Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva
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I sing because I’m happy,
I sing because I’m free . . .
It felt so comfortable and familiar up there, singing a hymn I loved for people who did not come to judge me but came to listen to a beautiful tune and root me on. I felt five years old again, singing in church, or in Grandma Voigt’s living room.
My rehab-mates sat on the edges of their plastic chairs with their mouths open. Not one had ever been to an opera before, never mind felt the goose-bumping effect of a big-voiced dramatic soprano ten feet away from their eardrums, belting it out for God.
As I sang, I could feel that indelible, mystical connection between me, the song, and the audience—a bond I’d felt since childhood, an invisible force of sacred energy and light we shared together.
When I finished, there was a moment of silence. Then all thirty of them jumped to their feet, clapping and whistling.
There’s a ritual audiences used to do in my early days of performing that I always loved. At the end of an excellent show, they’d stand up and rip their programs into ribbons and toss them into the air. Joe Volpe hated it because it meant so much cleaning up afterward—which is probably why no one does it anymore. But I loved it; it was like being showered with confetti and streamers like at a big birthday celebration.
That’s how I felt when I saw my audience jump to their feet—like it was my birthday and the start of a new life. Even though they were somewhat captive, like my family in Grandma’s living room, they were one of the best audiences I ever had.
As I stood there, I realized that no matter what happened in future days, months, or years, no one could ever take this away from me:
You are here to sing.
God told me so, and I was going to keep doing it—on the opera stage or on the rooftops of the world.
I stood up from the piano and smiled, giving my rehab-mates an overly dramatic bow with plenty of melodramatic flourish. I wanted them to receive the full diva effect, after all, and get their $33,000-per-seat money’s worth.
The next morning I packed my Bible, libretto, and Trees of Life and Hope into my suitcase and left the facility, stepping into the sunlight.
I wasn’t afraid. I had faith in myself.
And if Puccini and Verdi didn’t see fit to compose happy endings for their tragic heroines, then this reluctant, down-to-earth diva was going to write one for herself.
Photo Section
How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practicing my scales while still in diapers, age two.
One of my early acting roles at age seven: a Southern Belle in Mom’s homemade costume.
A churchgoing family, on our way to “dedicate” baby Kevin in the Southern Baptist faith, circa 1968.
By thirteen, my new repertoire included ballads by my idol, Karen Carpenter, and Broadway show tunes.
Hiding my braces in my grad photo at El Dorado High, the year I performed in The Music Man.
Size 24 wedding dress and Jane Paul (far left) as my matron of honor. Melinda is on my right and Marianne on my left.
The “cover” gets her big break: my stage debut singing Amelia in Ballo in San Francisco, November 1990. Marty Sohl/San Francisco Opera
Emoting—with hair—and the wonderful Hildegard Behrens in Elektra in 1992. Winnie Klotz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera Archives
A big Italian hug from a big, beautiful soul—with Luciano Pavarotti in his dressing room, after a performance of Ballo in 1997.
Plácido Domingo and I, pre-kiss, in Die Walküre at the Met—the month I met Mitch. AP Photo/Richard Drew
Up close and personal with President Clinton, Chelsea, and Luciano (far right) after Act two of Aida at the Met in 2001. Janet Koltick
Tightly corseted in the sweltering heat for my role debut as Isolde in Vienna, 1993—we got a twenty-three-minute standing ovation on opening night. AP Photo/Stephan Trierenberg
Skewering the little black dress “mess” at my Carnegie Hall debut recital, 2004. Richard Termine
Manhandled by the Executioner in Salome in 2006, where I revealed my svelte, post-surgery body. AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast
My drinking was out of control when I sang Maddalena in Chénier in Barcelona, 2007. Antoni Bofill
With fellow winners at the Opera News Awards gala in 2007—(from left) René Pape, Renata Scotto, James Levine, and Ben Heppner. Dario Acosta
Paired with Ben—finally!—in the plagued production of Tristan and Isolde at the Met in 2008. Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera
Paragliding in Zurich—weightless and freeing, a sport I never would have attempted in my heavier days.
Fitting into that little black dress in my triumphant return as Ariadne at the London Royal Opera House in June 2008. Clive Barda / ArenaPAL
The role of my career; the fearless Brünnhilde in Die Walküre (with Bryn Terfel) in spring 2011. Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera
Interviewing Plácido for a Met Live in HD broadcast; transmitting opera to audiences around the world. Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera
My constant companion and faithful sidekick, Steinway, helps out with an Annie Get Your Gun photo shoot. Luke Ratray
Lifting my spirits—and perspective on life—during a recent break in the mountains of Kamikōchi, in the Japanese Alps.
A difficult year ends on an exalted note; singing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, December 2013. Intellectual Reserve, Inc.
Finale: Voigt Lessons
January 2014
IN THE SPRING of 2013, after I got home from Liège and as I was en route to my condo in Florida, I drove through a little town that looked like a forgotten corner of another world, lost in time. The streets were crowded with overgrown weeping willows heavy with hanging Spanish moss, giving them a spooky pallor, but for the tiny dots of light peeking out from the darkness. The run-down Victorian homes I passed were decorated with Christmas lights and burning candles on the front porches.
