Stand Up Straight and Sing!

by Jessye Norman

  As it happened, in just three short years after her defection, Claudia would be reunited with her mother—a reunion that came not from any clandestine arrangements, but from a much greater miracle: the collapse of the Berlin Wall. I happened to be performing in Taiwan when suddenly, seemingly without fanfare, it was announced that after years of being trapped within the borders of East Berlin, people could now “cross the street” freely. At the time, the Chinese government in Beijing (or Peking, as we called it then) was inviting people from the West to observe innovative surgical procedures that were reportedly being performed without anesthesia, utilizing only acupuncture and the music of Mozart to control pain. The science fascinated me, and I was doing everything I could to get there to witness one of these operations. But the United States was having its usual troubles with the Chinese government at the time, which made it very difficult for Americans to get to Beijing. Due to the political stalemate between China and Taiwan, there were not (and still are not) any direct flights from Taiwan to Beijing. It would have been necessary to fly through Hong Kong. And even if I could have secured a flight, the all-important visa for entering mainland China remained elusive. Still, though, the procedure was very much on my mind.

  The person who arrived to escort me to the concert that evening called my hotel room to say that I was to be ready in thirty minutes. Then, minutes later, the phone rang again and I, thinking it was the same person, answered, “No, no, I know—I’ll be down in thirty minutes.” To my surprise, the call was from a friend of mine in Germany. I became concerned immediately, fearing that it was bad news or yet another story of injustice in this divided nation. Instead, he declared simply: “The wall is coming down.” Honestly, at first I thought he was talking about the Great Wall of China! He said, “No, no, the Berlin Wall.”

  I turned on CNN and saw a crowd of people tearing down the wall, some, it seemed, with their bare hands, others with hatchets. I was so excited that I went downstairs, telling everyone I saw, “Do you know what is happening in the world? Do you know what is happening in Germany?”

  Singing that night was a great relief, while the extraordinary was happening in a city where my performance life had had its birth. My accompanist on this tour was Phillip Moll, who lived in Berlin. When I told him what was happening, he was incredulous and asked me to repeat what I had said. That night, the music poured through us and from us. The excitement, the music, the knowledge, the fact that the two of us—two Americans—had this connection with Berlin was amazing in every way.

  I traveled to Berlin soon after and went to Potsdamer Platz, where I was able to find a small piece of what had been the Berlin Wall. I took it and held it in my hands, and then thought, I’ll take this back to the States with me. I often say that I grew up in Berlin, because I went to live in this country at such an early age, thinking at the time that I knew something about the world. But it was here that I came to understand something of the vastness of this planet, the gulfs that exist among us. There were people who lived behind a wall that had been erected in their lifetime. A person living in Berlin in 1960 could move about the city without a great deal of difficulty. And then, an international political decision divided this city in 1961. Now, some of these same people lived to see the Wall and the political stance that had created it collapse. Germany would be reunited. At least that one gulf had been bridged.

  I was in Germany in November of that wonderful year, 1989, to make a recording. The Wall had begun to crumble just two weeks earlier. By chance, a recording had been scheduled to take place in this period two years prior to this monumental happening, and it would take place in Dresden, which was suddenly no longer behind a wall! The recording was of Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio, the theme of which is political persecution.

  The timing was impeccable. The streets were full of people simply meeting and hugging one another. Some, from the former West Berlin, carried crates of fresh fruit that they offered to all whom they passed, as they knew all too well that months and even years could pass with their East German families and friends not having sight of fresh grapes, for example.

  I witnessed a young boy on the street showing an adult man how to first peel and then eat a kiwi. As simple as that; as momentous as that.

  In complete contrast to my many other visits to the eastern part of this country, there were copies of newspapers from the West left lying around on tabletops. Freedom has many faces, many expressions. There were copies of the Economist, Time, and Der Spiegel sitting nonchalantly on a table. Such publications were seeing the light of day legally for the first time in this part of the country. Just a few weeks earlier, one could have been fined or even jailed for subversion for spreading ideas contrary to the communist system that had long since failed, but which had refused to lie down and die.

  THE RECORDING SESSIONS produced some wonderful results, especially from the marvelously trained men’s chorus. At one point in the opera, the male chorus sings of the glory of release from imprisonment. In the Dresden recording session one day, the singing of just one word—Freiheit—freedom, was done with such power by this chorus as to have almost shattered the walls of the hall. Imagine singing this word and meaning it, truly, for the first time in your life! Of course the sound would originate in the deepest part of you and ring out like no other in such a moment in time.

  People were joyful and open and smiling from a real place in their spirits, not a pretense, not to cover extreme distress, but genuine happiness. It was truly something to witness, and it was easy to feel like a bit player in the tremendous drama of those days: a country reunited and a world observing the stunning shattering of an old order.

