Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva (12 page)

“Art informs the music,” she told us, and she was right. To see art that was created at the same time as the music I sang was enriching.

One morning we paid our respects at the most famous cemetery in Vienna, the Zentralfriedhof, with almost 600 acres and over 300,000 graves, including those of composers Brahms, Beethoven, and Schubert. That night, we went to the Musikverein, which is one of the most beautiful and acoustically glorious halls in the world. I don’t remember who was singing or what they were singing; I just remember being overwhelmed by the colors and sounds of a country so new to my senses.

Grandma loved it, too, though she was queasy because everyone still smoked like a chimney in Europe. She was also still in hyperparanoid mode ever since her Nazi comment, and scared to even buy a pack of gum for fear she’d be taken advantage of. “Grandma, stop worrying. No one’s going to screw us over on a pack of gum or a cup of coffee. If you want to buy a diamond, then we’ll worry.”

A week into our trip, after we’d seen the magical sites of Vienna, and after Jane had left, I came down with something. But rather than stay cooped up in our cramped hotel room, Grandma and I went out to see Beethoven’s
Fidelio
at the Wiener Staatsoper (the Vienna State Opera).

Dame Gwyneth Jones, a very famous Welsh soprano at the time, was singing, and Grandma Voigt and I sat in a tiny box in the balcony of the horseshoe-shaped theater. I was running such a high fever, I wanted to lean my blazing head against one of the life-size, gilded, topless female sculptures that surrounded the perimeter of the room.
Gustav Mahler conducted here
, I thought, dizzily, then nearly passed out in my seat. I was scheduled to audition on that very stage the next day. What was I to do? I called John that night in tears—I was making only brief phone calls to him every few days during the trip because the long-distance rates were so high. On this call I was both homesick and sick-sick.

I woke up the next morning in our lightless, freezing hotel room with my head and throat on fire. I could barely make the phone call to tell the opera company I was too sick to come. “I need a doctor,” I said. An hour later I was tromping through the snow in search of a taxi; I had an appointment with the doctor to the opera stars. His waiting room walls were plastered with autographed photos of the most famous singers in the world. I slumped down in a chair and a moment later in walks one of them—James King, an American heldentenor (“heroic tenor”) considered to be one of the finest of the postwar period. He had a dark, powerful, dramatic voice,
perfect for the typical Wagnerian protagonist, and he sang mostly German romantic repertoire; my kind of heldentenor. We had met six months earlier in San Francisco when I was covering an opera role and he was singing the lead. He walked into the waiting room and gave me that
I know you
look.

“Mr. King, I’m Deborah Voigt,” I said, barely able to stand up. “I met you in San Franscisco. I was understudying Eva in
Die Meistersinger
.” I was burning up. He put his hand out to shake mine.

“No, no, no . . . I’m very ill. I’m running a fever. . . .”

He was there for a regular checkup, and we made a bit of small talk until the nurse came out to fetch “Frau Voigt.”

“Deborah, do you mind if I come in with you for your exam?” Mr. King asked. “I’m fascinated by the way vocal cords look in different singers. I’d love to see yours.”

The last thing I wanted was James King standing over the doctor’s shoulder, looking at my vocal cords. He might as well have been asking to come into my gynecologist’s exam with me. (If you’ve ever seen a vocal cord, it looks very much like that part of the female anatomy.) Plus, I was a gagger. I really didn’t need anyone to witness all of this.

“Yeah, sure,” I told him.

A minute later, the doctor was holding down my tongue with a wooden depressor and sticking something else down my throat. I looked up wildly from the reclining chair to see the peering bug-eyes of the doctor and James King staring down at me, and I started choking and choking . . .

“Deborah, Deborah”—Mr. King patted me on the shoulder, scoldingly—“you have got to learn to relax so the doctor can do a proper examination!”

After much gagging, the doctor was done. “Yeees, dees looked like de vocal cords of a dramatic soprano,” he said. What he meant, I had no idea. This doctor wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, and the experience was getting a little too bizarre for me. The
doctor gave me some sea-salt treatments and antibiotics, then had the nurse point a microwave-heated device at my chest to warm me up and break up the mucus. For three days, I was stuck convalescing in our puny hotel room with the snow-packed windows and Grandma, who didn’t dare venture outside without me. At the end of those three days, I was well enough to audition, and I did a good job. I was on their radar, and Vienna would later become a major house in my career.

