Every once in a while something really unthinkable occurs to cast a pall over your life. That happened to me on July 3, 2006, the morning I received the message from Peter Lieberson that Lorraine had died. I seldom sent emails to Lorraine. She was not an email type of person, but that morning, knowing she was not doing well, I sent her one, hoping that she was feeling better. The email came back from Peter that she had died that morning. Lorraine and I were both Pisces and we had worked together for so many years that I probably should not have thought this was unusual, my sending her a rare email on the very day she died. But it was devastating. This is the wrong order for death to happen. Children shouldn't die before their parents and students shouldn't die before their teachers. Lorraine and I had worked together for twenty years so I lost both a student and a surrogate daughter all at once.
My first encounter with Lorraine was the Saturday after Thanksgiving about twenty-some years ago when she drove out to Rood Hill Farm from Boston to sing for me the first time. A mutual friend, who had studied with me for a while, had made the suggestion to her that she should work with me. He told me that she had 'been having trouble with her high notes'.
Although I did not know her by name at the time, she was at the beginning of what would become a major international career and was already recognized in major musical circles for her recordings of Handel.
I was a bit worried having the 'diva' show up out of the blue. Having worked with divas before, I knew how troublesome they could become the moment you stopped adulating them. Well, Lorraine was the 'anti-diva', as Charles Mitchener called her in his profile in The New Yorker magazine.
After we talked for a bit about why she had come to me, I asked her what she had brought to sing for me and she whipped out 'Parto, parto', not exactly anyone's piece of cake! She sang it all the way through quite brilliantly. Then I had to come up with something equally brilliant to say about it to make her two and a half hour trip from Boston worthwhile.
First I told her what a grand instrument she owned and then said 'Do you realize that you are singing 'puh-arto,puh-arto' instead of connecting the consonant to the vowel? She immediately set to work correcting the problem and solved it on the spot. I knew at once that this was a new breed of divas!
This was the way she solved any vocal problems we discovered together during our long relationship and we continued to work in this fashion until her death.
She would sometimes come here to Sandisfield to Rood Hill Farm for her lessons and sometimes I would teach her in Boston, either at Harvard's Memorial Church, where I taught Harvard students for ten years, or sometimes in the basement of Symphony Hall on Mass Avenue. The latter was arranged for us by another Boston student of mine whose husband played with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
One amusing story about this period in our relationship is that once when this student had arranged for us to have the lessons in the large choral rehearsal room, a baritone and pianist were already working there. My student, all five feet one of her, strode into the room and imperiously ordered them out, saying that she had reserved the room and that they would have to go elsewhere.
About two minutes later the assistant manager of the BSO appeared and said to my student, 'Hamutal, that was Benjamin Luxon you just threw out of here. He is singing tomorrow with the orchestra. You will have to find another room!'
Just recently I finally got up the courage to tell this tale to Ben Luxon, who in the meantime has become my neighbor, sometime student, and all-time friend. He exploded with laughter.
One time when we were working at Harvard, after working on various pieces for a while, Lorraine said, 'Let's see if I can sing this', and handed me 'Abscheulischer' from Fidelio. She sang the socks off it!! She once told me that the manager at the Edinburgh Festival had heard her say that it was her fantasy to perform the role and, in fact, had asked her to sing it the following season. She told him it was her fantasy, but only a fantasy. But who knows what might have happened in a few years. Many of her fantasies did come true. On the other hand, she was very wise about what she should and shouldn't sing. And while she could sing the hell out of the aria she and I both really knew the complete role was not for her.
One summer a few years after we had begun working together, she spent the month of September at the summer home of one of my neighbors who kindly lent her their house which is just up the road from my home. What a glorious month for me! Every day she would come down the hill and we would work for three hours on Xerxes, the role she was preparing to sing with the Los Angeles Opera that fall. She had barely settled in to her new lodgings when her agent called to ask her to fly to Italy, learn the role of Orfeo (on the plane) and sing it from the score a week later. Wisely, she turned him down, though there was no doubt in my mind that she could have done it! She was scheduled to perform this same role at the Met in a production styled especially for her in the 2006-2007 season. The performances were given in her memory and David Daniels sang the role.
John Ferris and I went to Los Angeles that fall to hear her Xerxes in the brilliant production of Steve Wadsworth, a wonderful stage director. I have often had the experience, after working a long time on a role with Lorraine, to then hear her sing the same thing in public and be blown away. This magical thing always happened when she performed. This quality is something one is born with. No teacher can teach this. Lorraine had it is spades!
After the performance (a matinée) we went to dinner with Lorraine and a wonderful group of her friends who had flown down from San Francisco to hear the performance. She had played viola with them in a student orchestra in the Bay Area years before and they had become life-long friends. I know that they mourn her passing as deeply as I do.
