“Debbie, I want you to put the phone down and go get a glass of water.”
“No! No!”
“Debbie, put the phone down and go get a glass of water. What lights do you have on in the room? What color is the couch?” She was trying to talk me back into myself, trying to reattach me to the concrete world around me by asking me questions and making me answer them. Slowly, patiently, she calmed me down enough that I stepped away from the balcony. But for weeks afterward, the pain of his rejection was so unbearable that I was still in Fatal Attraction mode. I checked his voice mail on the hour because I knew his password. I’d call dozens of times a day and if I heard a voice mail from a woman—beeeeep!—I erased it. I kept on doing this until a friend finally stood next to me at a pay phone, made me dial his number, and made me change his passcode without looking at the numbers so that I wouldn’t know it. Mitch wouldn’t either, but, hell—that was a bonus.
THAT SUMMER OF 2002, which Jesslyn refers to as “Debbie’s summer of catatonia,” I rented a magnificent villa for two months in Salzburg to prepare for my debut as Danae in Strauss’s Die Liebe der Danae. It was a new production for the fiftieth anniversary of the Salzburg Festival, to be directed by famed opera director Günter Krämer. It was a very big deal and had created a buzz in the opera world months in advance.
I arrived a mess, and in need of a drink, or five.
Jesslyn came with me, and the first night we arrived we immediately got to work making martinis—badly needed after the long flight—but found no ice in the freezer. “Oh, God, no ice?!!” we yelled in unison.
But God always hears our prayers, it is said, especially when you least expect it. Maybe He doesn’t answer the big ones, like, “Oh, please, don’t let him leave me,” but who are we to pick and choose which ones should be answered? A few minutes after Jesslyn and I moaned aloud about our tragic ice situation, the clouds grew dark and it began to hail—giant chunks of ice fell from the sky. Laughing, we ran out into the backyard with buckets and collected the ice, then rinsed them off for our drinks.
The next few weeks were decidedly unmiraculous. The new role didn’t suit me well vocally, I felt, and it didn’t help that I’d arrived unprepared. We bought an icemaker, and I sat on my bedroom balcony overlooking a sunflower field every morning and prayed that the pain would go away.
Soon, in a miracle of sorts, I was laughing and twirling in that very same sunflower field—literally.
A few weeks after we got there, a Vanity Fair photographer and reporter arrived to interview me and shoot a two-page spread. Because we were in Salzburg, I had a great idea for the shoot—why not dress me up as Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music? I could never get enough of that singing nun. This time, I was imagining myself in a pretty, gauzy dress, reenacting the romantic scene in the gazebo, where the Captain kisses Maria. But no, the editors had another visual in mind. They wanted me to dress up like Maria in that very first scene, when she wears that unglamorous pinafore nun-dress, and spin around and around like Julie Andrews does with the Alps behind her. It was the iconic shot, after all, so I agreed. We spent an entire day with me twirling around, huffing and puffing, and getting dizzy. It takes a lot of work to spin 300-plus pounds around like a top. By the time we were done and they got the shot, I could barely stand upright.
I wasn’t about to deny myself my gazebo moment, though. As soon as I’d recovered my equilibrium the following week, I went with my mother—who came to visit—on the Official Sound of Music Bus Tour. Mom, Jesslyn, and I had made a unanimous decision that I needed lots of merriment and happy musicals that summer to cheer me up. What could be peppier than a sardine-packed busload of Aussie tourists singing “The Lonely Goatherd” for six hours?
“Sing, Debbie, sing!” Mom kept elbowing me whenever I stopped. I couldn’t help it. I’d never heard such bad singing in my life and I had to stop and listen, I told her. We burst out laughing, and soon I was singing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” with the rest of the sweaty, obsessed fans. The bus made stops at the movie locations, including the church where the Captain and Maria got married and the lake where the kids fall out of their rowboat. The last, and my favorite, was the gazebo, where the Captain and Maria sing their love duet, “Something Good.” Mom and I got out and walked inside it, debating whether Christopher Plummer was a good kisser or not (yes, we decided) and wondering where we could find a man like that for me. The summer had begun in the depths of despair but ended on bright notes. I stood in Maria’s gazebo, singing the hopeful lyrics to one of my childhood classics—somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good. And while I may have been easy to forget in Mitch’s mind, New York Times chief music critic Anthony Tommasini thought otherwise. He wrote in his August review of Die Liebe der Danae:
As rain (water poured from above) trickles down, Danae, the great Strauss soprano Deborah Voigt, covers her head with her cloak and walks slowly away. It’s an unforgettable image.
