The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer

by Renee Fleming

  Sometimes we would go out on tour. The guys in the group were a little older than I was, a little wiser. Larry Ham taught me how to make perfect omelets, and Eddie Ornowski drove me around the countryside in his big old white Cadillac with a red leather interior while listening to Schubert string quartets. I drank it all in.

  My turning point came when legendary saxophonist Illinois Jacquet came to teach a master class and suggested later that I tour with him. (He had teared up when I sang “You’ve Changed,” songs of unrequited love then being my forte.) That offer forced me to decide whether I wanted to be an opera singer or a jazz singer. In my heart, I knew I was too young and too frightened to move to New York, which a career in jazz would have required. I had not been raised to be an independent thinker. I couldn’t decide what to cook for dinner without asking someone else for guidance. Jazz is the music of free will, and I still preferred to toe the line. So I stayed with what I knew, which was how to be a student.

  After the Bach B-minor Mass, I sang Laurie in Aaron Copland’s only opera, The Tender Land, the lead in a chamber opera by Gustav Holst called The Wandering Scholar, and Elsie Maynard in a great production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Yeomen of the Guard. Those roles, along with my jazz performances, placed me before real audiences and not just teachers and classmates. The drama and dance classes I took at Potsdam were incredibly helpful to me too. If I had gone to Eastman or Juilliard as an undergraduate in those days, I wouldn’t have been able to study drama, because at that time there was no crossover between different divisions in the conservatories. This changed later when the necessity for fully rounded acting singers began to be appreciated, but by then my school days were behind me.

  My major at Potsdam was music education. My parents, forever practical, insisted that I graduate from college with a skill that would ensure me a job. They had confidence in my abilities as a singer, but they had also been in the music business long enough to see that the streets were littered with talented sopranos who couldn’t achieve a professional career. I had to be able to support myself on the very real possibility that my big dreams might never materialize. All I can say is that I’m lucky I made it as a performer, since the trials of Mozart seemed minor next to the semester I spent student-teaching in a public middle school. Eighth-graders, with their cracking voices and pinging hormones, remain one of the greatest challenges I have faced to this day. I had always respected what my parents did for a living, and had even thought I understood it, but it wasn’t until I did some time in the classroom myself that I came to see what a daunting task teaching in public schools really was. When my brother, Ted, later followed in the family tradition and became a teacher, he earned my greatest admiration.

  When the time came for me to graduate from Potsdam, I had a great deal of hesitation about leaving Pat, but she gently though firmly pushed me out of the nest. “Go out there and learn new things from different people,” she urged me. I loved Pat and appreciated all she had done for me, and, as I reminded her, a lot of singers do spend their whole professional lives with one teacher. But she was insistent that it was time for me to go. With her encouragement and a lot of nudging, I moved on to Eastman to study for a master’s degree in music.

  In my first audition at Eastman I landed the role of Zerlina in Don Giovanni in another upset, surprising everyone, most of all myself. It was my first bona fide full-scale opera production, and I was thrilled to be on the stage of the Eastman Theatre after spending so much time there when I was growing up. This was an enormously ambitious production, and the baritone and I both worked out madly at the YMCA across the street, because he had to lift me in a dance scene. During the course of my career I have sung all three female roles in Don Giovanni, and Zerlina is certainly the place to start, her “Vedrai carino” being that opera’s precious jewel of an aria. Donna Anna is the most difficult role to sing, with her two glorious scenes and one of the greatest accompanied recitatives ever composed. Da Ponte and Mozart portray her ambivalence toward Don Ottavio and then subtly allow us to surmise that Don Giovanni’s attack unleashed a repressed passion in her, followed closely by the murder of her father and then a torrent of shame and sorrow. Donna Elvira, with whom I made my inauspicious La Scala debut, is wildly temperamental and more obvious: a perfect example of fatal attraction. Mozart was the solid cornerstone of my operatic repertoire for the next ten years, and I ultimately sang nine different Mozart roles, in many different productions. The Countess in Le Nozze di Figaro served as my debut role, first as a student at the Aspen Music Festival, then in Houston, at the Met, in Paris, at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, in San Francisco, at both Spoleto Festivals, and in Hamilton, Canada, and I went on to sing her at Glyndebourne, in Geneva, and in Chicago. If anyone needed a Countess, I was the Go-to Girl, and I was lucky to have come to prominence at the commemoration of the bicentennial of Mozart’s death in 1991. Frankly, I would have chosen Berio, Puccini, Berlioz, or Stravinsky—anything but Mozart—as my introduction to the international stages of the world. While I would have preferred to avoid having to live up to his requirement of crystal-clear, naked perfection, in retrospect I’m grateful for that repertoire, as it helped protect my voice. I had no choice but to sing well and carefully for that first decade of my career, maintaining a youthful weight and quality to my voice, when the demands of other composers—full-voiced drama over a heavy orchestration—would have used me up by now, and I’d likely be hearing from opera companies, “Thank you very much, but you have a wobble and your top isn’t what it used to be.” Sheer luck again sent me into Mozart’s demanding but safe hands.

