The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer

by Renee Fleming

  I think of my voice as an hourglass. The bottom has breadth and width and a color that is deeper and darker. As I go up through the passaggio, which for me consists of the tones between E-flat and F-sharp at the top of the staff, I must imagine a sound that is narrow, like the waist of the hourglass. The passaggio is slim and focused, and there can be no pressure or weight there, just as you wouldn’t want to put any weight on such a delicate passageway of glass. As the voice moves into the top of the hourglass, the sound can open up and blossom. It takes on warmer colors and more breadth again. Every voice is different, and many singers might think of their voices as a column that is even all the way up and down, but for me the defining feature is the curve, the passaggio.

  It’s in the dangerous straits of the passaggio that many singers come to grief. They try to carry the full weight of the middle voice up through it, muscling their way to the top, or they carry the head voice down, causing weakness and fatigue in the bottom. Singers can also get away with a lot based on youth, strength, and enthusiasm, only to find ten years later that what was once just a niggling problem has brought their careers to an end. Lower-passaggio tones between the chest voice and middle voice are also problematic for women, especially for mezzo-sopranos. When we speak of a singer as having two or three voices, it’s because she has allowed these transitions to become abrupt gear shifts, which can be fine for dramatic emphasis or for Hank Williams Sr., but a steady diet of them isn’t recommended for a classically trained voice.

  I had a great deal of admiration for Arleen, not only as a singer but as a person. She had very high principles and she was always clear about where she stood on every issue. Early in our lessons she said to me, “I will teach you to the best of my ability, but I will not help you professionally, because really, you young singers are breathing down my neck. Professionally, you are on your own.”

  Coming from anyone else, such a declaration could have been off-putting to say the least, but Arleen presented it as simply a statement of fact, making it clear how she could help and how she couldn’t. I appreciated that kind of candor, as it meant that our lessons stayed purely in the realm of learning an art form, and I could, at least for the time I was with her, leave the business of business at the door. Of course, Arleen did help me professionally, not only by improving my voice but by virtue of the fact that I could cite her as one of my major teachers.

  I had completely the opposite experience that same year in Germany with a Canadian soprano, a woman I had never studied with, or even met, named Edith Wiens. She had a huge concert career in Germany, and I was fortunate enough to encounter her at a rehearsal of Britten’s War Requiem in which she was singing the soprano solo. I had taken a seat in the front row, with only a handful of people in the audience, and I loved the piece so much that I must have sat there beaming through the entire rehearsal. When it was over, she came up to me and asked, “Who are you?” After I introduced myself she told me, “I love your face. I love what you gave to me in this rehearsal. How can I help you?” She sat down with me, a complete stranger, and wrote out the names of all the important managers in Germany. She gave me a couple of hours’ worth of business classes, telling me all about how to get started as a singer. It was strange and lucky that I found those two halves of what I needed in different people, and that they came together to form such a complementary whole.

  I had come to Germany armed only with some French from school, which of course wasn’t very useful. I had one month of intense study at a Goethe Institute on the Rhine before my studies began. After braving the train from the airport alone, with my two suitcases, which were meant to hold a year’s worth of my belongings, I arrived at my rented room, which belonged to a kindly retired couple. I walked around the village and was immediately picked out as an American by a brash local who spoke a little English and invited me for coffee. I nearly choked on my first taste of Sprudel water, and after he left, when I reached for a Brötchen, the waitress nearly slapped my hand. I felt like Dorothy, hungry on the yellow brick road, trying to pick an apple only to be angrily rebuked by the apple tree. Needless to say, I had no clue that she was telling me that unlike at home, bread had to be paid for. I scurried back to my room and didn’t leave it until classes began the following morning.

  I ultimately enjoyed my intensive language study, both for the lessons themselves and for the stimulation of an international student body. I was pleasantly surprised one day before graduation when our teacher pulled me aside and said that if my singing career didn’t work out, I could pursue a career as a linguist. So, armed with what I believed was some degree of facility in the German language, I was placed with a family for a month in Frankfurt before my music studies were to begin. At the end of our first afternoon together, I remember thinking, Okay, this is a nightmare. I could not understand a word that anyone said—not a single word. And the Schulz family made no concessions to me either, by speaking slowly or simply. They just lived their lives—teaching me how to knit and to pick edible mushrooms and to light real candles on Christmas trees; discussing art and technology—and talked as if I could keep up. And eventually I did. By the end of this year of total immersion, I had learned to speak fairly fluent German, which has only become stronger with time. Whenever I return to Germany, people say to me, “I can’t believe how much your German has grown!” But I think that once the foundation is laid, the neurons just keep firing. Languages always improve for me over the years, regardless of whether or not I use them very consistently, in much the same way as music. The roles I have learned deepen and acquire more layers without my studying them or singing them or even thinking about them in between performances. The fact that music is as much a language as German or French is one aspect of learning that fascinates me.

  After I left my new friends, the Schulzes, I moved into a dorm, a high-rise Studentenheim, where I had a tiny room and shared a common bathroom and kitchen with the other students. At the Hochschule für Musik, I befriended a British woman named Helen Yorke, a pianist. We were both so relieved on the first day of school, literally the first day, to find someone we could talk with. Helen and I laughed together constantly. We went to concerts and coffeehouses, endlessly discussing music and home and the future, reveling in the sound of each other’s English. Helen played many recitals for me after that.

