Photograph by Christian Steiner
The BBC named Christine Brewer one of the top 20 sopranos of the 20th century. She’s sung with the world’s finest symphony orchestras and opera companies, made 32 classical recordings, and won a Grammy for Best Classical Album. Her voice is described as “golden,” its power “searing,” “stunning,” “superlative,” “magnificent.” And she’s standing in a tiny Washington University studio, brow furrowed, listening intently to her teacher, Christine Armistead. They’re going over the Benedictus of Ludwig van Beethoven’s powerful Missa Solemnis. “I’m OK for the first two-thirds,” Brewer says, “but when they start that little prelude, I always feel like I’m going to throw up.” Seriously? She’s sung this Mass many times, to glorious reviews. I do a furtive Google search for the Benedictus and find it pronounced immensely difficult and “nearly unsingable,” its opening violin rising several octaves in a single soaring flight. “The writing displays Beethoven’s characteristic disregard for the performer…”
When I look up, Armistead’s talking about the tessitura, the near-impossible pitch range Beethoven is demanding. “Did he write that just to irritate the singer?”
“I think so!” Brewer retorts. Then she softens. “I will say, when I‘ve done this before with [maestro Kurt] Masur, he always said it was like walking on the clouds in heaven.” Tears glimmer in her blue eyes.
Armistead nods. “Clouds are parting. You’re already there.” She talks about “breathing in held space” and the subtexts required in a melisma (an ornamental phrase of several notes sung to one syllable of lyric). Brewer raises questions so subtle and minute, it’s like watching a hummingbird’s wings in slow motion.
Only later do I realize that they have been discussing two bars of a 90-minute Mass.
Brewer made it her first priority, in her precious week home, to drive over from Lebanon, Ill., to go over those two bars. Monday, she’ll leave to sing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. Then she’ll sing Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring with the LA Opera, Der Freischütz with the London Symphony Orchestra, a recital in San Antonio, another at New York’s Lincoln Center—and that only takes us from March to early May.
When they switch from Beethoven to Britten, Brewer’s face lights up. She loves the role of Lady Billows, because after a year of Wagner’s Ring cycle and Richard Strauss’ songs about death, it’s a delightful chance to make the audience laugh.
She sings one of Lady Billows’ arias. Armistead leans forward. “On ‘shocking business,’ let’s shorten the vowel. You have an internal calibrator for every note you have to sing, and it’s calculating faster than a computer, giving you the spaces for every one of those pitches.”
Brewer tries again, shortening the vowel by a millisecond, and smiles break across both their faces. The segue has smoothed into satin. “When I do that, it’s so easy,” she tells Armistead. “I wish I could just tattoo that on my brain. Damn it.”
Armistead nods. “It’s counterintuitive. Because it is virtuosic there, it seems like it should be more work. That’s what’s so hard.”
Brewer’s used to hard work. It’s ease that catches her off guard.
A tall freshman in dark-framed ’60s glasses walked to the center of the Shawnee High School stage, drew a breath, and sang “I Could Have Danced All Night.” Her voice made a high, sparkling arc in the dim theater. She was auditioning to be Eliza in My Fair Lady. Singing came as naturally to her as talking, so she hadn’t practiced much.
And she didn’t get the part.
The lead should go to an upperclassman, her teacher explained. Christy could be the concertmaster. She took the news calmly and focused on her schoolwork—she was in the gifted program and would soon be taking college-level trigonometry and psychology—and her violin lessons. She usually won first place in recitals, but her mom always had a critique: “It didn’t sound quite as good as it did when you rehearsed it,” or “It didn’t quite sound like your heart was in it.”
Years later, Dee Burchyett finally explained: “I didn’t ever want you to think you were perfect, and you didn’t need
to practice.”
Back then, Dee was the one with the golden voice. She sang with two of her best friends in a trio, and they’d perform at state fairs or the Holiday Inn nightclub. Audiences stopped chatting and froze, drinks halfway to their lips, because the harmonies were so pure and perfect. When Christy sang, usually at her Southern Baptist church in Grand Tower, Ill. (population 500), people would say, “That was really good, honey. Now your mother, she really has a great voice…”
Dee also had a sturdy, point-blank way of facing the world. She grew up in a dirt-floored house in Arkansas, and she drummed into her kids the notion that everybody just had a job, and nobody’s job was more important than anybody else’s.
Junior year, Christy got the lead in South Pacific.
