Found hereSo here I was, a gifted child living in a small rural community with people who for the most part, didn't understand or appreciate classical music, let alone an operatic voice in a 15-year old. I didn't know anyone who could tell me how to navigate these waters. My father tried to encourage me to sing like the female performers that he knew of: Christa Ludwig or Dame Janet Baker. I loved listening to the latter and feared sounding like the former. Baker had a clear, crisp, decisive sounding voice. To my ear, Ludwig sang hootily and sounded like her mouth and throat were full of cotton. My father presented me with a recording of her singing Brahm's Alto Rhapsody, along with the vocal score. It is a soaring piece, written for an alto voice against a men's chorus. I was immediately entranced both with the music and melancholy lyrics of Goethe:
Well, that's pretty heavy stuff. Contemplating what it meant made me recognize that I felt like the bitter, brokenhearted man wandering in the desert. The music took me places that I'd never been before, mentally, spiritually, and vocally. But immersing myself in the lyrics like that was not good for me emotionally. About 60-70% of teenagers experience dysphoria: feeling sad or melancholy for long stretches of time. It's a sadness that is not quite depression, but is a melancholy that holds on. It is one of the things that makes us think of teenage girls as "drama queens." Being a teenager is hard enough, but living in the romantic composers' world dropped me down into the subterranean levels of mental health. Consider these lyrics of Robert Schumann:
Or the words of Mahler's Lieder eine faharenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) in which a man sings about his agony on the day of his true love's marriage to someone else:
a dagger deep in my heart,
Ah pain, it cuts so deep.
In every joy and pleasure deep,
so deep it cuts with pain so deep.
Ah, why must I have this evil guest,
never is he hushed, never will he rest.
Not by day, not by night when I sleep.
Ah pain.
When I look into the sky,
there I can see the bluest eyes. Ah pain.
When in the golden fields I roam,
there I can see her golden hair
on breezes blown. Ah pain, such pain.
And when from my dream I start
then I hear laughter, her silver laughter,
Ah pain.
I wished I lay in the darkest grave.
Oh never, never to wake up again.
And so there I was, living in the ephemeral world of anguished romantic composers--a good 60% of whom have mood disorders, as I would later learn. My external world had enough challenges of its own without this added ingredient. Longing to sing these songs, I was consumed every waking moment with a type of unrequited love: the music was in me but there was no place out in that rural environment to sing it. It was within me, but didn't belong to me. When I did sing it, I had to brace myself for whatever unthinking remark was made by my siblings or friends. And all the time, I kept wondering who on earth could I turn to who could help me with all of this.
I grew up in a very conservative religious home. One could say that we were fundamentalist Christians. We were told that it was our duty to develop our talents and gifts as much as possible as a way to bring honor and glory to God. But I began to notice that as I did that, I was getting unspoken messages that there was something spiritually dangerous about being a professional classical musician. I might lose interest in spiritual things and become full of prideful, dissipation. Especially with all those opera stories of lust, betrayal, and all manner of relationships inappropriate for Christians to portray. Think of it: Carmen, the girl with the loose morals who worked in a cigarette factory, has an affair with the jealous Escamillo who eventually knifes her to death in a jealous rage. Or let's see, how about Madame Butterfly? A 15 year-old geisha girl falls in love and marries American Lt. Pinkerton. In doing so, she must renounce the religion and love of her own parents. She does not realize that her marriage to Pinkerton is merely one of convenience and is not legally binding. So when he returns to America saying that he will return "when the robins nest again" she innocently believes him. Of course, he doesn't come back. When he writes to tell Butterfly that he has married an American woman, she does not read English and assumes that his letter is full of love for her. In fact, Pinkerton and his American wife come to Japan to tell her that they want her child to live with them in America. As Butterfly realizes what has happened, she tells them that they can return for the child in half an hour. She bids an agonized goodbye to her small child, goes behind a screen, and with Pinkerton's own dagger, kills herself. Pinkerton and his wife rush in to find her dying, and as the curtain falls, Pinkerton is pathetically calling out her name and weeping over her.
This is the ilk of operatic stories. No wonder conservative Christians do not like the idea of opera. They contain every stripe of immorality. But if I couldn't sing that sort of thing, why would God give me an operatic voice? Was I to sing Christian hymns in church? Was that to be my life?
I sought out every person whom I thought might be able to help me. One of them was my religion teacher, Mr. Barton. He had a thundering bass voice and when he sang "Asleep in the Deep" at church, he tucked his chin into his chest and shook his head from side to side, squeezing out those low notes. He used to sing in the Metropolitan Opera Chorus, he was quick to tell people. He was full of the stories that musicians tell: the time the obese soprano dramatically flung herself off a parapet supposedly to her death, but landed on a trampoline type affair offstage, only to bounce back up into full view of the audience. Or when the chorus members got lost and sang obscene lyrics in Italian to one another on stage. Or how the tenor couldn't sing a note and someone sang it for him from offstage. I used to listen to Mr. Barton talk about his days of glory and take notice of the wistfulness and regret on his face. "Oh, but a Christian can't stay in that field for very long," he'd tell me. "It was all so awful. You have to sleep your way to the top. There are so few really good singers that that's what you can expect to have to do." I didn't like the sound of that. But I didn't believe him, either. He sounded like such a martyr as he poured cold water on my dreams. Mr. Barton pointed out several opera singers who used to be fine Christians: Shirley Verrett, Thomas Hampson, and Kathleen Battle. "They gave up their godly lives to live out of a suitcase and sing on a stage. You need to be careful that this doesn't happen to you." He didn't have any advice, just a steady diet of futility and fatalism. A has-been, that's what he is. I don't want to ever be a has-been.
I note on Shirley Verrett's autobiography cover, she mentions how she "over came the fundamentalism" of her own family. Hmmm.
To hear this kind of commentary from Mr. Barton as well as from my own father, and to be led to believe that singers inevitably become power hungry, vain, dissolute divas, was the most discouraging thing any young singer could hear. It was as though my voice had been a cosmic joke: Here--see what singing is all about, but don't you dare do anything with it or else you'll be forever spiritually lost. It shocked me that I had been given something I didn't ask for, that I couldn't safely pursue or develop, that belonged to someone else, that others would receive accolades for (parents), and that was a danger to my eternal life. What had I done to deserve this? It was a double, triple, quadruple bind. I began to pray that my voice would go away.
Be careful what you pray for.
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