me through my pieces, prepare me, give me the inside story, let me know what my panel of auditioners really liked, on the deep dirty inside track.
But then Madame Klein had gone on to divulge one of her secrets to me, a little performer’s trick, and it had been like receiving the most generous gift.
“Vhile you are zinging de phrase, in your mind’s eye und ear, you gotta be also zeeing und hearing de phrase dat follows. You gotta hear two musicks at vonce.”
I rode for an hour and a half, thinking about the pieces, changing buses twice, until finally I reached the homogenous streets of the city’s farthest East End where Madame Klein lived. Her house was a brown stucco box in a neat row of brown stucco boxes that extended as far as the eye could see. The gardens were drab, and stumpy trees pruned to within an inch of their lives adorned the boulevard. During the winter, those trees made me think of mutilated hands grasping at the sky.
Madame Klein brought all her intensity and ambition with her wherever she lived, so that the neighborhood always seemed more impressive than before, vital and full of promise because of her.
Madame did all her own accompanying. Her arthritic hands were still able to coax subtle beauty from the keyboard. She did not want to know what was going on in her students’ personal lives. She did not want to know about our biorhythms. She did not care whether our hearts were whole or broken, whether we’d just been mugged or our dog had been hit by a car the day of the lesson. There was no excuse for not singing well. Life outside the score on the music stand was a series of minor obstacles that a real singer was expected to leap over without a second thought. The voice ruled supreme.
She only wanted to know that we had studied our pieces properly and would execute them precisely as we’d been instructed. She was exacting, tyrannical, and at times, brilliant. Nothing was ever good enough for her. And she didn’t need the money.
Now, there are singing teachers who make a good living buttering up egos, giving hope to hopeless cases and there are teachers who concede a compliment every so often. That was not Madame Klein. She was happy to lose students and I was desperate to keep her. It had taken me a long time to find a singing teacher who understood my voice.
Singing can be taught using various techniques. There’s the Squeeze Your Buns School, in which your breathing has to be so deep that your diaphragm expands so far that it reaches beyond your buttocks—buttocks that become cramped and muscular with the effort of controlling the singing breath. Then there’s the Up Your Nose School, where the soft palette has to be lifted and the sound has to buzz in the sinuses and ring in the nasal and head cavities—the joke being that a lot of singers have more resonating cavities than brains. There’s the Forget Technique and Think about the Music School of singing.
A good teacher believes in a delicate combination of all these things. That was Madame Klein.
In the waiting area, I sat on a Victorian sofa whose horse-hair stuffing prickled through the upholstery fabric, and thought about the ENO audition, myself and Kurt, Madame and her defunct husband, Oskar, and prepared to break the news about Kurt’s song cycle.
From my place on the itchy sofa, I could hear Madame’s voice in the studio but couldn’t make out the words. There was a staccato blast from her and then Martin, the singer whose lesson was before mine, erupted through the door. Martin was a tall, robust bass-baritone who also sang in the opera chorus. He thought himself very important. Today, he was sweating and on the verge of tears. Madame Klein had just made him less important. He barged past me and out the front door.
I approached her living room. Along with the lavish and finnicky antiques and mustard-colored walls, there was a lot of diva decor. Her walls were lined with photos of her with her spouse, with other great artists, conductors and accompanists, in the renowned theaters and concert halls of the world. Her recordings, awards and mementos filled the bookshelves next to her scores.
Her coiffed silver head seemed to be drowning as it bobbed behind the shiny black Steinway grand. She narrowed her eyes at me. She was checking my appearance like a cattle buyer at an auction, concerned with how I was presenting myself to the world. If she’d had her way, we’d all be wearing dirndl skirts and little white blouses with Peter Pan collars. When her perusal of me was finished, she shook her head tragically at all my denim and leg, acknowledging fashion defeat.
“Fräulein Lyme. Zing,” she commanded, playing the exercise.
I sang.
“Nein, nein, nein. You bleat like a goat. I vill take your name off ze marquee. You vill never be a great zinger if you bleat like zis.”
“I’m a little tired today, Madame.”
“Tired schmired. You conzentrate. You breaze. You picture ze music. Und you zing.”
So I did the opposite. I thought of Kurt, roving all over my body. I thought of Matilde, porking all over Paris. And I sang. I sang all the exercises and then she let me move on to some Italian art songs. After that, as a special treat, I was allowed to sing a long Mozart concert aria.
Madame Klein stopped playing and said, “Gut, gut. Not great but vee vill make a zinger of you yet.”
“Madame Klein. I got that audition I was telling you about. The one with the ENO.”
“Ja? It vill be a good experience. You get used to auditioning by doing lots of auditions.”
“So I’m going to London at Christmas.”
“Okay. Vhen you’re dere, you go see lots of de really big zingers. You can learn someting.”
“Oh and before I forget, Madame Klein, I have some more good news.” I prepared to unleash the bomb, with terror in my heart.
“Vhat is zis news?”
“I’ll be premiering a new song cycle by Kurt Hancock. With the Vancouver symphony.”
“You vill do vhat?”
I babbled fast. “I consider it my real debut, my first important gig really. I mean, with the symphony. It’s a pretty big deal. I don’t count the stuff we did at university or the opera chorus or those church solos.”
“You vill do no zuch ting. Zere vill be no debut.”
My silence was eloquent.
“You are too young. Your voice is not ready yet.”
“My…uh…voice…uh…” I was about follow in the footsteps of the baritone and let myself be reduced to tears.
“Ze music of Herr Hancock is demanding. Modern, difficult music. You do not vant to fall SCHPLATT on your pretty face.” She illustrated my messy musical dive-bombing with one hand crashing onto the piano keys. “You are not ripe for ze music.”
It was not the first time we’d had this conversation. If Madame Klein had had her way, none of us would have sung anywhere until we were so ripe we were rotten.
It was a vicious circle. You get a job in an opera chorus in order to have some money to pay for the singing lessons. At the singing lessons, the teacher tells you that the opera chorus will ruin your voice, ruin you for a solo career. So you’re supposed to pretend you’re singing by mouthing the words. But can you imagine what it sounds like when a whole chorus of would-be soloists does that?
She
