On the first day, we had to draw numbers to decide what order we’d compete. The competition took place at the Bolshoi Theatre and at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall; and it was broadcast live on TV all over the country from start to finish for the entire two weeks.
Picture me there, surrounded by beautiful girls in silk dresses and every hair in place, while I look like a lazy American couch potato.
“Deborah Voy-yeeeeeeeeeeeet!” someone calls. I go up on to the stage like a shlump, reach into the barrel, and pull out my number . . . 13. Oh, hell. I should just go home right now. . . .
A moment later, I hear the theater of over a thousand spectators burst into cheers and applause. “It is good luck here, the number thirteen,” a theater page next to me whispered. Well, that was the first bit of good news I’d had in days.
The competition was very thorough, in that the first day you offered them five opera arias and they pick one and you pick one, and you sing those two—that’s normal competition procedure. Then there was a section where you had to do a forty-minute recital, which had to include songs by Tchaikovsky and another Russian composer (I chose Rachmaninoff) plus a folk or pop song from your own country. All I could think of was “Beautiful Dreamer” which I’d heard Bing Crosby and Roy Orbison sing when I was a kid, a song my mother dreamily sang at the piano when I’d sat next to her.
Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,
Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee . . .
The next day at the hotel I’m primping in the bathroom with my curling iron (my luggage finally arrived!) and the black-and-white TV set is on in the other room, when all of a sudden I hear myself singing “Beautiful Dreamer.” I look at the TV and see the gauzy, slow-motion image of little girls running through a park with big bows in their hair, and couples lovingly looking at each other, and my voice in the background. Someone had turned my audition song into a music video! To this day I have no idea who—I assume it was the people involved with the competition. But there on the television was a bootleg recording of me paired with a video, or maybe it was some sort of commercial, I don’t know. It was hysterical!
By the second week in Moscow, John and my brother Rob—who had joined us in week two for the semifinals—suspected we were being watched. Our hotel stood kitty-corner from the theater, on the other side of a huge, busy, six-lane boulevard. To get across, we were sternly warned, we had to use the underground pedestrian walkway. One night John, Rob, and I left the theater at two a.m. and were feeling a bit loopy. It was a beautiful summer night and the boulevard was completely empty.
“Oh, fuck it! Let’s just run across the damn street!” Rob yelled. We started running and laughing . . . until we heard a booming Russian voice from above—from loudspeakers—scolding us. “Oh my God, we’re going to get shot dead right here in the middle of Bolshaya Sadovaya Ulitsa Smirnoff . . . or whatever the hell it’s called,” I yelled to the guys. “Run!”
The next week was July Fourth, and as much as we loved standing in food lines and searching for borscht, we were aching to do something embarrassingly and thoroughly American. We hopped a cab over to Red Square and threw a Frisbee around for a few hours under the statue of Vladimir Lenin. Back at our hotel room (John’s and mine), the three of us sampled every vodka known to humankind—that was one thing that was easy to get in Moscow. And we got tipsy, and rowdy, and we started mouthing off about how bloody hot it was, and why is no place here air-conditioned, and why are these wool blankets in our hotel rooms so itchy and horrible.
The next day, when we returned to our rooms after being out all day, the heavy wool blankets were missing, replaced by lightweight summer ones. How odd, and what a coincidence, we thought. But we didn’t want to get all paranoid. Besides, we were hungover and couldn’t trust our perception skills. But the next night, we were sitting around in the room when Rob tried to turn on the radio on the desk. The knob wouldn’t budge. He picked up the radio to look behind it—the back part of the radio was hollow except for a cord coming out of it leading into a wall—no outlet, no jack, no nothing. John and Rob couldn’t figure it out, and went out to the balcony to get some air.
“Debbie, Debbie! Get over here!” I rushed out and looked. Across from us was a huge government building, and lining the balcony directly opposite our room were rows of guards with binoculars to their eyes, staring right at us. We kept the curtains closed for the rest of our stay there.
