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[Melodie]

Slim reasoning behind dismissal of soprano; voice matters more
By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff, 3/28/2004

It's time to weigh in on the question of Deborah Voigt.

Earlier this month, in an interview with London's Daily Telegraph, the prominent American soprano expressed her dismay at London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and its decision to buy her out of her contract to perform in Strauss's "Ariadne auf Naxos" in June.

Although she had been hired five years before, and though the part of Ariadne is her signature role, Voigt was told that she wasn't physically suitable for the production by Christof Loy, which updates the opera and requires the mythological heroine to run around in a little black cocktail dress.

"I have big hips," Voigt said, "and Covent Garden has a problem with them." She had told an interviewer for andante.com more than a year earlier that the prejudice against heavy people is "the last bastion of open discrimination in our society." It's clear that Covent Garden has made a dumb decision; there is no one currently singing Ariadne who sings the music better than Voigt, and she's also a lively stage personality with a beautiful and expressive face. The artistic administration should have chucked the costume and found a way to make the diva look fabulous.

Instead, administrators made a bad situation worse by saying stupid things. "The costume and the type of production make it not such a fantastic suggestion that she should be in it," said casting director Peter Katona, tactlessly adding that many singers tend to eat too much. A spokesman, Christopher Millard, remarked, "There is a broader issue here." Even Voigt's manager, Michael Benchetrit, unhelpfully said, "She is not monstrously heavy." (No one but Voigt knows her actual current weight, which has been estimated at something over 200 pounds.)

The Voigt case is significant because this is the first time discrimination against a front-rank singer because of weight has become public knowledge. Of course such discrimination goes on all the time, particularly at other levels of the profession. No heavy second-string singer would ever be cast in preference to a slender second-string singer.

But first-rate singers -- the ones with the great, the magical, the memorable, the historic voices -- have always been able to make their own rules and throw their weight around. Jessye Norman did it before Deborah Voigt, and Helen Traubel before Norman. And great male singers have had an even easier time: Even when he was at his heaviest, Luciano Pavarotti became sexy the moment he opened his mouth and started to sing. Bryn Terfel is a great bear of a man today, but Covent Garden isn't dismissing him. The last bastion of open discrimination seems to be prejudice against heavy women.

We are told all the time that the audience's expectations for opera have changed because our society is visually oriented, educated by films and television, even by opera on television. We now expect opera to be theatrically vital.

One problem with this view is that our visual society has not been well educated by films and television -- media that even now often ignore the "visual" reality of the society they are supposed to reflect. People come in all sizes, shapes, colors, ages, and types of behavior; they engage in passionate love affairs and die nobly or ignobly, regardless of their outward appearance. In a way, opera is a more honest art form than the movies, because people look the way they do rather than the way film fans expect heroes and villains to appear. Viggo Mortensen may look like a hero, but if we have to wait for someone who looks like Mortensen to sing Tristan, we are going to wait a very long time.

The old operatic argument used to be over whether the words or the music had primacy; today the argument has become whether the eye or the ear should dominate. But through all the arguments, opera hasn't changed its essential nature. There are operas that aim for realism, but opera is not a realistic art form; nobody goes through life singing. And soaring romantic singing voices issue from short tenors in platform shoes and from large-framed sopranos.

Some of opera's prototypical characters are not even people. Just what, exactly, is a Valkyrie or a mythical goddess supposed to look like? Carmen is a realistic character, and we expect her to be thin and sexy, but history shows us that not all sirens are skinny; plenty of men have been fatally attracted to buxom vixens.

And besides, some operatic roles require a vocal weight, a stamina, and an experience that come only with an age advanced far beyond that of the character the singer is portraying -- Voigt's most recent triumph was as Wagner's Isolde, a "big sing" that she did not attempt until she was past 40. If she had tried it earlier, she might not still be singing now; her voice might not have survived the heavy lifting.

Large, heroic voices do not emerge from the bodies of ballet dancers. "The best of the dramatic singers have bodies like tin cans or barrels: hardly any neck and a straight shot from chest to head," remarks Boston Lyric Opera music director Stephen Lord.

Soprano Sharon Daniels, a veteran of opera and Broadway now teaching and directing at Boston University, cautions, "We are talking about bone structure, not about rolls of fat around the middle. But you have to have a little meat on you to have the stamina for the big-sing roles with huge orchestras in large opera houses. And when I saw Deborah Voigt in `Die Frau ohne Schatten' at the Met, she looked completely proportionate to the huge theater, to the stage setting around her -- the story and the setting are larger than life. But I tell my students, if you are going to sing `Manon,' you are going to have to watch what you eat and go to the gym."

"Nobody can get a cello voice out of a violin body," says former Metropolitan Opera soprano Patricia Craig, now teaching at the New England Conservatory. "I wasn't one of those people who could just stand there and let out one of those gorgeous one- or two- or three-times-in-a-lifetime voice; I had to have everything else. So I was a yo-yo dieter for a lot of years. Appearance is important in opera, and I believe in opera as theater. But the bottom line is what a singer sounds like."

Excessive weight can complicate breathing and compromise a singer's musical intentions; this has sometimes happened to Voigt's colleague Jane Eaglen. At another extreme, Baz Luhrman's Broadway production of "La Boheme" proved the opposite. It failed because these hot and sexy young singers did not have hot and sexy operatic voices, and nobody wanted to hear what their scrawny, undernourished tones sounded like amplified by the body mikes and fed into the sound mix.

And does Covent Garden really expect people to pay $192 a ticket to see a little black cocktail dress starring in "Ariadne auf Naxos" without Deborah Voigt in it?

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2004/03/28/in_opera_size_matters/