Marilyn Horne, the great mezzo-soprano, is retired now, but far from inactive: she is the head of the Marilyn Horne Foundation, a group dedicated to the nurturing of young singers, with a particular eye to the song recital, which Horne and her cohorts fear is dying. The foundation is what the first President Bush might have called a “point of light.” In the music world, there is probably none brighter.
Among the foundation’s activities is an annual series of master classes. These are, roughly, public lessons, in which teachers —“masters”—listen to several students and then comment, not only for the benefit of the individual students, but for the benefit of the audience, seated before them. A master class, done well, is an unusually satisfying experience.
Certainly, the most famous master class ever—or rather, series of master classes— was that given by Maria Callas at the Juilliard School in 1971–72. Unfortunately, this series is best known now through Terrence McNally’s play Master Class, which is a soap-opera-ish excursion into Callas’s (admittedly, soap-opera-ish) life. In reality, those classes were superb explorations of singing, with Callas at her most brilliant, most tart, most Callas-like. In one session, the diva chastised a poor student who had attacked a note in a grossly histrionic way. “But, Madame,” protested the student, “it’s a cry of despair.” “No, it isn’t,” said Callas, “it’s a B flat.” This remains one of the most useful comments about music-making ever made.
It’s hard to guess who will make a good master-class teacher, and who will not. Some of the best musicians really can’t convey what they know; some rather lesser musicians can, luminously. A teacher has to decide any number of things: how critical to be, how gentle; how detailed to get with the student, how general to keep it, for the audience; how much to demonstrate, when to hold off. In my view, a master-class teacher fails when he concentrates on the students to the exclusion of the greater audience. The students, of course, are trying to shine and impress, but they should be almost irrelevant. They should be mere tools —springboards—for public instruction. In other words, the teacher’s primary duty is to the hundreds (or dozens or whatever), rather than to the few onstage.
And the teacher should not be afraid to show off, to be the star of the show. Self- effacement is a fault here. The “master” is the one we have come to see, to hear, to learn from. I once heard Leontyne Price begin a class, “Now, the first thing you have to understand is that this is not about me; it’s about these young artists.” Thank God, it wasn’t—it was about Price. And everyone got his money’s worth.
At their best, master classes leave you with a glow, an almost religious uplift, a feeling of having witnessed a kind of missionary work. There is little so bracing and inspiring as excellent teaching—the kind that sticks.
The Horne Foundation provided such teaching with its three classes this year, held in January at the Juilliard School. They were conducted by the retired mezzo- soprano Shirley Verrett, Horne herself, and James Levine, artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera and arguably the most important force in singers’ lives worldwide.
Verrett was a widely admired singer, with a flexible and memorable instrument. She was celebrated for her Verdi, and, more particularly, for her Eboli in that composer’s Don Carlo. She has taught at the University of Michigan since 1996. Marilyn Horne, introducing her, couldn’t help remarking, “This lady is looking damn good.” So she is.
Before bringing out the first student, Verrett gave a little speech about “passing the baton” to the next generation, and “giving back” to the profession, and so on in that platitudinous, somewhat corny vein. But, you know: it’s true. All of the clichés about teaching are right and just. Verrett, Horne, and the rest got their techniques, outlooks, and, in a way, careers from the generations that preceded them, and they are now, indeed, doing unto others, and obviously deriving great satisfaction from the process.
That first student offered Mahler’s “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” from the Rückertlieder, a most curious piece for a master class, especially for the start of one. This may be, of the millions of songs, the most sublime ever composed. You wonder whether a student ought to be allowed to try it. A student pianist, by way of comparison, might as well assay the final sonata of Beethoven. We often hear that only a person with gray hair, and a fund of spirituality, should get near this work. It would be silly to be rigid about it—people mature differently—but it would be equally silly to be cavalier.
When the young lady had finished, Verrett said, “What a beautiful voice”—which a) could be true, and b) is something to note when a student has not performed a piece very well. And it can be encouraging to the singer. Verrett—as she would with every participant—demanded that the student explain what the song meant to her. So would Horne and Levine, when their turns came. Verrett also laid great stress on the expression on the singer’s face—as would Horne and Levine. I confess to finding this last puzzling. For my taste, there is all too much facial expression in singing, and not enough real, musical expression. All season long, I see singers—particularly young ones—pantomiming and mugging their way through songs, as though this music were meant to be acted out, rather than expressed musically. But all three teachers were insistent.
Verrett gave solid, and simple, advice: mark the difference between double and single consonants. Make sure that thoughts are connected, even through rests, when there is no sound. If a line goes up in pitch, it is not necessarily desirable for the voice to grow with it. And “here is something forever and ever” (a real wake-up call in a master class): you don’t have to observe the value of a note strictly (since when do singers—notoriously loose—have to be reminded of that?); you do what is most convenient to the breath. The Verrett students always sounded better at the end of their time onstage, the result, surely, of a mixture of things: good instruction, close proximity to a major singer and personality, and simply being more relaxed, less nervous.