  I applied to the opera department at the Hochschule but was rejected. As was true at so many points in my life, being turned down proved to be a stroke of luck. Excellent opera instruction was easy to come by at home; what I got instead was something much more valuable and rare: a year in which to study exclusively German lieder with Hartmut Höll. I thought he was a musical genius, illuminating for us his unconventional interpretations of the Wolf, Webern, and Schubert songs we were studying, and I’m honored now to have opportunities to share the concert stage with him. Helen and I coached with him as much as he would allow. Though it wasn’t a style that would have worked for everybody, I loved his way of dissecting every note. Faced with his method, many students would balk: “I don’t want to do it the way you’re doing it. I have a different idea about that phrase. Just give me a framework so I can develop my own interpretation,” but I used his interpretations as a template for forging my own, years later.

  It seemed that everywhere I turned in Germany, another golden opportunity was waiting. I also studied lieder with Rainer Hoffmann that year, combing the vast lied repertoire for undiscovered jewels. He later pointed me to Schubert’s “Viola,” which became the cornerstone of my Schubert recording and my Salzburg recital debut with Christoph Eschenbach. Imagine a whole year in which to indulge the thirst for the discovery of literature that Pat Misslin had instilled in me. With my Studentenausweis (student ID card), I also went to the opera three times a week for three or four dollars, soaking up new repertoire, absorbing every scrap of culture I could. The Frankfurt Opera was under the music directorship of the conductor Michael Gielen, who encouraged truly cutting-edge theatrical work at tha
t time. Ruth Berghaus’s productions there were famous, as was an Aida in which Aida is a modern-day Putzfrau, a cleaning lady, in a contemporary museum of ancient artifacts. Audiences would be screaming at the end of performances, whether booing or cheering, and fights would break out—and all over an opera! It was thrilling. My favorite opera was Strauss’s Capriccio. I would sit through the entire piece, barely understanding a single phrase, just to get to the final scene. My taste in what constitutes a successful operatic performance was developed that year. I realized that I wanted to believe fully in the characters and the story and I wanted to be moved. Vocal shortcomings were always distracting, as was a “diva” performance of Mimì or the Countess, since I couldn’t forget the performer. When the piece was over, I would get on my bicycle and ride back to the dorm, singing to myself phrases of what I had just heard and dreaming of someday sharing the stage with the wonderful artists I had seen that evening.

  Professionally, I was growing quickly, but personally, I was miserable at times. It took me six months to gain enough comfort in the language so that I could communicate with other students and begin to socialize. Helpfully, Arleen sat me down shortly after I arrived and said, “Everything here is based on some form of one-upmanship. And if you can get comfortable with that, people aren’t offended. Nobody gets angry, nobody holds a grudge, but assertiveness is respected.” That at least gave me some sort of framework for what I was experiencing. My biggest triumph came at the end of the year when somebody cut in front of me at a vending machine and I cut back in front of him and said, “I was here first.” To do all of this in a foreign language was doubly challenging. Germany taught me a great lesson, because while situations could often seem aggressive, nothing was personal. Once I understood that there was no emotion behind the attitude, it just became a different way of maneuvering through the day. I also learned to be genuinely grateful for the directness of my fellow students. If I had an off day singing, they would simply say, “You sound terrible today.” At Juilliard, no one would have dreamt of offering so blunt an opinion, but they would have whispered it in the hallway after I left. There’s a comfort in always knowing where you stand, and in Germany I knew where I stood, every minute, every note.

  I’ve never been sure if sensitivity is a burden or a gift. The part of me that is moved to tears over a piece of music is the same part of me that can put that much feeling back into what I sing. On the other hand, when a nest of baby rabbits I was taking care of as a girl died, I was devastated beyond all reason. When a boy blew smoke in my face at a junior-high-school party, I thought I’d have to be carried out on a stretcher. In Germany, several things happened that sent me reeling. One was seeing an Iranian political protest poster in the hallway of my dorm, picturing a man being dismembered. I had a similar experience years later viewing the film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. While I believe that extreme emotion is a reasonable response to extreme cruelty, I knew I had to toughen up if I was going to get through life, to find a way to stay vulnerable to certain things while at the same time growing more thick-skinned about life in general. All of my emotions sat too close to the skin, and I needed to rein them in. For me that was as much a physical process as learning how to connect through my registers.

  Of course, there are some circumstances that would reduce almost anyone to a quivering bowl of Jell-O.

  If I had been asked how I felt about Elisabeth Schwarzkopf before I took her master class, I would have said that a week’s work with her was reason enough to spend a year in Germany. By now I had come to idolize her, and she only reinforced those feelings when she walked into the room that first day and spoke in three different languages to three different students inside of two minutes without missing a beat. It made a powerful first impression. Even by her very entrance, she epitomized everything I wanted to be: smart and glamorous and in command. She was the kind of person who brought the room to hushed attention just by walking into it. Everyone wanted to please her.

