With the rapier insight and minimal blood-letting to which we've become accustomed in her writing, New York Times music critic Anne Midgette ("Opera Divas, on the Stage and on the Page" NYT October 19, 2003) has cut to the quick of the Renee Fleming phenom, which is packing The Metroplitan Opera House for Fleming's opulent turn as Violetta in Verdi's La Traviata this season.
Quoting a passage from Bel Canto (novelist Ann Patchett's 2001 best-seller, in which one character is inspired by the superstar soprano), Midgette writes that it "bears about the same relation to actual singing that romance novels do to the actual experience of love." Midgette goes on to make the broader point that classical music itself, like the iconic divas of grand opera, has become the scrim upon which we project our most guarded fantasies and longings. It gives short shrift all around -- but I warm to Midgette's worry over the singers.
It's no wonder that we forget what we hunger for as we sit down to the arts, when popular culture enlists twenty seconds of the "Dies Irae" from Verdi's monumental Requiem to hawk SUV cargo space on TV. When Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti have divided the "world's greatest/favorite tenor" titles between them with acrimony (and wasn't there a third tenor?) -- as perennial West End ingenue Sara Brightman records "Nessun Dorma" (the tenor showpiece from Puccini's Turandot ) to popular acclaim. I myself have been a helpless fan of Renee Fleming's singing since way before she was Perfect, but I did not recognize her in Rolex glam, her hot new look that steams up the inside front cover of the September 2003 issue of Opera News. That is, inside the front cover, which Fleming also graces, resplendently.
"Artistic growth is a refining of the sense of truthfulness," quotes Midgette from Willa Cather's Song of the Lark, based on the life of Olive Fremstad, diva of a different time, whose long dedication took her from a hard scrabble Wisconsin childhood, through deep soul searching in Arizona's Canyon de Chelly, to Wagner's rarefied repertoire on the world stage--and estrangement from the loved ones of her youth. Miss Ellen Repp, one of the grandest of New York's grande dames of vocal pedagogy, told many a student fretting over high notes, "you're secure in what you're doing technically; what you need now is a little ecstasy!" One singer said that her high notes "clicked in" just about the same time that her psychotherapy started working "...or was it vice versa?" Modern dance diva Martha Graham famously said to a class of earnest protegees "...some of you will be doomed to dance."
Midgette draws a useful analogy between high art and the truths about any other love relationship: that it is "sometimes prosaic and humdrum...that deep appreciation grows...through long-term commitment..." That whether it begins in a delirium of the senses or is dutifully arranged, high art holds prodigious powers which deliver themselves "through daily life, rather than be yond it."
Like love, in short, high art is hard work, and takes a long time. And singing is the hardest--requiring refinement of the self through and through, soul and body, music and the instrument through which it sounds. Any lingering doubt about that is well dispelled by the September Opera News articles that flank David J. Baker's handsome profile of Renee Fleming, the diva on top today. In one piece, Eric Myers revisits soprano Carol Neblett, who'd like to make a comeback; in the other, Rosalyn M. Story looks at the legendary career of Shirley Verrett, who has just published her autobiography. Taken together, these three profiles round out the portrait of a diva's real life, lived -- like Floria Tosca's -- for art.
Ciao for nao!>>
10/22/2003 11:33:24 PM