At one point, Verrett admonished, “Don’t scoop,” then quickly added, “I’m not here to give lessons”—which brings up a problem of the master class: how much should a teacher attempt of a technical nature? Should he confine himself to remarks on interpretation, or should he descend to the vocal nitty-gritty? This must be a matter of judgment, made on the fly. I, personally, would have liked to hear from Verrett how this or that singer could improve his intonation—a question quite far from the loftily philosophical, but absolutely critical.
The diva-professor was full of charm, as when she said to one mezzo, “Don’t dig down into your chest, dear—I did that at the beginning of my career, and I had to get out of it.” Before the student left the stage, Verrett made a further, physical point. The young woman had been holding her arms in a peculiar way during moments of tension. Said Verrett, “I tell you not to embarrass you or anything, but I had a funny thing I did with my thumbs. No one told me—I noticed in pictures. You have an arm thing. Best to escape the habit now.”
Verrett also engaged in some demonstration, however sparingly. In that still-distinctive voice, she showed how to exit a note in a particular way—a way impossible, or nearly impossible, to describe in words. We tend to cluck at teachers who (for example) shove piano students off benches. But sometimes, a phrase briefly played, or sung, can be worth a thousand words, or many thousands. In fact, those thousands may be pathetically futile.
The final student of the day had the temerity—or the gumption or the smarts— to sing “O don fatale,” the signature aria from Verrett’s signature role. It was a rare opportunity, and the student was no doubt right to take it—if only for the pleasure of saying, years from now, “I was coached by Verrett on this, you know.”
She has a lot to impart, Shirley Verrett; and she does it with a touching enthusiasm, even a zeal. I had the impression that she is just as excited—just as involved, just as serious, just as animated—without a master-class audience, in the privacy and relative obscurity of her studio in Ann Arbor.
Marilyn Horne is famously a fine teacher, a musician who can explain what she does. For her class, students had prepared songs in English. This language of ours presents special difficulties, and Horne has long been a master of them. No one sings in English better than she.
Horne can teach because she is a brainy singer, not merely a natural (although she is that, without question). In a master class, she exhibits firmness, good humor, and devotion to the high standards of music. Suffusing everything is her renowned personality, which brims with charisma. Whether she waves hello, or coughs, or throws her head back and laughs, she is, somehow, charismatic; she can’t help it. She is also a little earthy, strongly opinionated, and a bit of a clown—a thoroughly American diva, as distinct from an old-style European one. Before summoning her first student at Juilliard, she said, “Let’s do some work and have some fun”—a kind of summing-up of Horne herself.
She asked that first student to introduce her piece, and when the student was a bit muted, Horne said, “Speak up, please”— here was a teacher who covers all the bases. (Horne herself has an extraordinary speaking voice. It is almost shockingly clear, and very Middle American, coming from the Pennsylvania heartland.) One by one, as the students appeared, whether they sang or talked, Horne asked for sharper diction, “more consonants”—“gimme lots of consonants.” She convincingly related the texts to the music, and vice versa. In everything she did, she showed a positively uncanny ability to communicate, through words, gestures, and demonstration. She might have made an excellent conductor—something that can be said of very few singers.
A phrase that needs urgency should be “on the balls of its feet.” A certain note should be soft, yes, but that softness should carry “an intensity, an energy.” Another note should be held longer: “Stay on it, and don’t spend half of it sliding [to the next note].” When a tenor cracked, she pointed at a glass and ordered, “Water!” She always took care to provide a leavening humor: “You see that the composer has done us the wonderful favor of giving us an ee vowel on that G!” Changing the dynamics in the score of an old, hymn-like chestnut, she shot the audience a look and quipped, “It ain’t Mozart.”
All these things—high and low, complex and simple—are likely to stay with those students, and with the “students” in the audience, too.
And Horne did not neglect the accompanists. (The term “accompanist,” by the way, has apparently gone out of favor. They are now called “collaborative artists”—a ghastly piece of political correctness that should be stamped out quickly. “Accompanist” is no pejorative: It was good enough for Franz Rupp, it was good enough for Gerald Moore, and it should be good enough for the “collaborative artists” of today.) Horne gave consistently good advice—even quite subtle advice—to the pianists. And she imparted something of a very practical nature: “When a singer or conductor or someone asks you to give a line [a line the singer is bungling], just bang it out. No finesse, no musicality. That’s not called for here. Just bang it out!”
As the class progressed, I was conscious that Horne was teaching the students to sing … rather like Marilyn Horne. When she counseled a “lift” in the back of the vocal apparatus, producing a certain resonance, I thought, “Ah, that’s the Horne spot, and the Horne sound.” When she said, “I don’t care if you gasp—you need air there,” I was reminded that Horne would sometimes gasp—though, when she did it, it never seemed unmusical. When she instructed, “Get a good tank of air there,” I couldn’t help thinking, “That’s exactly what she did: get a good tank of air. When writing about her, I might have said, ‘She sang that passage with a good tank of air.’”
She did sing a little, in this master class —in odd snatches of demonstration. She was feeling awful: suffering from a cold, toddling along on a cane (she had been injured), recovering from laryngitis. So her willingness to demonstrate revealed a rare and refreshing lack of vanity. She did not fear to sound like a retired mezzo who was drained and sick. What she sounded like was … well, it was thrilling.