NEXT STOP, MUNICH
. Once I felt better, we hopped a train for my audition at the Bayerische Staatsoper. Everything went well enough (no problems with customs officials, to Grandma’s relief), but what I remember most from that stop was an audition I did for a local agent. There’d been a snowstorm the day before and I was wearing my little black heels instead of boots (no boots for an audition!), which was fine because I had no problem getting a taxi at my hotel. His office was a fifth-floor walk-up above an antique shop in the artsy Schwabing district, off Münchner Freiheit Square. I sang for him and he was impressed.

“Deeebbie,” he said, with a thick German accent, “Now . . . I vant you to go to thees city, and then thees city and thees city . . . and here is a B opera house, and here is a C opera house, and you must be there, you must have a position there!”

Opera houses, I had learned recently, were ranked alphabetically according to their importance and prestige. The main opera houses in Vienna, Munich, and Milan, for example, would be considered A houses; and although I was not yet ready for them, he thought I could easily get a full-time company position in a B house. A lot of Americans built their opera careers this way, so it would be a stellar opportunity and experience for a baby soprano like me—he was insistent about it.

“You need to go to Heidelberg!” he declared and stood up. “Get on the train today. There’s one that leaves at six o’clock tonight. You
will go to Heidelberg and sing for Herr
Iforgetzinamen
! I will call him now and arrange everything and you will sing for him! After that, I vant you to get on a train and get to Düsseldorf and sing for them, too . . . and after that . . .”

He went on and on with a list of cities and names and opera houses, and I was saying,
Okay, okay, yes . . . thank you, yes. I will get on these trains, I will go.

But in my head, I was thinking,
No! No! No!

I walked outside into a foot-high snowdrift in my little black heels, couldn’t find a taxi, and burst into tears. When I finally got back to the hotel room, to waiting Grandma, my feet were soaking wet, and I was still crying. Part of me wanted to do as the agent said because he and other important people in the business were telling me I had the chops to do it, and the United States didn’t have as many opera houses or opportunities like this for a singer on the rise. In America, the experience would be more conservatory style, or in small opera companies singing small roles. In a B opera house in Germany, you’d be singing the leads.

“I don’t want to do it, I’m not ready,” I cried to Grandma. Part of it was that I wasn’t ready to leave home, and part of it was John. I thought of Jane’s words again, about letting John hold me back. But I also knew that Jane knew me emotionally and would understand it wasn’t right for me.

“Calm down,” said Grandma, taking charge for the first time during our trip. “If you don’t want to go you don’t have to go. Nobody’s making you do anything. Why don’t you call the lady who set up the auditions and see what she says?” Good thinking, Grandma. I rang up Sarah Billinghurst.

“Sarah, it’s Debbie”—and I burst into tears yet again.

“Debbie, what’s wrong?”

“I’ve just sung for that big agent.”

“Ah, yes! How did it go?”

“Well . . . he liked me very much . . .
sniffle sniffle
. . . but he wants
me to go to all these small opera companies and . . .
sob, sob
. . .” I explained the rest.

“Oh, Debbie! You don’t have to do it! You’re not even done with your Adler Fellowship yet. Tell him you can’t do it. Do you want me to tell him?”

So Sarah made the call and got me off the hook. The next day, Grandma and I boarded a train to Milan and the famous La Scala.

MOST OF THE
world’s greatest operatic artists have sung in Italy’s majestic Teatro alla Scala, which opened in 1778. It is the stage of many an operatic
prima
and was a second home to Verdi, who premiered many of his operas there up to his final composition,
Falstaff
, in 1893. Walking into the house for the first time is a stunning experience. Grandma had skipped the other auditions but came with me to this one, and together we stood in the main auditorium and looked up at the grand proscenium in awe. I was glad Grandma was seeing this. She’d had a frustrating time the day before trying to deal with the pizza in Italy, unable to comprehend why it was different from the one at Pizza Hut in suburban Illinois. We were on Week Three, and it was getting more and more difficult to get along. She’d never experienced so many new tastes, sights, and habits, and, like her son, she wasn’t the go-with-the-flow type.

