DIVA FEVER

CHARLES MICHENER

She's inspired more adulation than any soprano since Callas. One of her curtain calls lasted fifty-five minutes. The movie Diva was based on her. And this month Georgia-born Jessye Norman performs in the first one-character opera in the history of the Met. CHARLES MICHENER hangs out with the great one at her homes in London and New York

She had simply materialized, a few feet away from me at Gatwick Airport on a drizzly English morning—an atmosphere-changing presence. Her startling bulk was draped in a voluminous black cape, and she had on a Mata Hari hat of brilliant purple. But it was the head I couldn't stop staring at—a head carved for the prow of a ship, a head made for sailing through the elements, come what may.

She spoke:

"There's one missing!"

I looked around surreptitiously, aware of an impending drama.

She was talking about her luggage. I had never seen so much luggage in the company of one person. There were at least two dozen pieces of it, each a different size, all of it Vuitton and all of it stacked up in an apparently incomplete tower. A man did a recount, and all the while she remained immobile, her gaze fixed on some distant horizon.

My car arrived. Reluctantly, I got myself and my one bag into it. As we pulled away, I looked back. There she was with that head—Pallas Athena at Gatwick, a diva.

To the true opera nut, a diva (or her male counterpart, a golden tenor) is what it's all about. Did she or didn't she "do" it? Did the practitioner of what has been called "the most exotic and irrational of the arts" transport you to some unimagined vista so that every hair on the back of your neck was aquiver, so that the only thing in existence was that sound? Next comes the inevitable question: What is she really like? For just as the essence of opera's appeal is its mystery—its genuine weirdness—so the true diva must become the subject of endless speculation about what makes her mortal. It's what separates her from the mere "great singer." Did we care who Renata Tebaldi really was? Not terribly. But Maria Callas? Yes—forever.

And so, to a degree not seen since Callas, it has become with Jessye Norman, who at forty-three is the reigning wonder of the operatic world. Pavarotti may make you swoon. Domingo will rivet you to the back of your seat. Marilyn Home still outdazzles just about everyone else. And no one can make you hold your breath during a floating pianissimo like Montserrat Caballe. But Jessye Norman does more: she creates, as more than one writer has said, her own universe.

Part of this may be due to the fact that there is probably more of Jessye Norman than of any other singer today. Her physical proportions (she stands a reported five feet ten and weighs... who knows?) are monumental. Her voice is a great lava flow of many colors and temperatures that obeys none of the conventional vocal boundaries of "contralto," "mezzo-soprano," "soprano," "dramatic," "spinto," "lyric"—all of which she is and something, uncategorically, more. She is fast becoming one of history's most recorded singers, and she maintains an international performance schedule without letup. No one gets bigger ovations—forty-seven minutes in Tokyo in 1985, fifty-five minutes three years ago in Salzburg.

More than anyone else in the business today, she has done it "her way." No other major career has been built so intrepidly outside the mainstream repertory: just one popular Italian role, Aida, last sung in 1973; an early Countess in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and Elvira in Don Giovanni; one more frequently performed Wagnerian lady, Elisabeth in Tannhauser (she has sung Isolde in concert and recorded Sieglinde in the recent Die Walkiire, conducted by James Levine). As for the rest, it has been a steady, surprising succession of little-sung heroines, most out of classical antiquity: among them Rameau's Phedre, Purcell's Dido, Gluck's Alceste, Berlioz's Cleopatre, Strauss's Ariadne, Jocasta in Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex. In 1982 in Paris, she collaborated with her friend Robert Wilson on Great Day in the Morning, a theater piece inspired by her extraordinary repertoire of Negro spirituals. For the Metropolitan Opera's current season, she is presiding over a twentieth-century double bill as Judith in Bartok's Bluebeards Castle and the Woman in Schoenberg's Erwartung, this last being the first one-character opera in the Met's history.

All this has been plotted without the traditional guidance of a Svengali. In the seventies she left the opera stage for five years to develop her art in the intensely personal recitals and concert appearances to which she still devotes much of her time. For ten years she put off a Met debut. Most remarkably, while never hiding from an increasingly clamorous press, she has managed to keep her "self" to herself—without a press agent. (In 1984 she severed a brief relationship with Pavarotti's media mentor, Herbert Breslin.) There is no backstage gossip about "prima donna" behavior. Unmarried, she has never—as far as the public knows—been "romantically linked." Everyone heard that the title character in the French film Diva was inspired by her, which only enshrined her right to be uninvaded by prying eyes.