  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once stated, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

  And so with whatever hammering and cutting tools they could find, quickly and with their bare hands, the symbol, the enshrinement of this horror, was beaten to the ground.

  O namenlose Freude, Fidelio • LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN • Oh, Joy Beyond Naming

  ***

  O, namenlose Freude! Oh, joy beyond naming

  An Leonorens Brust! The comfort of Leonore’s breast

  Nach unnennbarer Leiden After unspeakable suffering

  So übergrosse Lust. This larger than life pleasure.

  O Gott, wie gross ist dein Erbarmen! Oh God, how great is Your Grace.

  O Dank dir, Gott, für diese Lust! Oh thanks to God for this delight

  Mein Weib, mein Weib My wife, my bride

  An meiner Brust! Du bist’s! On my breast; you, Leonore, you are!

  O himmliches Entzücken! Oh, the Goodness of Heaven

  Ich bin’s Leonore! I am your Leonore

  Leonore! Leonore

  The author at age thirteen.

  All photos from the author’s personal collection, except where otherwise noted.

  With other finalists of the Bavarian Radio International Music Competition, Munich, September 1968. I was honored to be awarded first prize.

  The front page of the The Augusta Chronicle, reporting that local philanthropist Peter Knox IV had donated the building that would house the Jessye Norman School of the Arts in Augusta, Georgia, my hometown.

  The Augusta Chronicle

  With President Barack Obama and Ben Vereen at Ford’s Theatre in Washington D.C., 2009, for a concert commemorating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.

  Performing the role of Sélika in Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera L’Africaine at the Maggio Musicale in Florence, 1971.

  Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

  Aida at La Scala, Milan, 1972.

  Archivio la Scala

  In the recording studio with British mezzo-soprano Dame Janet Baker.

  As Phèdre in Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, 1982.

  Aix-en-Provence Festival

  With pianist Dalton Baldwin, a longtime collaborator.

  As Cassandra
in Les Troyens by Hector Berlioz, 1983, my Metropolitan Opera debut.

  The Metropolitan Opera Archives

  With conductor/violinist Vladimir Spivakov.

  The Metropolitan Opera Archives

  As Dido in Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, 1984.

  Opéra-Comique de Paris

  With accompanist Phillip Moll, with whom I worked for many years.

  With conductor Claudio Abbado at the Edinburgh Festival.

  With conductor Seiji Ozawa during a recording session.

  With conductor James Levine.

  With James Levine in recital.

  As Elisabeth in Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Metropolitan Opera. Some years before, I had made my operatic debut in this role at the Deutsche Oper Berlin.

  The Metropolitan Opera Archives

  As Ariadne in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos at the Metropolitan Opera.

  The Metropolitan Opera Archives

  With Yves Montand.

  At a dress fitting with Azzedine Alaïa and Jean-Paul Goude, for the bicentennial of the French Revolution.

  As Judith in the Metropolitan Opera production of Bluebeard’s Castle by Béla Bartók, with Samuel Ramey in the role of Bluebeard.

  The Metropolitan Opera Archives

  As Alceste in Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Alceste at Lyric Opera of Chicago.

  Lyric Opera of Chicago Archives

  Being awarded the French Légion d’Honneur at the Palais Royale in Paris.

  As Sieglinde in Wagner’s Die Walküre at the Metropolitan Opera, with Gary Lakes as Siegmund.

  The Metropolitan Opera Archives

  As Kundry in the Metropolitan Opera production of Wagner’s Parsifal, with Plácido Domingo in the title role.

  The Metropolitan Opera Archives

  Shaking hands with Hillary Rodham Clinton at a White House state dinner for the Prime Minister of South Korea, November 1993.

  White House Photo Office

  With Girl Scouts and students from LaGuardia High School for Take Our Daughters to Work Day at the Metropolitan Opera.

  As Jocasta in Oedipus Rex by Igor Stravinsky, in a production by Julie Taymor in Matsumoto, Japan.

  Saito Kinen Festival

  As Emilia Marty in the Metropolitan Opera’s first-ever production of Leoš Janáček’s The Makropulos Case.

  The Metropolitan Opera Archives

  Performing Arnold Schoenberg’s monodrama Erwartung at the Salzburg Festival, in a production by Robert Wilson.

  Salzburg Festival

  With President Bill Clinton following his second inaugural address.

  White House Photo Office

  Presentation of the Kennedy Center Honors at the White House with President Clinton, December 1997.

  White House Photo Office

  With the Norman family at the White House reception for the Kennedy Center Honors.

  White House Photo Office

  Singing atop Masada for the fiftieth anniversary of the State of Israel.

  With Anna Deveare Smith.