We had a wonderful seafood dinner, then wandered next door to a cocktail lounge in a fancy hotel for an after dinner drink. None of us wanted the evening to end. We were the only ones in the room except for a pianist who was playing cocktail music, and playing it very well. At some point one of her friends persuaded Lorraine to get up and sing something. She swung into a popular song and sang it a la Ella. As the pianist was complimenting her on her singing someone told him that she had just finished singing the title role in Xerxes just down the street. He was quite amazed.
She continued to perform this production of Xerxes with the Boston Lyric Opera, the New York City Opera, and elsewhere for several seasons.
The last time I was with her in Boston, while working with her on Schoenberg's Gurrelieder, I told her that she should do a 'cross-over' album. We had been listening to Eileen Farrell sing the Immolation Scene followed at once by her album 'I've got a right to sing the blues'. Lorraine had never heard her before. She was entranced. I know that Lorraine could have made that same transition without losing a step. But that was the February before she died.
Once while staying with us at Rood Hill Farm, she sat outdoors on the terrace steps sipping her morning tea. I watched as a little garter snake coiled up near her. She was having a conversation with it. She extended her index finger and the little snake gave her a kiss on the tip. After that I was convinced that she was a good witch as well as a great singer!
My late Portuguese Water Dog, Zumba, fell madly in love with Lorraine (as we all did) while she stayed with us. Zumba would always lie under the piano while Lorraine and I worked together in my studio. Sometime later, a friend who was doggie sitting while John and I were abroad, put on a CD of Lorraine's singing. She swears that Zumba rose from a prone position and began to run to the windows and doors throughout the house looking for Lorraine. She knew the voice. Another time, this same 'Music Critic Zumba', while we were listening to a broadcast from the Met of Julio Cesare, and an inferior mezzo screamed out a high note, Zumba arose from the floor, glared at the speakers, and stalked from the room. Zumba was used to hearing nothing but the best from her friend, Lorraine.
Lorraine seemed to soak up music and ideas with the speed of lightning. When we were correcting a problem or working on a new concept, she would try it, get it, and then sing the passage numerous times, making it her own. I would see her do the same work on stage at a later time and she did it just the way we had perfected it. She continued to do this through all the years we worked together.
I would say the same thing about Lorraine that my late, dear friend and teacher Olga Averino, once said about Mary Carter, a student of mine whose singing she adored: 'Mary becomes the song'!
Well, Lorraine always became the song.
A number of times I went into Boston or New York City not only to give her lessons but to attend rehearsals and performances. She did Beatrice and Benedict of Berlioz with the Boston Lyric Opera Company. I can still see her floating across the stage of the Emerson Majestic Theatre as Beatrice in a diaphanous gown. I have always regretted that her Carmen never made it to international opera houses. She sang this with Boston Lyric as well and was incredible. She was asked to perform it at the Opéra Bastille in Paris but turned them down because she hated the acoustics. She finally did the last act in a Gala at the Met with Jose Carreras singing Don José. This was shortly after her surgery for breast cancer and he had just had knee surgery. She said it was a very tamed-down version of the death scene. Both of them were in some discomfort but her singing made up for any lack of physical agility.
I would often sit in on rehearsals and take notes on 'post-it' which I would stick in her score where I had a question or suggestion to make. At the end of the rehearsal we would go out for a bite to eat and go through the score from post-it to post-it as I made suggestions. It was always gratifying to me that when I would watch her do the performance the same points we had discussed were always there.
She is, of course, famous for her singing of Handel, Her ease with fioritura boggles the mind and the ear. We worked together on many roles and arias to achieve a clear, accurate, legato line to these difficult passages.
She also appeared with Les Arts Florissants, the Parisian opera company that specializes in French Baroque opera. We went to her début at the Salle Garnier (the old Paris Opéra) for her Médée of Charpentier. She told me 'You can't miss me, I have the biggest skirt on stage!', and sure enough, she had to enter sideways from the wings to get the dress onstage without a catastrophe. She received a standing ovation for her singing, but also, I think, for managing that skirt.
She invited us to her charming apartment on the Seine just behind the Louvre for champagne before we took her to dinner at a restaurant at Samairitaine, a large department store with a fancy restaurant on the top floor with views of Notre Dame and the Bateaux Mouches plying up and down the river.
At one point, when she was preparing a concert of Spanish music to be given at the Walter Reed Theatre in Lincoln Center with Steve Blier at the piano, after hearing a run-through, we went back to Steve's apartment on Riverside Drive to talk about the performance. It was at this point I said to her 'I think you need to decide what you are.' She had been billed by Colbert as Soprano-Mezzo-soprano for some time. She sang some soprano roles, especially when performed at early pitch, and some mezzo roles. As her voice matured and deepened, her center of gravity lowered. Her passagio was a third lower than the usual female passagio. She could go into the chest voice practically undetected. She always had the high notes but it was her mezzo, almost contralto range than identified her. In her later years, her voice sometimes reminded me of Kathleen Ferrier, but better focused.
