CHAPTER SIX
CHALLENGE
B
Y 1995 I was taking on new roles at the insane pace of five to eight a year, and there was even one period in which I was scheduled to sing ten new roles in fourteen months. I had become a great procrastinator when it came to learning operas, not because I was lazy but because my schedule demanded that I learn one role after another in quick succession. Ultimately, the adrenaline of working under pressure became addictive and created a work habit that I still find tough to break. (My former manager Matthew Epstein’s pet name for me is Mother Courage.) When I was pregnant with our second daughter, Sage, I was engaged to sing my first Marschallin in
Der Rosenkavalier
with Christoph Eschenbach in Houston. In this case I was really backed up and had to learn the Marschallin in two weeks, so that I could arrive in Houston and be onstage for a dress rehearsal the same day, since a previously scheduled Vienna engagement curtailed my availability. As I started to study the score, I was thinking it wouldn’t be impossibly daunting. After all, the Marschallin doesn’t sing at all in act 2, and makes her third-act entrance only toward the end of the opera, and of course I already knew the trio from concert performances.
Unfortunately, I didn’t take into account how difficult act 1 was, how wordy, how conversational, how
long
. There was so much singing, and it was all so chromatic and rhythmically challenging. It was hard enough for me to understand it on the page, much less read it and memorize it. While in Vienna I had rented one of Plácido Domingo’s apartments, and if I close my eyes right now I can still see the wallpaper, the pictures on the walls, the piano, everything. The entire apartment is etched in my mind forever, because I ended up sitting in a chair all day, studying the score, sunup to sundown. By the time I got to Houston I knew it cold, and in this way began my love affair with one of the greatest characters ever created for a soprano. Strauss, anything in Russian or Czech—those parts are graven in my memory forever. Even roles that I haven’t sung very often over the course of my career I could sing again tomorrow, if they required painstaking attention the first time around. I appeared in Benjamin Britten’s
The Turn of the Screw
once as a student and then had to sing it again several years later on one day’s notice. I was surprised to find that I could conjure it up again in twenty-four hours. Repeating operas also helps to establish them in my memory. Not only could I still sing all three soprano roles in
Don Giovanni
(though I’d need a little warning to brush up on Zerlina), I could probably sing Leporello and Giovanni as well. If you perform in an opera often enough, everybody’s roles become familiar.
Sage was born in August 1995, and again I sang until late in my pregnancy. I was engaged to open the Met in
Otello
with Plácido Domingo, which was an exciting opportunity, both for singing with him in his signature role and for opening the season, so two and a half weeks after she was born I pushed myself to begin rehearsals. Opening night came two weeks after that, and somehow I managed. I lived only five blocks away from the Met, which was enormously helpful, and rehearsals were not strenuous, given that we all knew the production, but the performances certainly were. Being in New York with Rick and my family there to help me made things much easier than having to scoop up the baby and run to Dallas, the way I did after Amelia was born. It also helped that I wasn’t learning a new role in Russian. But mostly it worked because I was young and energetic and had a very strong will.
Having children has been an incredible gift to me. Only time will tell if my daughters will feel equally fortunate, but so far they seem to be happy, well-adjusted girls. It was easy when they were very young, because I simply packed them up and took them with me on the road. In the days when my schedule consisted almost entirely of opera, we’d simply travel to a new city and set up camp in an apartment, staying in the same place for a month or two. The girls thought of home as being wherever I, their current nanny, and their respective toys and paraphernalia were, and they didn’t seem to mind that it wasn’t a stationary place. Rick would visit, and when we returned to New York he would largely take over the nuts and bolts of care so as to have his time with them as well. It truly was the perfect existence. I had everything I wanted without the pain and guilt of leaving my children. I kept this up for as long as I could, even moving the girls to schools in Houston and Chicago for longer opera engagements. Amelia actually extended her kindergarten year in Paris, and two years later, both girls attended the bilingual school. Because the Paris school year lasts until the middle of July, it meant some extra weeks of work for them, but I wanted the girls to have as much exposure to another language as possible.
Once Amelia entered the first grade and school became more demanding, I knew things had to change, as Rick and I both felt that the girls needed a solid education combined with a stable social life—no traveling tutors for us. Eventually, I switched over from what was almost entirely an opera schedule—which had me on the road for as much as ten months out of a year—to a schedule that balanced operas with concerts. I made a general commitment to sing opera only at the Met every season and in Europe in the summer, when the girls can come with me, with very few exceptions. The rest of the season, I take only short trips, typically three concerts in five days to a week, as opposed to an opera engagement, which requires three to six weeks’ rehearsal before six to ten performances—a commitment of up to two months. This system still presents a challenge, however, because operas are planned five or six years in advance, making it next to impossible to work around the school calendar and its treasured plays and dance recitals. Fortunately, concerts are scheduled much later than opera, so I sometimes have the flexibility to confirm a date just a year in advance. I feel tremendously fortunate to have both riches in my life: the satisfaction of a thrilling career combined with the sharing and unconditional love of a mother-daughter relationship. Amelia and Sage know without a doubt that they come first, but they can also see firsthand the joy I experience in my work. It was this same kind of personal satisfaction I observed in my own mother’s life, and one that I hope my daughters will experience as well.
But even as I was managing the scheduling and the girls, I wasn’t managing everything well. In the early part of 1998 Rick and I began to discuss divorce. Most people would look at us and assume that our marriage broke up because of my career, when in fact it was just the opposite. Rick and I had fallen in love when we were living in different countries, and while I was away so often we did very well. But once the girls were older and established, and I started staying home more with them, we were finally forced to confront the problems we had, which were not unlike the problems any other couple has. We’d grown apart.