  Jenny Warburg

  With Gloria Steinem and Sonia Sanchez.

  Jenny Warburg

  With my present piano accompanist, Mark Markham, at a gala benefit for Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center.

  With flutist Alain Marion.

  Performing in the Statuary Hall of the United States Capitol Building in July 2013 for the congressional commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington.

  7

  The Singing Craft as Art Form

  “OH, GLORY!”

  Oh, Glory; there is room enough in Paradise

  To have a home in Glory.

  Jesus my Lord to Heaven is gone,

  To have a home in glory,

  He, whom I’ve fixed my hopes upon,

  To have a home in glory.

  Singing gives me many rewards and many blessings for all the hard work it requires and on which it depends. Only through hard work can such a craft rise to the level of art.

  Singing, for me, is actually life itself. It is communication, person to person and soul to soul, a physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual expression carried by the breath. Life!

  WE CAN APPROXIMATE and thereby appreciate the physical act of oxygen rushing in great waves throughout the body, as it does in singing, by distance running or a vigorous bicycle ride. Oxygen flow is deeply satisfying to me, as is my ability to communicate through poems and prose, often in centuries-old texts that can illuminate our thoughts and lives today. Songs that revel in the beauty of taking time to enjoy nature’s splendor, or to fall in love. There are a million songs about love—unrequited love, secret love, the love of a father for a son, or a mother for a daughter, or perverted, inappropriate love, like that which Jocasta holds for her son in Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, or Phèdre for Hippolyte. Conveying each of these ideas to an audience with words and music can be physically and mentally invigorating.

  I love the discipline involved in bringing the breath out of my lungs and past my vocal chords with a specific control that gives me a certain quality of sound: singing! Music gives wings to words—makes it possible to say “I love you” to a person in the most moving, touching, personal way. So much so that the one who hears these words can walk away with a melody that lingers. The words have a tune to accompany the beautiful sentiment. This does not mean that the words are less meaningful if offered without music; it is simply that the music adds yet another dimension to their meaning. I am thankful that I can employ my voice to convey these meanings. Of course, a lot of music we listen to and adore has no words at all. Sometimes you can think of words that might fit an instrumental melody just because of the way that it touches you: the haunting sounds that come through the instrument, the depth of color or the beautiful length of the phrases. Each of these things can cause you to think, Oh, wouldn’t it be lovely to have words to that! Some composers, particularly of that grand period of European songwriting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, would begin their compositions with the text and then compose the music. But there were composers like Johannes Brahms who would sometimes compose the melody first, and then look for a suitable text. Either approach could yield a song deeply satisfying for its ability to touch, to speak, to inspire.

  I do tend to gravitate toward operatic characters that are multidimensional, complex. I love to sing the stories of women for whom I am capable of empathy. For me, it is both interesting and challenging to delve into a complicated character and role, such as Virgil’s Dido, who, after losing her husband and taking on the responsibility of seeing to the full economic resurgence of Carthage and its return to its place of honor and proper reverence in the eyes of the world, allows herself to fall in love again, against her better judgment—only to have Aeneas, the man whom she allows herself to love thoroughly, leave her. He considers his call to duty more significant than the love he feels for her. And what a duty it was: he would go on to found Rome!

  Dido’s reaction to this tragic turn of events, as taken from the fourth book of Virgil’s Aeneid and translated into beautiful French, set to the meltingly romantic music of Berlioz, is, I feel, one of opera’s greatest treasures. I feel the same way about Erwartung of Schoenberg, the one-woman opera in which the character surges and suffers through a wide range of emotion as she searches frantically in the darkness for her lover, only to find that he has been murdered. She is at once frightened, angry, apprehensive, unsure, insecure. Alone. It is possible for me to sing this particular opera, which spans little more than half an hour, in three different characterizations: as the person who has committed the murder, as the person who has observed the murder, and as the person who is imagining these dire events in her head. This type of complexity is the kind of challenge that I grab with both hands! I am sure when I say such things that Sigmund Freud, who was Schoenberg’s contemporary, would have his own interesting interpretation of what goes on inside my head.
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  Our responsibility as singers is to find a level of reality in the sometimes complex characters that we portray. I enjoy becoming deeply conversant with that hurt, that aching, that yearning, that joy, to truly understand the role, and use all of this to reveal the character as fully as I can onstage. It truly is not necessary that the audience should speak and understand every word that I sing in a foreign language, but I must convey the very essence of the texts I am singing. If the audience is not able to glean that I am extremely distressed, or that something wonderful has just happened, or that I am anticipating something that could be a challenge to life and limb, then I am not doing my job. To be able to communicate these everyday emotions is the basis, the thrust, of acting. Acting must support a singer’s onstage work.