With Callas we heard all about her private tribulations, and still she remained "Callas," never "Maria." With her successor, we have been permitted to see only the public triumphs, and still she is never called "Norman"—only "Jessye Norman" or, by her fans, "Jessye."

And therein lies the tale...

In the years following my first sighting of her at Gatwick, I pursued Jessye Norman in the usual way. I bought her recordings and began the addict's process of wearing out certain grooves, knowing just where to drop the needle for the fix—the verse beginning "Und die Seele" in the third of Strauss's "Four Last Songs" as she parts the clouds to reveal a blinding sunburst; the moment in the spiritual "Sweet Little Jesus Boy" on the album Sacred Songs when her humming draws you inside her deepest memories. I attended her belated 1983 debut performances at the Met in Les Troyens, during which she rattled the rafters as nobody had since Birgit Nilsson—but with fire, not ice, singing statuesque Cassandra and stricken Dido with equal conviction. And I gasped along with everybody else when she made her second-act entrance as Elisabeth in Tannhauser in the half-crouch of a fullback, ready to scoop the whole audience up in her arms and run with it.

A few summers ago I was in another of her queendoms—Salzburg at festival time—where I saw her rise during a performance of Mahler's Eighth Symphony while the cast of thousands was going full blast, and heard her soar effortlessly over the din, riding it like a wave. Afterward I described her voice to a German critic as "oceanic." He replied, bettering my praise: "I call her the Dark Continent."

Then, recently, came the predictable joust with an equally impassioned opera nut, an Englishman, who said, "I don't think she's quite the real thing. Isn't it rather the fact that she's black and so extraordinary-looking? And isn't she a bit grand?"

A few nights later I had the chance to test this very English accusation in a very English setting, a recital at London's Wigmore Hall. And I'd been invited to be part of a postconcert dinner celebration with the diva herself.

The radiant, semi-naked Muse of Music that presides in a mural at the back of Wigmore's stage paled to insignificance when she made her entrance. For some time now, her concert outfits have been events in their own right— the concoctions of a Paris designer called Eliakim, who creates elaborately hand-painted silks and cottons that make her extravagant figure all the more extravagant. This one came with the swirls of a Chinese porcelain painter on LSD and enough yardage to costume a Noh drama. She moved in it as though she'd been wearing it for years.

Jessye Norman's recitals aren't just performances, they're rites. She began on the sacred level with a clarion call aimed straight at God in Beethoven's six "Gellert" songs. From there she descended to the more profane romanticism of songs by Schumann, Brahms, and Debussy. With her expert accompanist, Phillip Moll, she made an epic tapestry out of countless moments of longing, ecstasy, bitterness, wonder. A deaf person could have "heard" much of this in her eloquent clasping and unclasping of arms and hands, her mouth as it shaped the German and French into visible vowels, the furling and unfurling of her lips over her astonishing, perfect teeth.

A good friend of Jessye's, Rudolf Nureyev, had told me, "In France we have an expression, 'l' homme-orchestre'—the man who can do everything. Jessye is 'la femme-orchestre'" At times she was so much an "orchestra" that it was almost too much for the intimate setting. But never quite too much. Disciplined by impeccable musicianship, her singing was prodigious, never prodigal. And behind the grandeur I sensed an innocence—a wonder, perhaps, at the wonder of herself. As well as something else: an easy, immediate kinship, the sense that we were "all here together." Any remaining barrier between her and us resoundingly collapsed in one of her encores with the mischievous, roaring line: "Why do they shut me out of heaven? Did I sing too loud?"

"The real thing?" She rendered the question meaningless.

With most concert singers there is a post-performance deflation of personality, as if they want you to know that this is now the "real me." Not so with Jessye Norman. She sailed into the French restaurant announced by her great, hooting laugh. She made sure everyone was properly introduced, seated the long table, and decided on the wine. On an impulse I asked her something I have never asked anyone else—to order for me—and she rolled the names of the French dishes off her tongue with such gusto that I felt like asking her to recite the entire menu.

Her speaking was scarcely less poetic than her singing: a rich, theatrically enunciated stew of accents, ranging from the American South to the lobby, under a potted palm, of a grand hotel, circa 1925. With a little prompting, she brought forth amusing stories about the surprises of celebrity: the time she was in the backseat of a car in a New York traffic jam, desperately late and about to snap the head off a freelance window washer when the man leaned in and said, "Didn't I see you last night in Ariadne on Live from the Met?"

And another time in New York when she was enthusiastically recognized by a bum brandishing a whiskey bottle. "Grand?" Yes. But warmly grand.

