cuts leisure activities out of my life, refocusing me onto musicianship and musicianship alone.
It’s May 2004. I’m running late.
Andrassy Street is impossibly elegant. Lined with trees and boutiques, restaurants and theaters, it’s a more weathered take on Paris’s Champs Élysées. I sit singing scales as my grimy taxi passes the Opera House and the Hungarian National Ballet on the way to the Thália Theatre, the venue for tonight’s performance. As the driver pulls up to the curb, I spot a petite bundle of blond hair and downy blue scarves.
“Mommy!” I rush out of the car to meet her where she stands outside the theater. Mom has flown in from Denver—she insists it’s a special visit to witness this seminal moment in my career. Through happy tears, I catch a glimpse of her thousand-watt grin. We walk hand in hand to the opulent theater. Judit is waiting in my dressing room with the confection of a gown I’d been fitted for earlier that day and the most exquisite bouquet of flowers I’ve ever seen.
Orchestra members start to arrive, suited in black and white, and whispers of a standing-room-only crowd spread through the halls. Mom and Judit leave to take their seats in the audience. I stay hidden behind the curtain, looking at the crowd settle into their seats. Then, as if by magic, silence descends.
Polite applause welcomes me onto the stage as I take my place in front of the orchestra. Anticipatory energy fills the dark theater. The orchestra strikes its first chord, then the bassoon takes over in a cantorial introduction. Inhale. Exhale. I breathe in the vowels
for my first phrase, “Glitter and be gay . . . .” The strings begin and the conductor cues my entrance. I sing from a place deep within myself. My diaphragm pushes air from my lungs and I become Cunégonde from Bernstein’s Candide; a girl who has fallen from grace—a cold, sparkly, wanton example of resilience. As the aria gets under way, each lyric exploit shines like a jewel in my vocal boudoir. The song fits my voice like a pageant queen’s dress—which isn’t to say it’s not a bit tight in some places.
Many singers never quite settle into their higher tessitura—the upper reaches of their vocal range. A high note sung poorly can ruin a voice or end a career. At some point, every soprano needs faith: in her voice, in her training, in the composer. I brace myself for the final phrase of the aria, breathing deep and wide. My voice pierces the high E and the room erupts in an ovation.
For nearly five minutes, the crowd joins in synchronized applause. As it slows, I leave the stage, only to be called back as it speeds up again with renewed gusto, each reprise producing a new bouquet of flowers. When the bows finally end, I see Mom and Judit waiting backstage with Éva. I greet them, giddy with pride, relief, and gratitude. Together, we field enthusiastic theatergoers, flowers, and well wishes.
Only now do I realize the evening’s biggest challenge still lies ahead: as the antique theater lacks an elevator, I must scale the front lobby’s grand staircase to reach the post-performance reception. Even small flights of stairs totally exhaust me at this point, but I have no choice. Mom and the others walk ahead as I place my high-heeled foot on the first step to begin my ascent. At first, I’m fine; I follow Mom’s example and talk to passersby, using each introduction as an excuse to stop and catch my breath. But as I continue, I feel my heart pumping harder. Blood drains from my face and my vision begins to tunnel. I stop, steadying myself on the ornate banister. I don’t want anyone to know I’m unwell. I don’t want tonight to end with another fainting spell. Trying to pass off sluggishness for elegance, I slowly move my foot onto the next step. Then the next. Then the next. Gradually, I lurch my way up the curved vestibule toward the upper lobby. Finally, I ascend to the reception. Mom smiles proudly as her gaze lingers on me, then her attention turns back to the milieu as she’s beckoned by another guest.
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