AFTER WE GOT home from Salzburg, I went to pick up little Steinway at the breeder’s kennel. He was the littlest thing I’d ever held, and on the car ride home he threw up all over me. But just like it’s good luck when a bird poops on you, I considered Steinway’s barfing in my lap an omen that the upcoming year would bring good fortune.
And it did. Remarkably, my career stayed on the upswing despite the downward spiral of my love life. In April of 2003 I took Jesslyn and little Steinway to Vienna for a new production of Tristan und Isolde—my first completely staged performance of it—and we arrived six weeks before opening night for an unusually long stretch of rehearsal time.
As a side note, people often wonder how much opera singers are paid. I’m not going to get into numbers, but I will say that singers’ fees are standard for each specific opera house and all of the top-tier singers are paid the same. But in Vienna, an exception is made if you sing Isolde. It’s the only role and the only opera company as far as I know where this is true, but for Isolde you get more money than the usual rate. Why? Because it’s a “long song.” So considering the salary bump, I wasn’t about to complain about the insufferable heat, not really.
We arrived during a stiflingly hot spring (when it came to the weather in Vienna, I was truly cursed), and the Vienna State Opera house didn’t have air conditioning. Thomas Moser was set to sing Tristan, and Günter Krämer was again my director. We had a great group, but the heat was making us all nuts.
For one big scene we had to wear heavy rain jackets over our already bulky costumes for a scene on a ship, and I had to lie on the floor at the edge of the stage with my head hanging over the orchestra pit. Every time I did it, one of the string bass players inches away from me would dart his eyes up at my dripping face, shooting me a look that said, Hey, lady—don’t you dare sweat all over my instrument!
My costume was tight; I was bone-corseted to within an inch of my life because they were trying to make me look smaller. Sigh. How do you make a woman over three hundred pounds look smaller? My dress had a fifteen-foot-long train made of black tulle. When you wear a dress like that, you have to choreograph precisely how you’re going to work in it, how you’re going to move, because it’s so easy for you to walk one way and the dress to go another. So the costumers made a replica for me to wear during rehearsals so that I could coordinate my movements and staging with the dress, which upped my body temperature at least a few degrees.
It was so steamy that as soon as we got a three-day break, Jesslyn and I drove south to Baden and stayed at the Grand Hotel Sauerhof, built in the twelfth century and once a haven for such guests as Beethoven and Antonio Salieri.
There, we took midnight dips in the hotel pool to cool off. Steinway was such a mama’s boy that he followed me right into the water the first night, stepping off the concrete edge with a little yelp. It was a sink-or-swim moment for my little guy, and I’m glad to say he learned to doggie paddle quickly. His mama, on the other hand, impressed Jesslyn with the number of laps I could do and how long
I could hold my breath underwater. She’d pull out her watch and time me:
“. . . three minutes . . . four minutes . . . do all Wagnerian sopranos have this kind of lung capacity? Four minutes and thirty seconds. Debbie? Debbie!”
In the mornings, I’d let Steinway out on a little patch of lawn outside my first-floor hotel room to do his business, and I’d invariably end up chasing after him in my short nightie with my bare ass in the air.
During breakfast one day as we ate on the outdoor patio, Jesslyn was giving me a detailed history lesson on the hotel when I shushed her.
“Did you hear that bird?”
We held our breath and heard a song coming from the leafy sequoia tree nearby. If we both hadn’t heard it, I’d never have believed it; the bird was whistling the unmistakable first five notes of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” I kid you not.