Instead of embracing the newness, she was afraid of it. Looking up at the vaulted ceiling at the Teatro, I wondered about my own fears. Did I hesitate to leap into Europe’s welcoming arms just because I was afraid of something so big and new? What, exactly, was I afraid of?

Milan was not a good place for me to start any leaping.

I was auditioning that day for the new principal conductor and musical director, Riccardo Muti, who would continue in that eminent position for another two decades. He had a reputation as being tough and is known as a kind of god of Italian music, whereas I’m primarily a German singer and was so even then. Right away
we weren’t a great fit, and it ended up being one of the most awkward auditions I ever had. I sang an aria from
Ballo
and something German—“Dich, teure Halle” from Wagner’s
Tannhäuser
, as I recall.

The stagehands had been working on the set for their upcoming production of Wagner’s
Die Walküre
that day and the stage was scattered with props. They had vacated the stage, but as I was doing my audition, they made so much noise underneath the stage, eating their lunch and moving scenery, that I couldn’t hear myself sing except to know that I was off-pitch.

“Stop, stop . . .
basta
!” said Maestro Muti, putting his hand up. He was standing in the tenth row of the house with the artistic director, Cesare Mazzonis. The maestro put his hands on his hips

“Why are you singing like that, is there something wrong with you?”

“No, Maestro, I’m sorry. I’m hearing so much noise from below where the stagehands are working . . .”

“Well, come downstage, then!” He was not happy. I moved downstage, stepping on big, flat rocks that were part of the set. Turns out they were made of foam and rubber, and as I put my entire 280 pounds on them, I slipped and—
boom!—
onto the floor. After I gathered myself up in embarrassment, I sang. But Maestro Muti wasn’t giving me the time of day. He knew I had so much grooming to do, all he said to me was, “You need to work on your Italian,” and left.

For someone so Italian, I think I was just too
German
for him—my look, my voice, even my name. The man scared the shit out of me but I would have loved to have worked with him at some point and I never have. He’s a great musician and my colleagues with whom he’s worked speak very highly of him. But I wasn’t going to let this experience ruin my first time in Italy. Afterward, I took a walk by myself down a little cobblestoned
strada
and turned the corner into a piazza and there, in front of me, was the beautiful,
gothic Duomo. It took six centuries to build and is one of the oldest churches in Europe. I stepped inside and looked up—at 148 feet, the church had one of the highest “naves” (the long ceiling leading up to the altar) in the world. I looked up and up. Somehow, looking so high and seeing all that beauty made my little slip onstage seem small and insignificant.

OUR LAST STOP
was Paris, where I was to spend two coveted, and very expensive, weeks studying with Régine Crespin. I was looking forward to meeting this grand, controversial character. She had published her very candid memoir,
La vie et l’amour d’une femme
(“The Life and Love of a Woman”), a few years earlier, and the opera world was buzzing with her descriptions of backstage love affairs with both men and women, among other colorful details.

We got to Paris and I telephoned her—no answer. Grandma and I went out to have some
pain au chocolat
at the pâtisserie near our hotel, came back, and I tried her again—still no answer, and no answering machine. The next day, the same thing, and by Day Three, I was getting very worried, until I got a call from her. She’s having dental problems, she explained, and tells me to please wait—
Attends!—
and she will call me again when her teeth feel better.

By Day Five and no Madame, Grandma and I were at each other’s throats. By now I’ve been dipping into John’s and my savings account so that we could have our own hotel rooms and give each other some breathing space. But as Days Six and Seven rolled around and still no Madame, I’d had it. I loved Europe but after tripping, crying, freezing, getting sick, and having my larynx ogled at, I was over it and was more than ready to go home. I called the airline, changed our return tickets, and when we touched down at San Francisco International I wanted to kiss the tarmac.

The following year, the elusive Madame Crespin, whom I couldn’t get to see in Paris, came directly to me in San Francisco. She began teaching part-time at the Adler Fellowship, and I finally got
my voice lessons. She was a great teacher and she loved my voice. So much so, that she tried to get me to go back to Paris with her.