At one point, that cane slid to the floor. As she bent to pick it up, Horne said, “I always hated it when people dropped their canes during my recitals!” She continued, “I said to myself before coming here, ‘You’re really going to look like the dowager voice teacher.’ And then it hit me: ‘You are the dowager voice teacher!’”
In her two hours before the public, Horne showed a formidable understanding of the vocal enterprise. Everything she said had the force of rightness—not of opinion, no matter how interesting, but of rightness. And as good as this teaching was, she promised even better to come: “When James Levine does a master class, we all get religion.”
That third and final class was to have been led by the legendary German bass-baritone Hans Hotter, whose ninety-second birthday it was. Hotter proved unable to travel, however, and Horne had to scramble for a replacement. She decided, as she put it, to “start at the top”—and, indeed, secured Levine.
He is one of the great talkers in music, an intellectual, as well as a naturally expressive musician. He is also a fine and frequent accompanist. To his session at Juilliard, the students brought German songs, or lieder, which Levine pronounced his favorite repertory, for its unending variety. His first student offered up Strauss’s “Befreit”— which is too long a piece, in my opinion, for a master class. The first couple of pages might have sufficed for an hour or two of Levine’s teaching (important though it may be to grasp the overall arc of the piece). A good golf instructor requires only a couple of swings. Master-class teachers err in letting students go on too long, allowing the experience to become something of a concert, when time is precious, and there is so much to discuss. (In addition, a teacher must decide when to move off a problem that the student is not solving—again, keeping the audience in mind.)
As it happened, after this first student sang “Befreit,” Levine had her immediately move on to another song. There was maybe double the amount of singing in this class than in the preceding two. But what Levine said, inevitably, hit the mark. “What bothers me,” he confided to the “Befreit” student, “is subtle: I wish I could know where this is going.” This was not a matter of tempo or breathing; it was an interpretive phenomenon, a psychological stance, an intuition in every phrase of the work as a whole (so much for my wanting to cut the poor girl off). Further, “I need to understand your point of view,” said Levine. “I need to hear what you would have me, the listener, understand.”
One thing that surprised me about Levine’s class was his repeated emphasis on the subjective: the individual’s taste, his own conception, his own relationship to the piece, and so forth. Generally, I regard Levine as a bulwark against this sort of thing: against emotionality, against the imposition of personality, against “Let it all hang out, baby.” Some of us, for example, might regard the little song “Mein!” from Die schöne Müllerin as, not so much the ecstatic declaration of a lover, or would-be lover, as a burbly Schubert piece in D major. Shades of Callas there. But Levine insisted on the importance—even the preeminence —of the personal. He did, however, caution (about Wolf’s great “Kennst du das Land”), “This music doesn’t need to be given extra drama; it has enough within itself.” This is more the Levine I am familiar with.
Some songs are suited to certain singers, he noted, and others, not. “Which [of two lieder] do you like better?,” he asked one student. Before the student could answer, Levine said, “The second song likes you better.” There are thousands of songs, he went on, so “set aside the ones that don’t speak to you, and take up the ones that do.” Flip through the texts. If one leaves you cold, and another one makes your heart leap—go with the latter. It will show in the performance. What could be plainer?
I would venture to add that a true musician—Levine, say—can perform any music well, and that an audience should not be able to guess, necessarily, what he happens to cherish personally and what he does not. Indeed, weak-minded musicians tend to misperform the music they especially love, maiming it with rubato and ego. I enjoy thinking of the late pianist Malcolm Frager, who once said, when sitting down to rehearse a concerto, “As I am not a Beethoven specialist, I think we should take this at the proper tempo.”
Levine put neatly an eternal paradox of singing: “Find a way not to hold everything in, and not to push it out, either.” To one baritone, he said, “Resist the temptation to have it come out tight—oxygenate yourself.” Over and over, he stressed that the most important aspect of lieder-singing is communication: “Sing directly to the people. Let there be no gap between what you intend and what they hear.” And “always be comfortable in—think in—the language of the song. Allow no translation in your head.” In oratorio, we “present,” and in opera, we play a role; but in song, we communicate intimately—and “everything that you do that’s presentational takes away from the song.”
The maestro-pianist engaged in a little demonstrating of his own, pushing one accompanist off the bench to make a point about Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade.” Impressively verbal as he is, Levine could not have done better than that.
Above all, he—as always, whether on the podium or elsewhere—communicated his own, amazing love of music, his ability to remain excited about it, deep into adulthood. When a singer and pianist came to a shift of key in a Schubert song, Levine broke in, wide-eyed, marveling, “What about that? That’s a big harmonic event.” No child was ever more delighted about a discovery, or rediscovery, in music. This is a rare and significant thing among professionals.
Indeed, this entire series did the work of serving music—of keeping a flame, endowing a heritage. Good for Marilyn Horne. Seldom has a singer had so great a career; and seldom has one fashioned so useful a post-career.
