Performance Anxiety. Betsy Burke
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in front of a large rundown palazzo just off Via de’ Bardi. I was ushered in by a Philippine servant and introduced to the Melandroni family, including all the in-laws and outlaws. Each time I thought I had a handle on how many of them lived under the same roof, a new one would pop up. My job for the next three months was to “accompany” the eldest family member, Baby Melandroni.
Baby was eighty-nine years old and a Bette Davis look-alike, with crimson lipstick oozing into the creases around her mouth. “Accompanying” meant following her every demented move, repairing her wardrobe, peeling her grapes, cleaning up her accidents and making sure she didn’t fall down any stairs. She insisted that I call her Contessa.
It didn’t take me long to realize that I was participating in a real-life version of The Twilight of the Gods. The Melandronis hated, tormented and plotted against each other at every available opportunity, but were scandalized when I naively suggested they might be happier if they didn’t all live in the same house.
I barely got near those gorgeous chic men that summer. I spent most of my time in the palazzo, at one window or another, sneaking peeks at the outside world. Although two of the Melandroni men lost their way during electrical storms and ended up in my bedroom, it was no consolation. They both looked like beagles and were unctuous and overeager, a product of too much noble inbreeding. Both times I had to defend myself by beaning them with the six-pound Italian-English dictionary I was trying so hard to absorb.
I was certain that all over Europe, inexperienced North American girls like me were submitting themselves to similar tortures. I had proof. Tina, for example, had chosen to do her work-study in Germany. I received a long, hysterical letter from her. It was written on toilet paper. She’d been locked into a supply closet while labor inspectors toured the hotel where she was illegally employed as a chambermaid.
It was not so much a work-study program as a ball-chain program.
The summer ended on a high note. I’d struggled the whole time to interpret Baby’s ravings and finally understood that she wanted nothing more than to escape. She was being held prisoner, she told me, by her very own family, and they had taken all her jewels from her and put them in the safe in the bank, and were taking all the rest of her money, stripping her of her wealth, not to mention the last shreds of her dignity. She wanted to dress up like the contessa she was and get back into society again.
So one Sunday after lunch, when all the other Melandronis were napping after having stuffed themselves at the big meal, I got her all dolled up. I packed my bags quickly and we snuck out of the palazzo. We took a taxi to Piazza della Signoria. I deposited Baby at a central table in Caffe Rivoire, ordered her a big dish of ice cream drowned in kirsch, and left. Just before catching my train for Pisa airport (a day ahead of schedule), I called the palazzo and told the servant where to pick up Baby. I spent nearly the last of my funds that night on a pensione in Pisa. What a luxury. It had been a completely frustrating experience, but at least it had been frustrating in a new language.
Chapter 6
I stood at the bus stop, buzzing with the caffeine from Mike’s, mentally preparing for my lesson. Over and over I sang the audition pieces in my head. I’d chosen them carefully. Opera management around the world was growing less and less tolerant of singers who didn’t look the part. The days of the three-hundred-pound consumptive heroine were over, except in the case of the truly prodigious voices, like Ellie’s and Peter’s, for whom exceptions were made.
Young singers just starting out were another story. You had to fit the role, and if you were willing to do cartwheels and lose your clothes along the way, all the better.
I’d opted for something safe, with no potential for nudity. I was going to sing Cherubino’s aria “Non So Più” from Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro and “Iris, Hence Away” from Handel’s Semele.
In Le Nozze di Figaro, Cherubino is a trouser role, a boy or man played by a mezzo-soprano. Cherubino is a youthful and buoyant, all over the place, lovesick puppy. I was pushing it, given my C-cup, but I’d bind myself up for the sake of art and a singing job.
My other aria was from Handel’s Semele. Semele is hardly ever staged. It’s a baroque opera based on the infighting of the gods Juno and Jupiter. The aria is Juno’s fuming in a moment of vengeful plotting against Jupiter. “Iris, Hence Away” shows off a different style, my sung English and vocal flexibility in the middle range, as well as a character portrayal opposite to Cherubino. I tried to make my Juno dominant and alarming, a sort of Katharine Hepburn of the operatic stage.
When I’d told Madame Klein a month before that I was trying to get an audition with the ENO, she’d said dismissively. “Dis vill be a gut exercise for you, ja? Strange city, strange theater, people you don’t know, ja, dat is part of de zinging experience. Und you can alvays zing in de chorus.” But she wouldn’t commit on whether I had a minimal chance of winning a solo role with the company.
I wouldn’t be alone, though. Once I got to England, I would have my father to coach 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.
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