The civilians, though, could not have been more warm and welcoming and passionately devoted to their music and to this competition. At least a thousand of them would line up every morning to buy a ticket to the competition that day, which would start at ten a.m. and often go till one a.m. They treated us like rock stars and brought flowers for the singers.
After more than two weeks of singing, I won the gold medal and first place in the female vocalist category—very rare for an American. I was the second American to have ever won it at that point.
To celebrate, we took my 5,000 rubles of prize money (which equaled somewhere between $140 and $480, depending on the day) and went out to eat at the best restaurant in Moscow. By this time, we were starving. We’d run out of tuna and Lipton Chicken Soup packages.
They didn’t speak any English at the restaurant, and we couldn’t understand the menu, so John attempted to draw a picture of what we wanted to eat with a pencil and paper. He was trying to draw a chicken and potatoes, but John’s no artist. His potato looked like it had a head growing out of it; and he had placed it under the ass of the stick-figure chicken so that it looked like some sort of mutant egg alien monster.
“Da, da, da!” the waiter said, nodding. That worried me; what the heck was he going to bring? Thank goodness he arrived at our table with two of everything on the menu, and we devoured it all. The day before we left, I gave the rest of the rubles to Katja, the very sturdy woman who had been my translator for the duration of the trip. There was nothing to buy, and I couldn’t exchange them for U.S. currency. The girl was in tears and hugged me; you’d have thought I’d given her a million dollars.
Back at home, I got the modern-day version of Van Cliburn’s ticker-tape parade—an interview spot on Good Morning America with Joan Lunden. The L.A. Times even called my mother for a quote: “I’m thrilled,” said Mom. “I’m so excited for her. This is the highlight of her career. I’m sure it will open many doors for her.”
The win was a very big deal because the Russians really don’t want to give it to an American. After that, I was off to Fort Worth, Texas. I’d gotten a phone call at home from Van Cliburn himself as soon as I returned to New York; he wanted to hire me to come sing at his mother’s seventieth birthday party a few days later, which I did. I sang my one-hit-wonder, “Beautiful Dreamer,” now famous on late-night Russian television. After the party, he invited me to his home for a private soirée and showed me his souvenirs from his many travels. Every table top, every wall, in every room was adorned with memorabilia.
I was particularly drawn to a framed photo atop the piano of two little boys, around age five, wearing shorts and sitting side by side at a piano, playing together.
“Do you know who that is?” he asked. I shook my head. “It’s me and Jimmy Levine.” Soon enough I would get to know Maestro Levine’s face very well.
WINNING THE GOLD medal at the Tchaikovsky Competition was a major turning point in my career and attracted a lot of attention. What followed for Lucky Number 13 was a lucky break that sealed the deal for my destiny.
That November I was covering Amelia in Ballo for Aprile Millo at the Met—I was already cast in the role for the New York Metropolitan Opera Parks Concerts the following summer—when I got a call from my agent one Friday night. Susan Dunn was singing Amelia in San Francisco and had taken ill and wasn’t sure if she’d be able to do the upcoming Sunday matinee. San Francisco wanted to know if I’d fly over, just in case she couldn’t go on.
Well, the San Francisco Opera was like family to me after my years there, b
ut I didn’t want to go all that way for nothing. I had flashbacks of my Margaret Price and Carol Neblett situations a few years earlier when I’d rushed over thinking I was going on, only to be left standing there in wig and makeup, like a stood-up bride at the altar. I went to bed, restless over what to do; around two a.m. I noticed the light flashing on my answering machine. My agent had called: Dunn was definitely canceling the Sunday matinee, and probably several more after that. Early next morning, John and I were on a plane, and shortly after landing I was shuffled into a quickie two-hour stage rehearsal, a one-hour rehearsal with the conductor, and a rushed costume fitting for my full skirt and heavy cape.