Where was I, the Twilight Zone? I passed a sign: Cassadaga: The Psychic Capital of the World. I’d heard of this town; it had been known for its “spiritualistic” camp a century earlier and was now declared a historic site, though most of its original characters were long gone and buried in the local cemetery, rumored to be haunted. The cemetery has a bench nicknamed “the Devil’s Chair,” where, legend has it, if you leave an unopened can of beer on it at night, you’ll find it empty in the morning—but still sealed.
That’s one desperate drinker, I thought. I’d never been to a psychic before—it’s considered sinful in the Southern Baptist religion to do so. In our house, we weren’t even allowed to have a deck of regular playing cards to play crazy eights as kids. It was drummed into my head that talking to a psychic was engaging with the devil himself.
But my thoughts on the devil and hell have evolved over the years since the fire-and-brimstone sermons of my childhood. I no longer believed hell was an actual physical place of eternal fire, tortures, and pitchforks. Or that people would automatically be doomed to go there if they hadn’t been dunked in baptismal waters and saved. I came to believe that hell was a state of mind, a place we put ourselves in when we veered off the loving path.
I drove by a pink clapboard bookstore with a hand-painted sign out front: Psychic Readings! All Welcome! and found myself pulling over. What the hell. I don’t believe anything is random or coincidental in this life.
Inside I met Shane, a tall and lanky twenty-two-year-old with tousled hair to his shoulders and puppy-dog eyes. He wore a faded, tie-dyed T-shirt and looked like a teen idol circa 1972. Just my luck, he was the psychic on duty that afternoon. Shane sat me down at a little table in the back where he’d lit candles and incense and began shuffling a pack of Tarot cards. Before we started, my Christian sensibility kicked in and I needed to clear the pot-scented air.
“Shane, where does God fit into something like this?”
He looked surprised. “What I do is all about God,” he answered. “It’s all about divinity. I get my messages from above. The longer I
work on my own faith and ‘let go and let God,’ the stronger my connection with God is, and the clearer my messages become.” Hmmm. I recognized his “let go” phrase from AA and felt an immediate kinship with young Shane.
That satisfied me, and so we began. I didn’t say a word about myself; I wanted to see what, if anything, this kid would come up with. I wasn’t taking any of this too seriously. Shane placed the cards in rows on the table and studied them. A slightly pained expression spread across his unlined face.
“You’ve been through a very difficult several months,” he said, “both physically and emotionally. You beat yourself up too much. You have to let go of this defeatist attitude, stop banging your head against the wall. It’s not going to get any better until you change your thinking. You’re rubbing two rocks together with rough edges, hoping things will smooth out, but they won’t unless you let go of some things.”
“What things?”
“Old attitudes, old habits, old information and ways of thinking . . . places and relationships that don’t serve you well anymore.”
I didn’t say a word. He flipped a few more cards and smiled.
“There’s a lot of transition that’s going to happen for you in the next six months—a lot. It’s going to be a big year for you, a lot of good change—with career, with personal life, with your living situation. You are going to make your life smaller, get rid of excess . . . but that will make your life bigger. You tend to pick up the crumbs, especially in your romantic relationships. It’s going to be a year of less picking up the crumbs so you can be ready for an entire pie.”
I appreciated the kid’s food imagery. I wondered if he was having a psychic vision of me from my old bingeing days. “It was vanilla-coconut cake,” I wanted to correct him, “not pie.” Young Shane kept talking for another twenty minutes about how my entire life was on the verge of a major overhaul, and I silently thought to myself, I hope so . . . I hope so.
“It will be a year of renewal,” he said, with assurance, wrapping it up. “And now, I’m going to pick two cards from the bottom of the deck. These will be your two dominant cards for the next year.”
He took out the cards and placed them on the table, face up.
“Happiness,” he said, with a grin, “and . . . Peace. Two very good cards indeed.”
I nodded and agreed. He’d said a lot of things that could be true for anyone, I suppose, but they definitely resonated with me in particular. And even if guys like Shane were what the Bible called “false prophets,” I imagine his words could still be used to inspire a person to make positive changes.
I got up and thanked him, and as I turned to go, Shane asked me his first and only question of the entire thirty-minute session.
“Hey . . . do you sing?”
IT TURNS OUT that Shane, the teen idol psychic from the mysterious commune of Cassadaga, had been right on all counts.
A few months later I was in rehab, dumped the sometime boyfriend, sold my Florida condo, and broke the lease on my Manhattan apartment. In September, I found a cozy little house in Fort Lee, New Jersey—a fifteen-minute drive over the George Washington Bridge from Lincoln Center but worlds away from the life I’d led for decades. After making such sudden, major changes in my life over the summer in rehab, I wanted to plant myself somewhere solid where my new life could take root and where little Steinway could have a yard to run in. I wanted new scenery and new people to go with my new life choices. I took Steinway for walks and met the neighbors. When they asked me what I did for a living I told them, and I usually got the same amused reaction.