Feeling initially relieved that a step had been taken, I was completely unprepared for the havoc this was about to wreak on my life and sense of well-being. We had already been leading largely independent lives and remained devoted parents, so I naively thought that our separation wouldn’t really amount to too dramatic a change. My subconscious had other ideas, though, and was soon to knock me down—hard.
Professionally, 1998 began very promisingly. In January I sang a televised concert with Plácido Domingo, Daniel Barenboim, and the Chicago Symphony, followed a week later by Strauss and Mozart in Cleveland. Everywhere I went I sang with incredible ease, loving every second I was onstage. I felt that things were settled for the girls, who would be accompanying me for a long upcoming opera engagement in Chicago, and who had been accepted into two different French schools. Although Rick and I were beginning to map out our divorce, we were managing to put the girls’ needs first and to work well together to take good care of them. I began to feel a tremendous sense of relief.
Then, while I was performing the Countess at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, I experienced some stage fright during “Dove sono.” It caught me by surprise. That aria was never an easy piece, but it was certainly one with which I had had an enormous amount of experience. Suddenly I found myself growing nervous every time I heard the music coming up, and I couldn’t seem to shake it. The aria proved to be difficult to perform for the entire run, and there were a couple of phrases in particular that I started to dread, tensing whenever I had to sing them. Opera singers are rightly terrified of fear, because by affecting our relaxation it undermines our breathing. I recognized that I had good reasons to be feeling stressed. Besides the divorce, I was facing three new roles back-to-back in the coming months: the title roles in
Arabella
and
Lucrezia Borgia,
and Blanche in the world premiere of André Previn’s
A Streetcar Named Desire
. It made perfect sense that the pressure would show up somewhere. If it showed up in “Dove sono,” well, at least I had identified the problem, gotten through it, and could move on to the next engagement.
I went to Houston and began the rehearsal period for
Arabella
with my beloved Christoph Eschenbach. I was glad to be starting a new opera, safe with my friend and with my art, my girls with me, away from home and the stress of the addition of lawyers to begin the process of separation. I didn’t have any trouble learning the role this time, but I had an incredible amount of physical tension in my shoulder muscles and neck—tension that grew so strong that I began to wonder if, by the time opening night came around, I’d even be able to get through the performance. Somehow I managed to calm myself down and find a great masseuse, who worked on me as if with a hammer and chisel, and I survived this beautiful but demanding role.
From Houston, I went on to La Scala for Donizetti’s
Lucrezia Borgia
. I felt physically better, and with the love and support of the girls and my visiting family, I was able to put my previous experience in
Don Giovanni
behind me and think of this as a fresh start. I did have a slight run-in with the conductor, Gianluigi Gelmetti, over decorations and cadenzas that I wanted to add to the piece, to all of which he was patently opposed. They were beautiful and all stylistically correct, since Philip Gossett, a superb musicologist who specializes in nineteenth-century Italian opera, and with whom I had collaborated ever since singing
Armida
in Pesaro, had written them. Although Gossett’s scholarship is greatly respected, Gelmetti insisted, “We are in Muti’s house and so we will follow Muti’s strictures,” which meant to sing what was on the page only. Gelmetti, who was advancing in age, was making his own La Scala debut with this performance and was probably fearful of doing anything that might cause Muti any displeasure. After some discussion, I gave in on almost everything, with the exception of one particularly dramatic cadenza in the final scene that I lobbied to keep. Finally Gelmetti agreed, and I was pleased that we’d managed the whole issue in the spirit of civility and compromise. The final dress rehearsal was perfect, the chorus and orchestra were supportive, and we had an excellent cast. I thought that everything was going to turn out beautifully, which is a tribute to my particularly American naïveté.
The first piece of troublesome news on opening night was that the tenor had canceled. I think he knew there was trouble brewing and had been advised to distance himself from it. Fortunately for me, my friend Marcello Giordani had been scheduled for the second company. We had worked together often in the past, and I was relieved to be sharing the evening with my friend. At the end of my first aria, just as I finished the last note, I heard a loud thud, and when I looked down I saw that the conductor had disappeared. There was a gasp from the audience. Gelmetti had collapsed, and Marcello and I continued standing in our places, peering into the pit, not even sure if he was alive, though at that moment I feared the worst. Eventually the curtain came down, and we learned that he had only fainted. After fifteen minutes he pulled himself together, and we resumed, though it was all downhill from there. At the end of my first big duet with Marcello there was some scattered booing, but I felt remarkably unscathed by it. It really wasn’t until the much-discussed cadenza at the end of my final scene that all havoc broke loose and the serious booing began.
Now, just to set the record straight, the protagonists in this drama were a very small group of men, probably fewer than ten, who were sitting in the very top reaches of the theater. Rachelle and several friends who were there witnessed it all from the audience. Fortunately, those of us on the stage are very limited in what we can hear clearly in the house, and if I’m actually singing I can hear almost nothing at all besides the sound of my own voice, which in this case was a blessing. So I am relying on others’ reports when I say that many audience members in the orchestra section and other areas in the house began screaming at the catcallers, warning them in no uncertain terms to stop the disruption. Nevertheless, the screaming and booing continued throughout the final scene, which is Lucrezia’s scene entirely, as she realizes she’s just poisoned her own son by mistake (one of opera’s more ludicrous plots). I kept my focus and stayed with the music. Thankfully the force of what had happened didn’t hit me until it was over. And then I began to shake, and I shook for days.
When the curtain went down, Gelmetti turned to the auditorium and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “Well, it wasn’t my fault,” and then left us to face the audience on our own. The cast bowed together with me in solidarity. Naive to the end, I called the clinic to which Gelmetti was admitted and inquired about his health. He wrote me a telling letter that said simply, “Your Lucrezia is very special.” “Special” is not a compliment in the Italian language. At its very best it implies ambivalence, and at its worst it implies no ambivalence whatsoever.