She was working in the admissions office at McKendree College, in Lebanon, Ill., when a transfer student walked in. He had long hair and little John Lennon glasses, and he was smart—he had a scholarship. “I’m going to date him,” she told a friend.
Ross Brewer hadn’t even noticed her. He already had a girlfriend, and he wasn’t looking for a new one. But he saw her again when classes started. They were both education majors. She had this freshness about her, just enough attitude. And she was pretty…
They married right after graduation. She was 21. He was 22 and didn’t have a job yet. They spent less than $100 on the wedding—but all of their friends were there. Ross found a job teaching social studies and English to eighth-graders. They bought a piano—paying in installments—and ate White House macaroni and cheese because it was cheaper than Kraft.
By then, Christine had been to her first opera: Don Giovanni. She’d also fallen in love with Strauss’ Four Last Songs, transcendent meditations on death. She bought the score, but her voice teacher said she was too young; she should learn the poems but not even think about singing them until she was in her thirties.
She took his advice, focused on Mozart. After graduation, she started singing with the St. Louis Symphony Chorus, and one day she heard the other sopranos buzzing about openings in the chorus of a young company called Opera Theatre of Saint Louis.
Not only did Christine get hired, she got to be a tree. She was the tallest woman in the chorus, so artistic director Colin Graham handed her a heavy metal tree to hold in The Magic Flute’s magic forest. She stood very still, onstage for nearly the entire production, sweaty in her midnight-blue velvet, clutching her tree. From that vantage point, she got to watch Pamina and Tamino fall in love, more realistically with every rehearsal. This wasn’t a frothy high-school musical; this was real.
Until that moment, her plan had been to teach music—voice, guitar, violin—and sing wherever she was asked. In the magic forest, a different kind of ambition, something larger and far less likely, took root.
OTSL started giving her small parts and understudy roles, and Graham invited her to his Benjamin Britten workshop in Banff, Alberta. There were diction classes, acting classes—there was even a movement class, taught by a dancer who wanted them to learn fluidity by “being” a ball. Trained by her brothers, Christine couldn’t stop “throwing” the ball. “Who wins this game?” she called as she threw.
Her teacher winced. “This is Zen, Christine!”
After that workshop, Graham asked her to sing Ellen Orford in Britten’s Peter Grimes.
Ross watched his wife closely. They had one child, Elisabeth, and she was about to enter kindergarten. They’d settled in Lebanon, planning to rehab a Victorian house, and Christine was substitute teaching, auditioning here and there. She kept saying they couldn’t afford for her to make a full-out try for an opera career. But in the middle of a conversation about politics or art, she’d hear a snatch of music and “flitter off to another dimension,” as he put it. Telling her not to pursue that passion would be like telling their golden retrievers not to chase tennis balls.
So in spring 1989, when the time came for him to drive to the courthouse in Belleville and renew their teaching licenses, he only renewed his.
She was fighting mad—and she’s never been one to hold back her feelings. Ross shrugged. “I just thought you needed an extra push.”
That fall, she won the Metropolitan Opera auditions—a $10,000 prize—and a Richard Tucker Career Grant, another $10,000. She signed with IMG Artists, and her London manager set up an audition tour.
It was her first—and last. Word of mouth among the conductors would now suffice. In 1993, she made her debut with the Royal Opera at London’s Covent Garden.
She finally had the opera world’s attention.
So she started turning work down.
The Met got a little sniffy with her, but she held fast: She didn’t want to leave her daughter during the school year. She took only summer festival roles—Santa Fe, Spoleto, Grand Teton—and brought Elisabeth with her. It turned out to be a godsend. “You’re thrown into an intimate situation with other singers and actors, and it becomes your world for three months,” she explains. “I do find I become much more self-absorbed: ‘Oh, how is my voice today?’ But when your daughter’s there, you have to go, ‘OK, yeah, we’re gonna study your math now.’”
At a rehearsal in Paris, a German stage director told Christine she was making too many gestures. She nodded, then caught sight of her small daughter behind him, making a thumbs-up sign. On the way back to the hotel, Elisabeth said, “Mom, I hate those fake operatic gestures. You don’t do too many of them, but…”
Elisabeth was a huge help—until she reached her teens. One day, a school friend said, “I saw your mom getting her picture taken! She was in a fancy gown, standing in the middle of a field outside town.” Elisabeth accused the friend of making it up. She came home and begged, “Mom, tell me this didn’t happen!”