  Director Richard Pearlman was running Eastman’s opera department then, and I’ll never forget the day he played a recording of Maria Callas in a class devoted to her art. He had known her, and he loved to tell a story about offering Callas a cup of cocoa during a rehearsal in Dallas. She refused it, saying, “No, thanks, honey, chocolate gives me pimples.” The story made a huge impression on me, not so much her response as his reverence for her. All those years later you could still see the power she had over him as a young director. Every soprano in the class sat there thinking, What would that be like? As we listened to her singing he would tell us that her voice was beautiful, as if it were an objective fact rather than a controversial opinion. The first time I heard a Callas recording—and, for that matter, one by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf—I didn’t understand why they were considered iconic when to my ear they weren’t even particularly accomplished singers. Callas’s voice seemed unattractive, with its overly covered, steely edge and its wide vibrato on top, and Schwarzkopf ’s vocal production struck me as uneven and eccentric, however beautiful the voice. But as often is the case with things that are unusual and unfamiliar, we develop a taste for them. We come to love certain voices because of their very flaws, their strangeness, and, most important, the way they can be identified by little more than a single note. After I had listened long enough and thoughtfully enough to these two sopranos, I came to a point where my heart belonged to both of them, along with those of their millions of other fans. I was probably especially sensitive to the idea of flaws at this time because I was trying so hard to iron out my own. Arleen Augér once remarked to John Maloy, who was one of my teachers at Eastman, that I’d be great if I could only get my technique together. I had the talent and the discipline, but I was still learning to sing, which meant I had plenty of kinks to work out if I wanted to make a career of singing. And while I had some successes at Eastman, I had my share of dismal failures as well—the very worst being my first audition for the Met National Council Auditions, a program designed to assist promising young singers in the development of their careers.

  My accompanist was Richard Bado, a friend and a fellow student at Eastman. I was a quick study even then, and that talent did nothing but exacerbate my tendency toward procrastination. I memorized Pamina’s aria from Die Zauberflöte, “Ach, ich fühl’s,” the week before the audition. My parents were in the audience with se
veral of my friends, and the adjudicating panel, which had flown in to represent the Met, was right in the middle. I was polished and brushed and made up and well dressed, and as I looked out at all the people who loved me and the people who wanted me to do well and the people who were ready to give me a chance, I fell apart completely. We’re talking white knuckles. All I could do was fantasize about fainting or falling through a hole in the stage. So many nervous singers long to fall through nonexistent stage holes that I have to wonder why recital halls across the world don’t just go ahead and saw them into the floor-boards. “Ach, ich fühl’s” is a very exposed aria, sung for the most part very quietly. That’s always been the thing that frightens me the most: anything that’s exposed. Not the fireworks, fioriture, leaps, trills, or chest tones—those I can file my nails by. The terrifying place is that soft pitch in the middle voice. That drenches me in cold sweat. This was one of the first pieces I’d sung with this kind of exposure, so you have to wonder what I was thinking of when I chose it for such an important audition. My throat tightened completely. My breath stopped working, and I had a flutter in my sound that you could drive a truck through. I can still see my family’s faces fall, and everyone in the house just sitting there with a look of growing embarrassment. Richard Bado told me later that he wanted to stand up in the middle of the audition and say, “We’re going to stop now. She can do so much better than this, and I think we should just try again another year.”

  When it was finally over, after what felt like twenty years of standing there with my throat in a vise grip, I had my first real existential crisis. I saw a school-appointed therapist for the first time to discuss my growing realization that I didn’t even understand what I was doing in graduate school. All I’d ever known was how to please others and how to do the right thing so that I could see a positive reflection of myself in their eyes. I was so steeped in the role of good girl that when I once skipped an opera rehearsal to attend a Bonnie Raitt concert, I couldn’t enjoy it for the intense nausea I was experiencing. I’d been the perfect chameleon, becoming whomever the person I was talking to wanted me to be, and I don’t mean only my parents or my teachers. I would behave this way with complete strangers. Somehow my botched audition brought all of that crashing down on my head. As a result of it, I started to pull together a genuine sense of who I was and what I wanted. It was then that music became mine for the first time, as I started to take responsibility for what I really wanted to achieve. This was not an amazing transformation, and it is one that many young performers experience, but it was the beginning of my real growth. John Maloy was very supportive through all of this, telling me it was all going to work out, and I believed him.

  As much as I struggled with my fears, it never once occurred to me to just stop trying. My parents had drilled into me the code of Never Give Up. In my family, you didn’t admit defeat, or change your mind and go on to something else. The core of my mother’s philosophy, whether it involved being in a play or taking piano lessons or having a horse, was that you can take on anything you want, but you can’t quit.

  When I look back on it now, I can see that this crisis was inevitable. If it hadn’t been the Met audition, it would have been something else. The passivity of my desire to please was holding me back from going on to the next level in my development. I needed to kick up all this dust and start questioning things so that I could learn the answers and move on. What I finally discovered was that in fact I really did love music, and especially singing, and I loved to learn about singing. It was time for me to stop worrying so much about what other people thought. It’s such a simple concept but it was completely foreign to me.