I think the telling moment that decided her to change her billing, came when she had to sing the soprano arias in the Messiah with the San Francisco Symphony at modern pitch. That half step up in pitch can be a killer. We worked hard on the role before she went to San Francisco and she could sing it, but she felt very uncomfortable. She got splendid reviews, but determined that she would no longer take soprano roles.
She sang one of her most moving performances at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. It was a movement for mezzo from a Bernstein symphony. She stood quietly on stage and simply dissolved the entire audience, including me, into tears.
Of course, I was at her Met début as Myrtle in John Harbison's Gatsby. I also sat in on numerous rehearsals sitting next to her dear husband Peter Lieberson. I did the same thing for her performances as Didon in the Berlioz Les Troyens. I even made a comment about her costume as Myrtle, which I felt made her look ugly. Somehow, it got changed. While singing Didon, she had to sing a duet with a Russian mezzo who had a hideous wobble! Lorraine said she could never tell what pitch the woman was singing. She told me she wanted to talk to Jimmie Levine about hiring me as an 'anti-wobble coach'. Somehow I never got the call and a lot of Met singers are still wobbling to beat the band.
John and I had met Peter Lieberson in Santa Fe when we went out there for the première of his opera Ashoka's Dream. We went backstage afterwards to congratulate Lorraine on her brilliant creation of the role of The Second Wife. She said to us, 'I want you to meet the composer! - Oh! Peter!' Peter who was standing some distance off turned at once and came to greet us smiling broadly. I said to John on the way back to our hotel, 'There's more to that than meets the eye!'
The next day we were invited to lunch at the lovely house Lorraine had been given for the run of the opera and I bet John that Peter would be there as well. But no; no Peter. Later Lorraine told me that he came over later. When you get two Pisceans together, and one is Italian (!) it's hard for them not to read each other's minds.
Their marriage several years later was a great joy for both of them. It was all too brief.
Whenever I would go backstage at the Met, the Salle Garnier, City Opera, wherever, my proudest moment would come when Lorraine would introduce to me whoever was on hand with the words 'This is my teacher'. How many divas will even admit they work with anyone. But Lorraine always came to me and we worked as equals.
When she sang Britten's Phaedre with the New York Philharmonic, Sir Colin Davis was the conductor. I attended the piano and orchestral rehearsals with Lorraine since I was in New York to work with her on the piece. Sir Colin couldn't have been more cordial to a mere voice teacher. I sat in the front row of Avery Fischer Hall for the piano rehearsal. After hearing Lorraine sing through the Mozart aria that she was also doing on the concert he turned to the front row where I was sitting and said 'Did you say that this man is your teacher? Well, Bravo!' I would like to have had that in writing. I moved further back in the hall for the orchestral rehearsal. Ot one point he turned to me,though there were a number of super-numeraries sitting out there, and asked me about the balance. I said that the orchestra was a bit too loud when Lorraine did a pianissimo repeat of the first section of the Mozart. So he did it again and asked 'Is that better?' I said it was a bit better but he did it another time anyway until the balance was perfect. Not many conductors are this considerate of a singer's being pitted against an entire orchestra. And damned few would ask a voice teacher for an opinion.
It was during this time that Lorraine was having a lot of trouble with her back. She had broken her ankle in September while walking her dog, Coyo. When we were working in New York that November and December, she was having a lot of pain and walking with difficulty. Once she arrived at Maestro Mazel's studio in Avery Fischer to have me work with her vocally before a rehearsal and said she really needed to lie flat on the floor and do some back exercises. As she lay on the floor talking to me, the assistant manager of the New York Phil opened the door to speak with her. I explained that I had not knocked her to the floor but that she was merely doing some back exercises. But it must have looked odd to him. It was after these performances that she began to do a lot of cancellations.
She came back to sing the Bach cantatas that Peter Sellers had choreographed for her at Emmanuel Church in Boston and which she was singing in New York to rave reviews. She went a on a brief Eurpean tour with these but had to cancel some performances.
She came back to Boston once again and we worked on the Gurrelieder which she sang with the BSO. She then went on tour with the BSO singing Peter's incrediably beautiful Neruda Songs that he wrote for her. I told Peter after hearing her performance at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, that I could feel the great love they had for each other pouring from her voice and his music. This was the last time I heard her sing.
A part of me died when I got Peter's email about her death. Driving to Litchfield later in the day, Public Radio announced her death and played her performance of Handel's 'Angels ever bright and fair, take oh, take me to thy care'. I had to turn off the radio. It was too soon to listen to her who was no longer there. I know that if there were any angels hovering around Santa Fe that July 3rd, they did just that.
I miss her still.