Christine hadn’t been wild about the idea herself—the local paper had wanted a shot of her “out standing in her field.”
“Why do you have to be so weird?” Elisabeth wailed.
“You want to go to college?” Christine retorted. “Then shut up.”
Now, the adolescent tension is long over. Elisabeth, who begins work this summer as a cardiac nurse, has organized her life around her favorite bit of advice from her mother: “You have to make yourself, not find yourself.”
Remembering that Elisabeth once considered becoming a vet, I ask her a silly question: “If your mom were a dog, what kind would she be?”
“Oh, she’s a golden retriever,” Elisabeth says without hesitation. “My dad, maybe a bearded collie—just as smart, but could maybe get sidetracked by some sheep or something.” When Christine’s away, “the house’ll look like a science project,” Elisabeth says, “but he’ll have neat rows of 500 lettuce seedlings on top of the fridge. He gets passionate about one thing after another.”
Elisabeth and Ross laugh about what Christine calls her “neurotic needs”: Ross says he once woke up in a hotel room to find she’d opened his wallet and leaned it against the alarm clock, “I guess so that little neon light wouldn’t keep her awake.”
She works so hard, she makes a point of relaxing, going to spas, watching movies, playing with gadgets (she loves anything electronic, especially her wristwatched iPod nano, playing Bruce Springsteen, Ella Fitzgerald, J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Alison Krauss, The Ting Tings…), and getting together with girlfriends she’s had since college. Many of them are schoolteachers, as she thought she’d be. They chat about husbands or grandbabies, books, politics (hers are liberal) and everyday—not operatic—joys and sorrows.
She has close friends in the music world, too—but her main criterion isn’t international fame, it’s “a wicked sense of humor.” Hers, according to her daughter, is “really sarcastic and a little dark.” She doesn’t spill her sorrows, though. “She’s very organized, and she has her own way of handling problems,” Elisabeth says. “Things that are really bothering her, we talk about after the plan has been arranged.”
I remember that after our first interview, I emailed a long list of additional questions. Christine replied quickly and thoughtfully, with lots of helpful detail, and left only one space blank. The question was “What scares you?”
In 1996, Dee Burchyett was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). First she lost her ability to move, then to talk and sing. By January 1998, she couldn’t eat—yet she lived another four months. “We took care of her, and my mom didn’t work that much during that time at all,” Elisabeth remembers.
Shortly after her mother’s death, Christine had to sing Johannes Brahms’ Requiem with the St. Louis Symphony. She worked on it with Armistead and cried through her solo every time. The voice teacher took her hand and told the accompanist to keep going. When Christine finished, her face sopping wet, Armistead said, “There. Now you know that you can sing this if you’re crying.”
Christine threw herself into work. Strauss’ Four Last Songs, with their peaceful acceptance of death, had a deeper meaning for her now. She moved into Wagner, relishing the solitary, tedious grind of preparing and memorizing.
“I sit down at the computer and type out the text,” she explains, “and then I put underneath each line my translation, and I leave another space where I jot my ideas and put it into Christine-speak.” She does the translating herself, resorting to dictionaries if she doesn’t know the language well enough. “The composer was inspired by the text,” she says. “If you know that text, then when you sing it, it will make sense.”
She flips through her printouts so often, the edges smudge and the staples loosen. She pores over the lines in airports and doctor’s offices, penciling notes in the margin about her character. At rehearsals, she jots down the staging and any inspiring comments the director or conductor has made. “It’s this way of building up the character,” she says, “and that helps me keep the words in my head.” When I ask if I can see one of these printouts, she says, “They’re a little too personal. Nobody has seen them but me!”
I’d have chosen Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos, Christine’s first lead role at the Met. She sang the role of Ariadne in 2003, with Maestro James Levine conducting. From that point, the work and travel snowballed. When she toured with the San Francisco Symphony, they moved through Europe so quickly—Paris, Madrid, Belgium—that one evening after a performance, she got into a taxi and went blank. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I don’t even know what language I should be speaking!”
On January 19, 2006, Christine was trading jokes with her girlfriends over lunch at Adriana’s, her favorite restaurant on The Hill. Her cellphone rang. It was Ross. “Would you please call your manager?” he asked, a tetch irritated. “They’ve called me twice at school.” She dialed. The Boston Symphony Orchestra needed her to sing the Missa Solemnis. That night.