  We worked with her in two long sessions, every day, for a week. Master classes are themselves a form of entertainment, conducted before an audience, which creates a very specific kind of dynamic. In our public, evening classes, Schwarzkopf chose to entertain her audience, but often at the expense of the students she was teaching. In my own case, one day I was the golden girl and the next I could do nothing right. I would sing two notes, and her hand would slice through the air to cut me off: “Nein, das ist es nicht.”

  I would attempt the two notes again, and she would shake her head. “Haben Sie nicht verstanden? Nochmals!”

  My shoulders were drawing up toward my neck, my breath tightening. The other students looked away from me, relieved that for a moment I was the object of her attention. I tried again, and this time she was right: I sounded awful.

  I was young, probably too young, and certainly not a finished singer. I’m sure she worked much better with performers who were ready for her, who were more confident in what they were doing. I wanted desperately to please her. I would have sung balanced on my nose if she had asked me. Yet even in the worst moments when she would interrupt me to sing a note or a phrase herself, I would think, Oh, my God, it’s her! It’s her voice! It’s that silvery tone!

  Fortunately, she was also imparting a lot of information. Her interpretive advice was brilliant and gave me more of a foundation for understanding how to use language in lieder. Further, I had always concentrated on making a healthy sound, but she was the first person who ever said to me, “You are responsible for the sound you make, the actual tone quality and whether or not it is beautiful.” It was a powerful statement coming from her, since her own sound was so strangely manufactured, which is the very quality in her voice that I have come to develop a taste for over the years. She was the one who encouraged me to find a sound that was beautiful. Until then, my sound had often been criticized as too bright, even strident.

  Ultimately, it was one vocal concept she imparted that added another important piece to the puzzle of my voice. She introduced me to the idea of covering. Nearly all tenors and baritones cover if they want to maneuver well into the top. For women, it’s optional. In covering, as a singer moves up through the high passaggio, the transition area, she changes the very direction of the flow of air. Her use of resonance transforms the sound from a forward-placed, bright one that is entirely open to an almost oh or ooh position, directed toward the soft palate. The basic forward direction of the sound is never abandoned; a “domed” quality is added just above the passaggio. This gives the tone a covered sound, as if the singer has just taken a bright tone and put a lid on it. High notes can then bloom without pressure, as opposed to being harsh or spread.

  As negative as the Schwarzkopf master-class experience seemed to me at the time, I look back on it now and can appreciate the two-year-long technical search she sent me on. Without it, and another six months at Juilliard fine-tuning my voice, I don’t know how I would ever have found security at the top of my range. And what’s a soprano without high notes? Schwarzkopf also established the very model of what a great Strauss singer is today, changing the focus from cantabile expression to declamatory expression, and emphasizing text over music. It sounds like something Strauss himself might have written an opera about.

  My week with Schwarzkopf contributed to the development of my own philosophy about the purpose and benefit of master classes. The student who takes part in them has a very short exposure to the teacher, who is often an idol, which gives each criticism or bit of praise heightened importance. While useful information can be imparted, there is never a follow-up session to see if these concepts have been correctly assimilated. Today, in my own master classes, I try to be generally diagnostic, always with the disclaimer that the student should discuss my ideas with his own teacher. I am also conscious of including the student in any “jokes,” so that no one feels as if he is being ridiculed. I enjoy entertaining the audience, but I never do so by undermining a student’s budding confide
nce in a very difficult art.

  Several different talents contribute to making a great teacher. Diagnostic skill is the first and most complex. Analyzing a voice and discerning why it isn’t functioning freely, beautifully, and artistically are like trying to dissect a snowflake. Each instrument is entirely different from all the others, because each mind and each body that produce it are different. Because the instrument itself can’t even be seen, one can only guess at the underlying faults by reading signals of tension, hearing fine gradations in use of resonance, and unlocking inhibitions and creativity in each young mind. The second major requirement is the ability to prescribe solutions for whatever these vocal issues are. If a singer cannot, say, descrescendo without the tone’s cutting out, or if she cannot sing above the staff at all, a teacher must have at hand the relevant exercises, images, and physiological explanations that might address the problem. And the solutions for one singer may not work for another. Among the important realizations I had in my own days in the practice room was that if one route to any one phrase didn’t work after days of trying, then the exact opposite route should at least be explored, as well as every alternative in between, as counterintuitive as that often seemed.

  I sometimes think it’s a miracle that anyone learns how to sing well, given the complexity of the instrument. It’s not surprising, for example, that most great singers do not become great teachers. Some will openly admit that they haven’t a clue how to explain what they do, and some can explain only that, without being able to apply it to other voices. The greatest barrier between the teacher and student is the involuntary muscles that produce the voice, muscles that have to be coaxed into fine coordination so that they can produce an even, beautiful sound extending through a singer’s full range. But another hurdle to overcome is terminology. It can take six months to develop a common language between teacher and student. What does she really mean when she says she wants me to have “higher resonance”? What does anyone mean by “more support”? Someone can tell you that you need to relax, but relax where? Relax what? Oh, and now you want more energy at the same time? When I feel energized I also feel tense. How am I supposed to reconcile those demands?