BACK IN VIENNA, opening night arrived and I was scared out of my wits, and rightly so. I was an American singing Isolde—and in Vienna! I woke up that morning with the same mixed feelings I often have when making a role debut—thrilled and totally confident, alternating with a self-doubt so debilitating I’m paralyzed. To keep my feelings under control, I go on autopilot: wake up, coffee, pray, breakfast, a little walk, pray, lunch, pray, look at the music, pray, nap, a light dinner, go to theater, pray, pray, PRAY . . . makeup, costume, a last-minute prayer during the overture, and then—GO!
Once I’m onstage, I let myself feel something besides the fear I woke up with. I let the character inside of me. Playing Isolde that night my staging began with a loud emotional outburst as I knocked the armor of Morold, slain by Tristan, to the ground. It was a great way to channel my nervous energy built up during the day. Then, I put one note in front of the other and took it scene by scene. I can’t go into these marathon Wagnerian evenings with my thoughts on the final note, or focused on what I have to do over the next few hours; that would be too overwhelming. I imagine it’s how a mountain climber feels standing at the foot of Everest. If they look up too high, they’d probably think, How the heck will I ever get all the way up there? Instead, it’s one step at a time.
Opening night was a huge success: a twenty-three-minute standing ovation reported on CNN live in a ticker-tape newsflash. Then came the second performance. I got laced up into my bone-corseted dress like a plus-size Scarlett O’Hara, walked onstage, began to sing, and . . . found I couldn’t move properly. What was going on? Something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t figure out what. I looked down at my dress and saw that six feet of my train had been hacked off and no one had bothered to tell the leading lady wearing it. I spent the second half of Act I fuming. As soon as I got offstage, I confronted the costumers and asked in my not-so-great German: “Vas the fück happened to my dress?!”
Herr Holender, they told me, had decided he didn’t like the length and had ordered them to cut it off.
Opera House Manager Herr Ioan Holender, a.k.a., “the Shark.” That was his nickname in opera circles because of his perpetual tan, snow-white hair, and oversized, sharp, bleached teeth. I wanted to rip the nuts off Herr Holender, and I wasn’t (and still am not) the only one in the world to feel that way.
“I want it back on my dress for the next show!” I told the costumers, and they nodded. Sure enough, it was back on the next day. The Shark took note of this.
“I see you’ve got your train back.” He flashed his big teeth.
“Yes, my train, which should never have been taken away in the first place without my being told.” I felt diva-ish responding like that because it was so not me, but the truth was my reaction was absolutely justified. It was unprofessional and detrimental to the entire production not to inform a performer of such a major costume change.
I didn’t hear another word from the Shark after that, and especially after I got a glowing review in the New York Times a few days later. Anthony Tommasini, who attended that second, trainless, performance, and whom I was beginning to love from afar, wrote:
Amid intense expectation . . . an intriguingly updated modern staging by Günter Krämer opened here last week. Ms. Voigt, in her prime at 42 and singing her first complete staged Isolde, is the first major American soprano to undertake the role in more than 20 years and the first American soprano ever to have a new production of the work mounted for her by this prestigious company, a bastion of Germanic culture.
At the second performance, on Thursday night, which I attended, Ms. Voigt sang with such confidence and vocal ease you would have thought the role had long been in her repertory. In this intimate 1,700-seat house (with room for 500 standees) her sound sliced through Wagner’s thick orchestration. Yet she preserved the lyrical beauty and sumptuous colorings that have made her such a cherished artist in the Strauss and Verdi repertory.
My cup runneth over that week. The opening-night standing ovation was another turning point in my career, albeit a bittersweet one. A few weeks before opening night, my stepsister Melinda—Lynn’s daughter—had mysteriously fallen into a coma while in remission from mesothelioma cancer. The whole family had been set to come to Vienna to see me in this important role, but Dad and Lynn, of course, stayed behind to be with her. A few days before opening night, I got a call from Lynn and Dad from Melinda’s bedside at the hospital.