Christine’s normal demeanor is calm, friendly, and controlled, but she answered in a flutter of apology; she doesn’t like to disappoint people. “I just can’t,” she explained. “By the time I got home, then back out to Lambert, it would be too late.” What if they chartered a plane for her at MidAmerica Airport? Possible, but barely. She tore home, packed the first gown she saw, dug out her Beethoven score, and put it in her purse. Once she was on the plane, she sang, then took a nap. When she woke, the air inside the plane was freezing cold, and she remembered hearing that a golfer had frozen to death in a small plane. But everything was fine; the heater was on the fritz.
They landed at 7:30 p.m. A limo was waiting, and its driver, Peppino, had Maestro Levine on the cellphone. She fired questions at him: “What’s the pronunciation? German Latin or church Latin?” “Are the soloists going to sing the Pleni sunt coeli or is the chorus singing it?” “Where will we be standing?”
They pulled up in front of the hall, and she was rushed to a dressing room. She was ready 15 minutes later—and doesn’t remember a moment of the concert. When she got back to her hotel, she sat down on the bed and burst into tears.
The next morning, she opened The Boston Globe to read, “Her musical and technical security last night was as impressive as the size and luster of her voice.”
Christine won a Grammy Award for Best Classical Album, for Bolcom: Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Leonard Slatkin conducting. There’s no soprano alive who sings Strauss better, it’s been said. She’s also won fame as a Wagnerian soprano, her interpretation of Isolde pronounced incomparable, her work “an important addition to the Wagner catalog.”
She says the color of her voice is better suited to German than Italian repertoire. It’s rounded, warm, and bright, with diamond clarity. Where does it come from? Northern Europe. Aside from a bit of Cherokee, she’s got Celtic, English, and Norwegian blood (“One relative was called Richard the Long Sword. Nice, huh?”). “If I open a Strauss or Wagner score,” she says, “it just seems like my voice knows what to do.”
Still, Wagner’s not exactly easy. Neither is Cristoph Willibald Gluck’s Alceste, which she sang in Santa Fe in 2009. She was onstage for the entire opera, except for a 5-minute scene at the start of the third act. A few weeks later, when she sang in Dallas, a woman came up and said, “I seen you in that Alceste. Well, I tell you what, that third act, where you were in hell? I was just so glad that you got to lay down on the floor, cause I thought, that girl is tired.” Christine grins. “Now, do I tell her it’s actually harder to sing when you’re on the floor with the devil lying on top of you?”
She loved the role, though, because Alceste “gave up her life and went to hell so her husband could live.” Isolde’s just as fierce. “I like these women that are strong and deep and have substance,” Christine says. They’re not whiny or petulant—and neither is she.
“I like working with you,” conductor Robert Shaw once told her. “You’re not a hot dog.”
Most divas scream. Or cut their costumes into ribbons. It’s said a tenor once declined to perform with Maria Callas, asking rhetorically, “Would you like to sing with a panther?” When Kathleen Battle was fired from the Met, it’s said the cast cheered and applauded. Angela Gheorghiu recently stormed out of The Met’s productions of Faust, Roméo et Juliette, and Carmen.
“It’s insecurity,” Christine says. “You’re by yourself in such a vulnerable place, and you’re onstage. It’s scary. And when you’re taking risks with your characterization and something doesn’t go right, or something throws you off your game, it’s easy to snap and lash out. I can sympathize. You feel like you are giving your soul and somebody asks you to do something stupid.”
I ask whether she’s ever played the diva, and there’s a guilty pause. “Well, I guess I did, one time. Yeah, I did. I just lost it.” A director had everyone wandering around upstage as they sang, unable to hear each other or see the conductor. “Does anybody else think this is stupid?” she finally yelled.
That was the only true diva moment—but she does speak her mind. At the first rehearsal for Strauss’ Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow) with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the director cleared his throat. “Now I’m not going to sugarcoat it,” he said. “The dyer’s wife is a bitch.”
Christine was playing the dyer’s wife, and she’d thought about the role long and hard, even discussing the standard interpretation with Alan Smith, who chairs keyboard studies at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music and has coached her for years on the nuances of Strauss.
“Why wouldn’t she be angry?” she fired back. “She lives with a man with three moronic brothers who are hateful and cruel, and she has to feed and care for them. I’m working harder than any of them, and they are abusive to me, and the only answer my husband has is that I should have a child! I don’t think the third act works if I’m screaming all the time. There’s this beautiful aria she sings and then this duet with her husband, and I don’t buy that she is so in love with him if she’s only been hateful. She is not a bitch!”