Still, who was she really? Later, out on the sidewalk as I watched her disappear into a limo, I thought: Now, is the performance over?

'She's a Jamesian heroine," says her friend Bobby Short. "Except that Henry James would not have known what to do with her.

Would you like some Perrier?" Her voice floated down from somewhere upstairs, the last syllable of "Perrier" lingering a little. I was in the living room of Jessye Norman's London mews house, well off the beaten paths of Belgravia. Quietly tasteful—prints, signed in pencil by Miro and Henry Moore, fresh flowers, a grand piano taking up half the space—it seemed more an elegant way station than a real home.

I heard a clinking of ice and that voice, now at close range: "How are yooou?"

She was carrying a silver tray with glasses, an ice bucket, sliced lemons, and the Perrier. She was wearing a simple blue smock dress, and her hair, held by a headband, was frizzed out at the sides. She was suddenly very real—the phrase "great big little girl" came to mind. She fixed us both Perriers, arranged herself like a happy cat on the sofa opposite me, and leaned forward with a gleaming smile.

I began by remarking about the "toll" of her schedule.

"Yes," she said, "I just wear myself out. The Wigmore was the fourth recital in eight days—all in different cities. It's not the vocal strain, it's the mental and emotional exhaustion. And my back has been doing its number. I've had everything for it, including acupuncture, and it just does what it wants to do! Sometimes it lasts forty-eight hours, sometimes forty-eight days. You never know." Perhaps lest I think there was any self-pity in this, she broke out in a girlish laugh.

Did she feel a terrible

pressure to perform?

"Very much. I feel a very great responsibility to fulfill my commitments. I think about those people who bought tickets, maybe months and months ahead, and there you are with your sciatica and you can't get out of bed and surely they will understand, but nonetheless I have to go on."

''Do you forget yourself onstage?"

"Of course! When I'm in my dressing room I just want to get started so I can get out there and feel good. ' '

Despite the energy of her answers, there was something too "good" about them. I asked, "What's the worst thing that ever happened to you onstage?"

She frowned, looked away, shook her head, said finally, "I must be very lucky—I can't think of something really bad..."

"But surely," I said, "there has to be something unfortunate..."

"Well," she began, "there was a... stupid thing..."

"Yes?"

"Well. . .1 was in Argentina, scheduled for the Teatro Colon. In Buenos Aires. Suddenly the recital was shifted to another place because of some political thing going on between our government and theirs. It was a dusty little theater somewhere, I don't know where, and I was in the middle of a long cantata by Haydn when suddenly the audience began to smile and then there was a slight... laughter. Well, I had never thought of this as being a comedy piece, and I looked over at my accompanist, Dalton Baldwin, in desperation, and he was looking at me equally desperately, and he shrugged and looked to my left... and there was a... a cat onstage! Just staring at me. I have this horrible allergy to cats and dogs, and I felt something funny in my nose and I didn't know whether to stop singing or continue to the end, or was I meant to shoo the cat away—does one say 'shoo' to a cat? Finally we had to stop because the audience was in hysterics and I had to go off and take an allergy pill. The cat made this horrible noise as I started to leave, and the whole thing stopped for half an hour. We finished the concert at 1:30 and went off to dinner. Everyone tried to make light of it, but of course I was absolutely mortified! That's the only moment onstage when I've thought, I should have gonnne to medical school."

It was a wonderful aria—complete with appropriate gestures and much widening of the eyes—and for a moment I could think of nothing to say. But I sensed that in the course of it she had stepped off some pedestal, prompted by the act of memory and the opportunity to tell a story. "Let's go back to when you were a child," I said.

For the next hour Jessye Norman described an upbringing which, in the se-

curity of its embrace, infused with social ideals and the importance of achievement, might seem as remote from today as an Andy Hardy movie. She was bom in the postwar baby boom, the second of five children ("a very good position"), in Augusta, Georgia, where her father managed the office of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, one of the largest black-owned corporations in the country—"a source of some considerable pride for us." Her parents were community leaders—her father headed the P.T.A., her mother was active in voter registration for the Democratic Party. And both were "musical," with "very good voices."

When she was in high school, she was sure she would be a psychiatrist.

Augusta, of course, was segregated in those days. "Segregation was bad," she said, "but we were well protected because we had such loving people looking after us. I was saying to my sister, Elaine, the other day that we could never have had better teachers, teachers who really cared about you and were sure you were learning what you were supposed to." She did well at school because "it gave my parents such pleasure to see good marks—I thought, Why not?" She is still, she said, "embarrassed" by her "very bad grade" in third-year French.