“I thought opera singers were, you know, bigger,” both my plumber and the guy who delivered my new couch said.
“Yeah, well . . .” I smile, but I don’t go into the whole story about my eating addiction and my 333 pounds and all that drama. I take their words as a compliment and move on. As per Shane, I’m letting past information and attitudes go.
Here on the other side of the bridge, I spend my days rehearsing at my piano and going to AA meetings, and my nights learning how to be comfortable by myself, in my own skin. I think of Daniella’s question to me in rehab: “What is it that makes Debbie not want to spend an evening with herself?” I try to examine that as I busy myself reading, watching TV, and writing e-mails. And if a moment pops up when I want to anesthetize myself with drink, and those moments do come, I remind myself of what they say in AA: “There’s no bad situation that can’t get worse with a drink.” Sobriety is an ongoing process, I have learned—a building upon building of new habits and rewiring of thoughts.
EVERY AGE HAS its transition, and today, in my early fifties, comes another one as I enter a new phase in my life.
Like many artists who reach success in their field, I’m finding great joy in giving back to young singers who are entering the opera scene. Amazingly, I’m now the age that Jane Paul was when I showed up one day at her studio, a green kid with no direction. Several years ago, my dear friend Jane had a stroke and it’s difficult for her to speak now. But when I gave her the news during our most recent visit together that I was going to sing Brünnhilde, Jane got teary-eyed and mustered up the shieldmaiden’s battle cry as we said good-bye—Ho jo to ho!—as her way to say to her student, “I knew you could do it. I’m proud of you.” Had someone told me that day I first met Jane that I would later accomplish what I have, I never would have believed it. I don’t think my family comprehends it, either, even though in our hometown of Placentia there’s a street named after me: Deborah Voigt Avenue.
Years ago a reporter asked me what it felt like to be a “star,” and I couldn’t answer her, because I didn’t feel like one. Only now, today, am I beginning to own that feeling, to accept that I’ve had success and be proud of it without feeling guilty or bad about it. My success was based partly on my gifts, but I had to work hard to develop those gifts. When I think back and recall the early days onstage and the thousands of pages of memorizing and the fears I had to overcome and the highs and lows and insecurities that go with an opera career, I take a deep breath and shake my head at all of it.
Time passes quickly; I’ve passed the age of Beverly Sills when I saw her in concert in my early twenties during her farewell tour, in which she thanked the audience for joining her in her twenty-five years in the business that gave her “as much joy and passion as this poor little heart can bear.” She continued, saying, “I prefer to think the book isn’t finished, it’s only a chapter that’s finished, and we’re going on to another one . . . and maybe [I can] help someone else’s dream come true as mine did. I can only hope that the best is yet to come.”
I feel the same way. For the last few years I’ve been teaching master classes to young opera students and I try to teach them what I’ve learned. It’s exciting to help them with their future, and I’m also excited with my own new beginnings.
On my piano stand—in front of my kitchen window overlooking the backyard bird feeders—I’ve got my Wozzeck libretto, which I study every morning. At the Met, in the spring of 2014, I was to play Alban Berg’s Marie, a flirtatious and unfaithful yet kind-hearted, Bible-reading (again!) common-law wife who is tragically murdered by her husband. It’s a great dramatic part full of fire and pain, like life, and it’s a part I’d never played before, so I’m eager to immerse myself. Every morning I make myself a coffee, feed Steiny, and nudge myself over to the piano . . . slowly changing old habits of procrastination.
I do the best I can do, I try to be good to myself, I try not to judge myself harshly, because what I have learned is that we are all in this together and we are all afraid at some time or another, not just me. We all have our off nights or off weeks—or even off years—but we can pick ourselves back up.
And as my good friend Maria von Trapp used to say, “When God closes a door, somewhere He opens a window.” (Or was that the Mother Superior?) One surprising new job at the Met that I first grumbled about but quickly grew to love is hosting the live HD performances. Instead of
dressing up in costumes or glamorous gowns, I put on my serious Barbara Walters suits and become a journalist, interviewing my colleagues backstage. I’ve been told by producers and my Twitter and Facebook followers that I have a knack for it. Perhaps it’s because I feel compassion for and solidarity with my colleagues, not competition.
Opera singers are more fragile than an audience member would ever believe. We loom larger than life up there, and when people meet me in person, I think they expect me to be seven feet tall. To catch us as we’re running offstage to change costume, or when we’ve flubbed a difficult aria or forgotten a line, puts us in a very vulnerable situation—never mind having cameras lingering on our every pore and nose hair at every turn.
I remember when the idea of doing the live HD broadcasts was first being discussed at the Met and the buzz backstage among performers was concern.
“I don’t know, what do you think about this HD thing?” Ben Heppner asked me at the time, when we passed each other in the halls at the Met a year or two before our revolving-Tristan run.