Nobody said a word. Then the director murmured, “O-kay. I think Miss Brewer has it. Let’s go on.”
In rehearsal, when they reached the peak of the scene where the dyer’s wife lets her husband have it, the conductor said, just audibly, “Oooh, she really is a bitch.” Then he caught himself: “No, no, she is misunderstood and—what was that other word?”
I’ve been at the Y for two hours already,” Christine assures me. She flew back from Boston last night, and I wondered whether she might be tired. “Water aerobics and deep-water running. I haven’t seen my buddies for a month!” She’s driving to the grade school in Marissa, Ill., where she taught for a year after college. “Back then, the coal mines were still active, and a lot of the kids’ fathers worked in the mines.”
She pulls up outside of the school and waves to violinist Shawn Weil and cellist Bjorn Ranheim, members of the St. Louis Symphony who are meeting her here as part of its Opera-tunities program. The kids are lined up outside on the steps, holding bright rings of flowers.
“Oh-oh, I think it’s Hawaiian Day,” Christine says. “They’re gonna lei us!”
As they head for the gauntlet, they compare notes—the orchestra will be at Carnegie Hall right after she’s there with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. “Oh, bummer,” Ranheim says. “What are you singing?’
The children’s greetings preclude further conversation. They hand Weil a bag of pennies they collected for the orchestra, and his shoulder sinks with the unexpected weight: 80 pounds of pennies, $142.39.
Christine tells the class about her trip to London. “Do you still have the London clock?” she asks. The world clocks were Ross’ idea, as was bringing currency, like the 100 kroner note from Norway that bears the image of soprano Kirsten Flagstad. “I was so excited. Who’s on our money? Old dead presidents.” She stops short and looks stricken. “That wasn’t very respectful. I shouldn’t have said that! This is probably why I don’t teach anymore!”
She loves these trips, though. She emails the kids continually, sending news about Marissa Melody. “She’s the teddy bear I travel with,” she tells me later, matter-of-factly, and sends photos of Marissa in a pink poodle skirt, posing with maestro Yannick Nézet-Séguin; in a purple ball gown, posing with St. Louis Symphony music director David Robertson; in a black leather Harley jacket with maestro Levine. If I needed solid proof that she is beloved, it would be her ability to persuade such men to pose with a frilled-up bear for some kids in a coal town.
They beg for Star Wars or Jaws theme songs; instead they get a violin-cello duet by Reinhold Glière—and then a goofy but brilliant bit of Jaws, too, with Ranheim drumming the shark’s approach on his cello. A girl raises her hand. “The band students from Marissa, they just had a contest Saturday,” she says in a rush, and a little boy pulls his ribbon out of his pocket. Christine tells them about her trip to Iceland, its glaciers and volcanoes, saunas and ice-water swims. The kids tell her about the Polar Bear Jump in New Athens.
They beg her to sing, and she chooses one of her favorites, “Mira” from Carnival, because “it’s about a girl from a very small town, and it reminds me of me.”
A place that’s strange is never cozy
A room that’s strange is never sweet
I have to have a chair that knows me
And walk a street that knows my feet.
She doesn’t tell them that when she recorded Great Operatic Arias in English, she insisted on adding two American show tunes to the end—but when it came time to sing “Mira,” she started crying and couldn’t finish. She went back the next day and sang it through.
“‘Mira’ is kind of her theme song,” Ross tells me. “There’s a line in there about ‘where you live in a house till the house falls down’—when we had to jack up our house and remove all the foundation from the north side and redo it, I said, ‘Could you lay off that song for a while?’”
The same woman’s done Christine’s hair for years, in a little salon on The Hill. We schedule a photo shoot for afterward—“Then I know I’ll have some good hair!”—at Adriana’s. She jokes with the photographer and catches up with Adriana (who regularly imposes on her to sing “Happy Birthday” to stunned patrons). “Home to do laundry so I can pack tomorrow,” Christine says as she leaves. “The glamour never ends!”
There is glamour, though, plenty of it, in the travel, the talent encircling her, its rituals and elegance. In a San Francisco production of Tristan und Isolde, her third-act costume was a simple black velvet gown with a long train, and she loved it so much she bought it from the costume department…
OK, that’s it for the glamour. Back to the packing. She layers her suitcases so what she needs first is on top and keeps separate bags when she’s going through different climate zones. She jots down the exchange rate on each day’s receipts. She pays taxes in six countries and about 20 states, plus estimated taxes in New York and California because she works there so often.
