Performance Anxiety. Betsy Burke
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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 expected things to be the way they’d been in Vienna a million years ago. But times had changed. She didn’t want to accept the fact that we were living in the world of the one-night wunderkind, that we were expected to be wunderkinder, too; that even in opera, we were part of a showbiz machine that was only too happy to suck our young juices then spit out the empty husk.
From wunderkinder to kinder tinder in one quick move.
Not that I was cynical. I believed I was ready for the opera-biz machine. It was a fact of life in the twenty-first century.
“Vhen you forget about your idea of zinging Kurt Hancock’s music, ve vill talk. But now I have nutting more to say to you today, Fräulein Lyme. Shut ze door vhen you leave,” she commanded, then waved her hand to dismiss me.
Still caught up in my problem, I changed buses on automatic pilot. I had to get off in the center near Granville. As I was crossing the street, a sound floated across to me. If I had been a cat, I would have arched my back. All the hairs on my spine would have stood on end. But not for fear. For beauty. For a new enemy in the camp.
At first, it was unearthly, like a moaning ghost, and then when I got closer, I heard it for what it was, a mournful, limpid, pure soprano voice. The singer sang the hymn, “Jerusalem,” William Blake’s words, very slowly, with perfect control. I’d sung it myself twenty times or more in my church gigs, Sunday mornings, bleary-eyed and hungover, hanging out with any religion that would pay me to sing their top ten. I froze there on the street and listened. The singer was invisible, around another corner, and I was afraid that if I made a move, she would disappear and I would never see who she was. So I listened.
Now, with the prospect of London looming before me, the words seemed particularly poignant, especially the last part about bows of burning gold, arrows of desire, and building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.
Yes, those were my sentiments exactly…I will not cease from mental fight…till we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.
Well.
Okay.
Maybe ours wouldn’t be a Jerusalem exactly. Kurt and I would have something less sacred and a little more hedonistic and spicy, something a little to the left of Jerusalem. Our own private Babylon, complete with hanging gardens and palm-waving slaves. That’s where you’d find me when I wasn’t singing concerts with my father.
Now that Kurt was in my life, I was starting to consider luxury, the trappings that came with the opera world, with being the desired object of a famous conductor. Gilt and plush red-velvet theaters, limousines, orchids and roses and champagne raining down on me. It was a nice thought.
When the hymn ended, the soprano began another piece. It was “Lift Thine Eyes” from Mendelssohn’s Elijah. I hurried in the direction of the voice, along Granville Street, past the bars, bingo palaces, strip joints, pool halls, cinemas and pawnshops. I turned a corner and under a sign that said GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS, XXX, was a beautiful dark waif seated cross-legged on a blanket with a cardboard box in front of her for offerings. She could have been fourteen or twenty-four. It was impossible to guess her age. Her face was dark and elfish, an exotic child’s face.
A small group had gathered near her. Approaching that part of town, it was kind of like coming upon a single Easter lily in a field of thistles. I rummaged in my knapsack for some change. While I was unsuccessfully hunting, an oily-haired lowlife in a buckskin jacket approached her. She shook her head violently, picked up all her stuff and hurried away.
I was tempted to run after her, but I didn’t. It would only be a matter of days, maybe even hours, before some other creep would get his hooks into her and have her selling her body to pay for his vice of choice. That part of town was crawling with junkies and panhandlers, some inarticulate and wasted, others fit, pompous and smart-ass, shoving themselves into people’s faces with lines like, “Could you spare five dollars to assist an