Everybody
knows that I’m totally hooked on Joyce DiDonato,
but then again, who isn’t? It could be that such simplicity is the highest art,
but she gives you the impression that, yes, she really is your long-lost
sister. And so she’s not easy to like: she’s impossible not to like.
But Renée Fleming?
She’s
certainly at the top of her game as well; in fact, both women are. Fleming is a
lyric soprano about whom one writer—in a blog called RenéeFlemingAdmirers.net,
and the fact that there is such a thing speaks libraries, not volumes—said….
The New
York Times writes about her as The Beautiful Voice. In France she is presented as La
Cantatrice Rayonnante,
when in England she is bearing the name Double Creame. Die German leading newspaper
has given her the tittle Schaumgeborene Sopran-Venus. To aloud (sic, very sic) to address to
her as Celeste Renée was
my proposition. She confirmed it favoring me with her incredible, charming
smile.
OK—be fair:
I have the sense that English may not be the writer’s first language, or cradle
tongue, as we say down here in Puerto Rico. The point is that Fleming has a
gorgeous voice.
Ooops,
sorry, but it’s not.
I read
somewhere that Jascha
Heifetz, when people told him, “oh, your violin sounds so beautiful,” would
put his ear to the instrument and say, “funny, I don’t hear anything….” So yes,
it’s true that Fleming’s voice is beautiful, gorgeous, polished, and all the
other adjectives writers like to heap up. But—surprise—there are lots and lots
of gorgeous voices out: it’s not that rare a thing. What is rare is the
incredible amount of discipline, work, thought, stamina, and luck that went
into getting that gorgeous voice to do what Fleming can do with it.
Is there
anything more difficult than singing opera? Because really, there’s the sheer
athletics; one tight muscle will very likely produce a tense sound. Then there’s
the attention to text, and how many actors, by the way, have to master German,
French, Italian, English, and—increasingly—Russian and Czech? And speaking of
actors, it’s no longer enough to haul yourself onstage, open your mouth and
blow everybody away. Remember Joan Sutherland, whom
the opera buffs at La
Fenice dubbed La Stupenda? Well, stupendous she was, but in her
early days, she had one gesture; a gesture her drama coach called “generally
pained expression,” or some such thing. (Every time he saw it, he would shout “GPE,
Joan,” and she struggled to change it.) And as if all this weren’t enough, you
are called upon—if you’re crazy enough to do it—to spend up to six hours, in
the case of Wagner,
screeching over 100 musicians who have the advantage—besides numbers—of sitting
between you and the audience. Thanks, guys!
Oh, and
have I mentioned a final detail? Yes, generally speaking, the polite British
and the friendly Americans will look the other way—with perhaps a generally
pained expression—as you have your off night. Because look, part of the work
you’ve put in is to assure that, by and large, you have a consistent product,
one you can roll out even after fighting with your husband on the phone for two
hours right before the performance. But that may mean that you’re delivering “good,”
but not “great.” But the Italians?
Good, you
see, is not good enough in Milan. And there is a group called the loggionisti, who are about as fierce—and certainly
as loud—as alley cats in heat. And here’s
what happened to Fleming when she sang there:
Quite
what Fleming's offence was is unclear, but certainly her opening night as
Lucrezia was not the luckiest of performances. The tenor had dropped out and
been replaced at the last minute. Then the conductor fainted with a thud at the
end of Fleming's first aria. Finally, at the end of her final cadenza, which
deviated somewhat from La Scala convention, the gods erupted and Fleming was
booed to the goldfretted rafters. It lasted for the whole of her closing scene
and afterwards, she wrote, "I began to shake and I shook for days."
Right—you
want nice? Stay in Minnesota….
Fleming
has, you see, stage fright, and what happened after that experience very nearly
derailed her career. Because she knew: if she “took some time off,” she would
never go back on a stage. So she had her voice coach walk her to the stage and
figuratively push her off the branch and onto the stage. And then, while
onstage, she relaxed and could perform. It was the days and hours before the
performance during which the anxiety rose to near panic.
It’s surprising,
the number of performers who are afflicted, and who nonetheless go on to make
great careers, in spite of it. And though it got better for Fleming, it never
entirely went away: she was petrified about having to sign the national anthem at the Super
Bowl. And why not? She fluffs one line—she would wake up in the middle of
the night thinking, “oh shit, who manned the ramparts?—and that will be
in the first sentence of her obituary:
Renée
Fleming, the brilliant lyric soprano whose career was marred by an unfortunate
lapse of memory while singing the Stars and Stripes…..
Oh, and
just to increase the pressure, she was singing to football fans, for God’s
sake, who are almost worse than the loggionisti. I mean, at least those
guys love opera….
There are
things you can do to reduce stage fright. First, of course, you can be sure you’re
really prepared, that you’ve studied the score, that you’ve put in the work.
Then—especially in the case of singers—you got to be sure you’re in physically
good shape: hydrated, rested, warmed up. But a surprising amount of it is
mental.
It involves
a curious paradox—but it’s not about you. Yes, they’re coming to see Renée
Fleming, but Renée Fleming as Rusalka.
And if you’re singing a
song recital? Well, it’s the music, or it’s the character in the song. But it’s
not you.
Mostly, it’s
the inner critic that somehow, in some way, has to be, not banished, but gently
told to back off. Because what will happen if the critic is screaming, “DON’T
GET TIGHT! DON’T TENSE THOSE NECK MUSCLES!”
Guess what—your
neck is probably tight right now….
And
paradoxically, even positive comments derail you, because it’s like what the
Buddhists, trying to attain pure consciousness, call the “I’m doing great, wasn’t
I!” moment. Which is all to say that it’s not just tennis that has an inner
game; opera has a huge one as well.
And sadly,
Fleming has paid twice, if not three times. First, there’s all that work she
put it in to get that voice where she—and all of us—want it. Then she had to
pay again with nearly immobilizing stage fright. And the third slug to the
emotional solar plexus?
“She seems
so fake,” said one friend.
“Her smile
could give you a suntan,” wrote one reviewer.
Guys? That’s
what I meant, a thousand words back there, when I said it wasn’t fair. Because
as you can see in the master class below, Fleming is both professionally very
helpful and wonderfully kind and supportive. Perhaps she learned what not
to do from Elisabeth
Schwarzkopf, who reportedly terrorized her. (If so, Fleming is not alone—seeing
her on YouTube was like
opening the freezer door).
DiDonato
has been blessed with a kind of candor, openness that—on the face of it—Fleming
doesn’t have. And yet, in comments and interviews, Fleming is remarkably candid
about what her career has cost her; at one point, she muses about how much ego
strength a man has to have to be “Mr. Renée Fleming.”
In one of
his novels, Robertson
Davies remarks that the person one has struggled to become is much more the
“real” person that one started out as. Why can’t we accept that this
extraordinary singer has polished her persona as much as her voice?