  My parents had divorced in 1981, and in the winter of 1983 my mother and her new husband, George Alexander, had a baby, my brother Geordie. I was there at the hospital waiting while she went into labor, and at the last minute I was invited in for the big event. There was my mother, at the age of forty-five, having her fourth baby! It was the moment I knew that I would have children myself one day. This angelic, curly-haired, towheaded baby is now Bryn Terfel-sized and is studying voice. He shadowed me in London last summer to see if the operatic lifestyle was one he could live with. The talent is there, but only time and his own strong desire to sing will tell.

  That year I spent the first of several summers singing and studying at the Aspen Music Festival. It was a very sweet time in my life, with blue skies, serious musicians, and endless possibilities. I bicycled seven miles up to the Maroon Bells and back down every day. The glorious scenery was there for me no matter where I looked. After a winter in Rochester, a summer in Aspen is an almost unimaginable reward, and every year I could hardly wait to pack up my suitcase and my bicycle and get back there. I had applied to a lot of summer programs, but the only two that accepted me were Aspen and the Spoleto Festival. I have a noble history of being rejected by a lot of places, only to discover that the one that finally lets me in is in fact the perfect fit.

  For two of my summers at Aspen I studied with Jan DeGaetani. She was a tremendous role model as a musician, above all. Her love of music and her gratitude for her art manifested itself through tears at nearly every master class. We students felt as if we had been granted membership in a clandestine and exclusive club, meeting in her crowded living room, singing for one another and discussing in hushed voices the intricacies of a text, the use of dynamics and resonance. I also met Ed Berkeley, who directed me in one of the best theatrical experiences I’ve had to this day, Conrad Susa’s opera Transformations, a setting of Anne Sexton’s poetry in which I played Sexton. We spent days on end just reading and analyzing her poems. The following summer I was cast as the Countess in Le Nozze di Figaro, in which Jorge Mester, who was the festival’s director, heard me. It was he who suggested that I go to Juilliard for a postgraduate program, the next step in my education. One of the many reasons that my work is so endlessly exciting is that you never know who is going to be in the audience or the orchestra pit, holding your fate in his hands.

  CHAPTER THREE

  APPRENTICESHIP

  THE HEAD OF Juilliard’s opera department was Erica Gastelli, an incredibly elegant Italian woman who was always perfectly put together in a way that seemed at once flawless and effortless. Whenever I think of her, I see a beautiful necklace she wore, which was made out of huge chunks of golden amber. The first thing I did when I made a little bit of money as a singer was to buy myself an amber necklace. This is often the way we put together our lives, adding the striking qualities of others into our own character. Whether it was Erica Gastelli’s style or Elisabeth Schwarzkopf ’s ease with languages or Beverly Sills’s ability to draw her public close to her, I made a careful study of the qualities I admired and did my best to emulate them. The other students in the program and I used to impersonate Erica’s thick Italian accent, mimicking the way she criticized our hair or our clothes, beginning with a finger-wagging “Oh, Renée . . . ,” followed by “Why would you wear that aaawful dress?”

  It was Erica who had called me at my parents’ house right after I’d come home from Aspen to announce, “You have been accepted to the Juilliard program. We would like you to sing Musetta in La Bohème.” She had a very low speaking voice, very formal—the kind of voice that makes you stand up straighter even if you’re only speaking on the phone, the kind of voice that under normal circumstances would have demanded a very dignified response. At this moment, though, I had no dignity. I felt as if I had been shot out of a cannon. I dropped the phone and screamed, running through the house, crying, “Juilliard! Juilliard!” My mother was home, as were Ted and Rachelle, and they joined in the shouting. It was pure bedlam, as it would be the three or so times later in my life when the truly great phone calls arrived. When I finally remembered what I had done, I crept back into the kitchen and picked the phone up off the floor, certain that if Erica was still on the line she would inform me that Juilliard had changed its mind. She was not amused; but then, as I was to find out later, she w
as never amused.

  Juilliard had a postgraduate training program then called the American Opera Center. Being accepted there was an enormous boon to me for many reasons, not the least of which was that it was free. For two and a half years I could audit any language class and study voice, perform in opera productions, and coach both music and diction. The only expenses I had to cover were my room and board. I could never have afforded to live in New York City and pay for so much instruction. I would have been lucky to manage the occasional voice lesson, maybe a bit of coaching, but I never would have been able to learn as much as I did. I still had a very long way to go.

  After witnessing my heartbreak over the failed Met audition and the tumultuous period of growth that followed, my father didn’t want me moving to New York. “You’ll end up jumping off a bridge,” he warned me. He worried that living in the city would overwhelm me, but I loved it. I found a temp job in Rockefeller Center with a group of opera singers at a law firm, assigned to an enormous asbestos case—a case from which my own grandfather ultimately would benefit. The firm had well-educated, reliable, and honest workers in us, and we had almost complete flexibility regarding our hours. I had earlier acquired excellent secretarial and touch-typing skills while temping, which was probably related to the eye-hand coordination I had developed through years of studying piano. This job enabled me to take advantage of everything Juilliard had to offer. I also added to my income by singing in New York City churches, which used students to supplement their amateur choral ranks.