John was traveling with me steadily now, in the role of “taking care of the family business.” But it was really because he had no other work—his job with my agent didn’t last and I was tired of traveling alone. Mostly what he did on the road was feed me. We’d go out to fantastic dinners after performances and cap the evening off with a huge dessert at two a.m. Or John would cook incredible, fattening meals if our lodging had a kitchen. Both of us always made sure that, wherever we were, our hotel room was well stocked with munchies for late-night snacks. I was a closet eater and never overate in front of other people. Judging from what I ate in public, you’d think I’d be half my size. By now my five-foot-six-inch frame was carrying about 290 pounds.
It could have been emotional eating. Three months after we got married, I found out that John had carried on a year-long affair back when we were living together. Even though I knew we weren’t madly in love with each other, it still broke my heart, and I’d like to think that had I known before we got married, I wouldn’t have gone through with it. I’d like to think that—but I also believe part of me did know it, sensed it on an unconscious level, and that that was why I’d felt such a panic to marry him quickly.
I called Mom from the opera house and she alerted the whole family: Debbie was going onstage! They all planned to be there—Mom, Dad, their spouses, my brothers, Grandma Voigt, Jane. I was thrilled and terrified, and was surviving on no sleep and plenty of adrenaline. Which may have contributed to what happened next.
Onstage at the next day’s matinee, all was going great . . . until the singer playing the role of the fortune teller shoved me a bit too eagerly during one scene as I left the stage. I could feel myself hurtling toward the floor, half onstage half off, falling in slow motion. The words shot out of me like an unstoppable cannon shooting a ballo:
“Oh, SHIT!!!!”
I was hoping only the first few rows heard me. My family and friends were in row ten, so they were safe. But everyone for sure saw me fall flat on my face just offstage, and the critics were none too kind:
. . . now diva sized and hardly nimble to begin with, [she] tripped and seemed to go headlong down the stairs that led offstage.
Superior direction may yet mitigate her unwieldy stage demeanor. At one point she flopped and floundered on the floor, thanks to a shove. . . .
But my hometown audience knew me and they were rooting for me. It was the first time my parents saw me in an important role and I caught a glimpse of them from the stage; they looked happily astonished. And, thankfully, the local newspapers focused on my voice, not my weight.
[She displayed a] genuine spinto sound, gleaming and urgent at the top, imbued with a long line and supple breath control.
Sometimes, I have learned, people are in the right place at the right time. Call it fate, call it destiny, call it coincidence—but making the right move at just the right moment can change a person’s life.
Two months after Amelia, I was making my debut in the title role of Ariadne in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos for the Boston Lyric Opera, a small opera company that was paying me very little, but they were giving me an apartment for free, and it was a great role for an anti-diva like me. The story is an opera-within-an-opera, and in the first half my character is an operatic prima donna who displays wild, diva-esque behavior. In the second half, she becomes Ariadne, a woman stranded on an island, pining for her lover who deserted her, before she is finally rescued by Bacchus—the god of wine.
JOHN AND I arrived in Boston in December, and it was, of course, one of the worst winters Boston ever had.
Our apartment was half basement, half aboveground, and it was freezing because the furnace kept breaking down. Since we were going to be in Boston for a month, we’d brought our cats with us—Tiffy and Ballo—and in our wisdom, had drugged them for the flight. Well, the flight was less than an hour from New York and the drugs had kicked in when we got to Boston; once we let them out of their cages, they were bumping into walls and rolling their eyelids like drunken sailors.
Taking a cue from the cats, we threw a wild party at the apartment and invited friends from the cast and in the process of our riotous revelry, we accidentally set off the fire alarm in the middle of the night and could not figure out how to turn the damn thing off. I teetered on a skinny metal folding chair and ripped the thing out of the ceiling.
Since I was at my all-time high in weight at that point, my costuming was becoming a problem, just as Jane’s vodka-swilling colleague back at Cal State had predicted. Nothing they had in the wardrobe department fit me—there’s only so much a seamstress can do—and they couldn’t find a size 26 Ariadne costume for rent. An angel came to my rescue when one of the financial patrons for the company, a really wonderful (and wealthy) woman named Lee Gillespie, donated the money for costumes to be specially made for me. Lee had just had back surgery, but was such an opera fan she’d come by rehearsals and lie down on the floor under the piano, close her eyes, and listen to us.