“Debbie, we just turned off Melinda’s respirator and she only has a few minutes left,” Lynn said. “Would you sing to her?”
She held the phone to Melinda’s ear and I told her goodbye, that I loved her, and I sang the first melody that came to my lips:
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I’m found.
Was blind, but now I see.
I sang to her again on opening night. I had managed to set my grief over Melinda’s death aside for most of the evening, until I got to the transcendent “Liebestod”—that intense aria of “love and death”—in the final act. In the scene, Isolde is saying goodbye to Tristan as she sings, and I couldn’t help but tear up about Melinda. But the special beauty of this aria is that it is filled with as much joy as sadness. It’s about beginnings as well as endings, and about life going on beyond this place.
That’s probably why I felt “Amazing Grace” welling up inside of me the moment Melinda passed.
Because, despite the anguish and pain we all endure in our lives, I believe that blessings, grace, and beauty are possible. Both in this world and in the next—for Melinda for sure, and maybe even for a wretch like me.
( 14 )
Little Black Dress and Sexy Salome
THE HURRICANE WINDS that would wreak havoc around my Florida condo in the fall of 2004 began swirling around me earlier that spring. The infamous “Little Black Dress” episode that brought me to the attention of the non-opera-going public, and which, in a very profound way, changed my life, crept up on me unexpectedly.
I had been scheduled to sing Ariadne, which had by now become a signature role for me, in a revival production at Covent Garden when my manager, Andrea Anson, got word that the director had a casting change of heart. He wanted to take a more “modern” approach to the opera, they said, and in his new vision he decided that Ariadne should wear what fashion observers know as “the little black dress.” My childhood idol, the petite Audrey Hepburn, made hers iconic in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Now tipping the scales at 330 pounds, I did not fit the director’s idea of this new, svelte Ariadne who wore a size “little” of anything. To put it bluntly: I didn’t fit the dress.
To put it even more bluntly, the Covent Garden people told Andrea that I was too fat for the role. It’s really amazing that in this day and age someone can get away with saying those words. Telling a woman she’s too fat for a job may be the last prejudicial statement, the last ugly judgment, that people think it’s okay to make. Unlike the areas of gender, ethnicity, age, and religion—it’s still open season on overweight women.
It wasn’t the first time I’d been told by a
director that I was too hefty for a part, of course; it’s happened several times. It’s even happened when how I looked shouldn’t matter. About ten years earlier, I auditioned for legendary conductor Sir Georg Solti for a recording he was planning to do of Tristan. At eighty-plus years of age, he was still handsome, lean, and fit—the kind of man who never gained a pound. When I think of him, I always remember a rumor I’d heard that he’d have great, torrid romances with opera singers and when he was done, he’d give each one a white grand piano as a parting gift.
I auditioned for Maestro Solti in a big rehearsal room in London, and when I’d finished I knew I’d sung very well, and so did he.
“That was beautiful,” he said, with a smile—“you’d be a great Isolde.”
Then he got up from behind his desk and walked over to me. “Why are you so fat?” he asked matter-of-factly. “Is it the food?”
I was stunned. He was being rude, I felt, but at the same time he was genuinely puzzled and curious.
“Well, Maestro, it is the food, yes,” I answered. (What did he think, I was OD-ing on water and broccoli?) “But it’s other issues as well.”
He still looked confused, not understanding why someone would be this large on purpose. I was scheduled to see him again several months later for some concerts. “If you lose weight by the time I see you for Beethoven’s Ninth,” he said, “you can have the job.”
And this was for a recording, I must point out—I didn’t even have to appear on stage! No one was even going to see me! Still, the legendary conductor didn’t want to be associated with a fat broad, even if you only saw my photo on the CD cover.
(P.S., I lost weight and got the job, but he passed away soon after so we never did the recording).
If a director for a stage production complains about my weight, usually the opera house boldly steps in and supports me, overriding the director’s decision, and the quality of my singing trumps the readout on my scale. Since I was currently considered the Ariadne of choice in the opera world, you’d think in this instance my voice would be more important than my dress size.
Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva Page 17