“The traveling gets her down,” Ross says, “but give her a day of rehearsal and she’s always much happier. It’s like the first day of school: Are you going to make friends with the other kids?”
Ross has a way of keeping things in perspective. After the Berlin Wall fell, Christine sang at the White House, and a reception followed. Soldiers from East Germany stood on one side, soldiers from West Germany on the other. “It’s like a junior-high mixer,” Ross whispered to his wife. Sure enough, after a bit of beer (Anheuser-Busch sponsored the reception) and Christine’s rendition of the German national anthem, the two sides began to mingle, history in the making.
Right before the final rehearsal of the Missa Solemnis at Carnegie Hall—the one Christine was prepping for with Armistead—conductor Kurt Masur stepped down. His Parkinson’s disease had worsened, and he quietly told the orchestra that he had climbed that mountain of the Missa Solemnis many times, and he would never climb it again. Christine listened, tears running down her face. The choir master, John Oliver, stepped in to conduct the orchestra.
Together, they salvaged Beethoven’s masterpiece. The performance had “a gratifying naturalness,” reported New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini. Christine Brewer, he said, was “radiant.”
She went on to L.A. and played Lady Billows to the hilt, cracking the audience up with her portrayal of a bossy matron who was smarter than everybody else in town. “Let’s just say it comes from within,” grins Ross.
This summer she’ll tour the Orkney Islands with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and in August, she’ll fly to Australia: Sydney Opera House wants her to perform the all-Wagner program that Birgit Nilsson sang at its opening gala four decades ago.
She’ll be back in time for the Hootenanny.
At the end of every summer, Ross cleans up the backyard flower beds, strings yellow lights from the trees, sets up bales of hay, and brings in amps and microphones. For 25 years now, they’ve hosted these old-fashioned jam sessions, singing the gospel, country, and bluegrass Dee Burchyett loved. The guys grill brats and pork steaks, their octogenarian neighbor supplies a keg of beer, and Christine shows little kids how to play the gutbucket (an inverted metal washtub with a broom handle and pluckable string), then joins them. As she once told a music critic, “I play a pretty mean harmonica.”
Her baby brother, Jeff Burchyett, flies in from Denver for the occasion. “A lot of the guys at work”—he drives for FedEx—“don’t believe she’s my sister,” he says with a chuckle. “Thirty years of Marlboros, my voice is somewhere between Ethel Merman and Bob Dylan.” He says Christine was always “the good one”; he and his brother were the tearaways. The only change he’s noticed in her is a bit of common sense: After years of world travel and huge contract negotiations, “she’s learned how to get out of the rain.”
She and Ross live as they always did, without excess or pretense. People occasionally come up to him and say, “Is Christine still doin’ that singing thing?”
“Yeah, she is,” he’ll answer evenly. “She’s gone about 200 days a year.”
What even he can’t quite fathom is that, “even at the stage she’s at right now, she still needs acceptance. She still needs people to love her, and she has an uncommon ability to elicit that.” He remembers watching her charm an audience at the Kennedy Center in D.C. “And that’s a cold-fish audience! I thought I had that ability with a class, after a couple months. But to pull it off in a half hour? That’s black magic.”
She once asked Ross how he got over stage fright when he taught. “Every day when I walk from the parking lot into the school, I tell myself, ‘These junior-high students are damn lucky to have me teaching them history,’” he said. So she started repeating things like that to herself, just before walking onstage. But the internal critic—maybe her mother’s voice?—has never fallen silent. And now that she’s made such a name for herself, “in some ways, it’s harder,” she says. “They don’t cut you any slack!”
Many sopranos have lost quality in their voice by the time they’re her age (56). Hers is pristine, because she took her teachers’ advice and waited to sing Strauss and Wagner until her voice—and she—matured.
“Her vocal gift is glorious,” says Smith, who’s coached at Tanglewood Music Center for 20 years, “and she has worked very hard to get it there. But what makes her truly captivating to listen to is the great humanity that comes through her. Her voice has that enviable combination that all singers wish they had: great warmth and great clarity at the same time. She loves to be emotionally touched; this is something that is important to her.
“And she, in turn, touches all of us.”