We had a great cast and we grew very close to one another. One reason was because we were all young and hungry together—relative beginners being paid very little, working really hard, and loving what we were doing. We were in the trenches, the orchestra pit, together. Another reason we bonded was because we could all feel a bit of magic surrounding the production, the feeling that everything was clicking, and that was exciting.
Before I even got to Boston, I had an inkling this role would be important for me. I was studying with a well-known Manhattan pianist and voice coach, Levering Rothfuss, to prepare—he had worked with such greats as Marilyn Horne, Tatiana Troyanos, and Carol Neblett. We’d meet in his apartment and work on Ariadne’s arias. Lev had a jaded side to him, having been in the business for a long time, so I knew if something moved him it had to be really, really great and true.
On the day I sang through the entire opera for him in his living room, I looked over to him after I’d finished and he sat on his piano bench with tears running down his face.
“This is exactly where your voice is supposed to be at this moment in time,” he told me, wiping his face. “This is your role. There is no one—no one—right now who sings it as well as you do.” His words made me shiver.
Maybe I sang it so well because I understood her. Ariadne had a melancholy I related to. And yet she was hopeful, too. She sits on a rock, having been abandoned, and suffers great emotional turmoil as she waits for someone to rescue her, but she doesn’t give up.
Playing the other side of the role, the “prima donna,” is some of the most fun I’ve had singing opera. It’s one of the few roles I’ve ever played that allowed me to show my humor and really lampoon the opera diva caricature; it’s so over the top. I even put a little humor and levity to the mournful Ariadne when I played her later in the Met Opera production. In one scene I added my own little stage business that has lived on with other sopranos. There’s a moment when Ariadne is surrounded by a group of clowns juggling and throwing scarves in the air and she’s upset. In the middle of the scene I reached out, grabbed one of the scarves, and blew my nose in it. It was ad-libbed, and the audience roared.
AS A FLUKE—OR was it destiny again?—a prominent opera critic, John Rockwell, was in the audience on our opening night, January 16, 1991. He’d come to Boston to write an article for the New York Times on the little
opera companies that were lately sprouting up in Boston, and he found himself, by chance, in our audience at the Emerson Majestic Theatre. Two days later I got a call from my agent.
“Did you see your review by John Rockwell in the New York Times?” he was yelling into the phone. He didn’t wait for an answer; he read it out loud to me:
. . . it introduced one truly remarkable singer in Deborah Voigt. . . .
Friday’s performance, her first of Ariadne, revealed one of the most important American singers to come along in years. It is wise to counsel caution, but foolish to stifle enthusiasm. Miss Voigt’s voice seems huge. It was hard to tell just how huge in the roughly 1,200-seat Majestic Theater—but it rang effortlessly in the ears.
More to the point, it sounded warm and solid and musically shaped. The obvious comparison among earlier American dramatic sopranos is Eileen Farrell. If Miss Voigt does not soon become an important Wagnerian soprano, she will have taken a wrong career turn.
I had to sit down. This critic had written a love letter to me but I could barely absorb the magnitude of his words. I didn’t know if I deserved such praise, and I had no idea how to embrace the success of the moment. It was my first major, major exposure in something that really mattered. It was pretty heady for a young singer to be singled out like that in a review, and to have it in the New York Times, and written by their chief classical music critic.
My phone rang off the hook after that, with friends and colleagues calling to congratulate me. Of course my family called, too.
“Congratulations, honey, we’re so happy for you!” my mother said over the phone. And she was. But I don’t know if my family understood the enormity of what this review meant, and what it was leading up to. They were still very innocent about the opera world, and still a bit of the mindset like, “Oh, Debbie sings, and it’s so easy for her, and she’s having her fun.”
Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva Page 12