And, starting at the age of six, when she won a contest in her Baptist church singing "God Will Take Care of You," she sang. "I never made a decision about becoming a singer. By the time I was fifteen I thought I already was a singer. I mean, I had been singing at more functions than I do now—at openings of church annexes, new recreational facilities, you name it. I sang things like 'Let There Be Peace on Earth,' 'I'll Walk with God,' 'Because'...'I Talked with God Last Night' was one of my really big numbers."

"Were you pious?" I asked.

"I was horrible! I was impossible! I read The Great Gatsby when I was twelve, and I thought it was just wonderful, even though I didn't know what it was. I had all these ideas out of books about how we should dress, how we should speak. I wanted music in the background during dinner and cocktails before. You know, peach juice! I remember suggesting that someone should serve at dinner, that we shouldn't all just sit there and sort of reach!"

"Were you ladylike?"

"Unh-unh. My mother longed to have a little girl she could get all dressed up who would sit there and just look pretty. The dresses she made for me always had a sash and a big bow in the back, and if I caught the bow on a door handle or something, I just kept going. My mother spent a lot of my childhood sewing the bows back on. She never gave up."

"Were you a tomboy?"

"Well, I was rather good at baseball and stuff like that. You had to be with three brothers."

Opera, as it has for so many American singers, entered her life through the radio. "I don't know why I tuned in one day to the Met's Saturday-afternoon broadcast. Perhaps I was playing with the dial, waiting for Gunsmoke. I was nine and I didn't know what was going on, but I just loved it. After that I listened religiously. Of course, I was crazy about Leontyne Price. I thought she was the most beautiful, fantastic singer in the world. And I was craaazy about Renata Tebaldi. I was mad, mad, mad for Joan Sutherland—I couldn't believe that such a big voice could move around with such agility! Callas? I was carried away by the mystique of Callas."

"Was it because of them that you wanted to become an opera singer?" I asked.

"I don't know. I had a wonderful psychology teacher in high school, and I was captivated by this whole idea of the subconscious and dreams. I was completely sure I would be a psychiatrist."

"Did you act in school plays?"

"Of course."

"Were you good at it?"

"I was a ham. I loved acting. I'm always acting!"

She seemed slightly embarrassed by this revelation. I put in quickly, "Did you have self-doubt as a teenager?"

She roared: "Self-doubt? That comes much later. That didn't come until I was in the real world."

She rose—we had come to the end of our appointed time. Ushering me out, she said, "Oh dear! I've talked much too much about my childhood."

"Not at all," I said. "Next time we'll talk about the real world."

She replied, "Wonderful."

At our next meeting, in the same room, she filled me in on the rest of her schooling: her musical scholarship to Howard University in Washington, D.C. ("I arrived two weeks after Martin Luther King's March on Washington. It was a very exciting place to be—oo-la-la!"); her graduate work at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and the University of Michigan, where she studied with the great French baritone Pierre Bernac. Europe claimed her first, after she won an international music competition in Munich in 1968; a year later she made her opera debut as Elisabeth in Tannhauser at the prestigious Deutsche Oper in Berlin. She became fluent in German—as she is in all the languages she sings—and soaked up European culture. ("Germany," she said, "was like a wonderland.") When I asked if she experienced any difficulties being black, she said sharply, "Well, I haven't been yellow or green, so I really don't know how different it could be."

Many doors were open to her, but that didn't make it easy. "Singing," she said, "takes over your life. You have to be very, very sure it's what you want. If you're thinking about all the glamorous clothes you'll get to wear, the flowers you may or may not receive—well, that's a very small part of it. This job happens at two in the morning when it's just you and that score and the books about that particular piece, and you're trying to work out just what in the world is going on. That's when you have to have the discipline to stay with it and do it. And I'm horribly selfcritical. The whole performance replays in my head the moment I get home. The moment I'm in my bed and trying to sleep, on goes the tape."

How did she develop her voice?

"My parents," she said, "instinctively knew I should not study voice as a child but study the piano. They were utterly correct. There are certain muscles that have to be developed before you can sustain a long breath without injuring yourself. And the voice is like a nerve. If you injure it, it's just about impossible to repair it."

Thinking of how Callas's voice suffered after her drastic loss of weight, I asked if the hugeness of her voice was at all dependent on her physical size.

"No," she said. "Your size on the outside has nothing to do with the size of your voice. What you need is the kind of cavities inside your head, your face, your throat, your chest that will produce a certain sound. I'm very grateful that my voice has extended from the middle outward. I'm able to sing much more comfortably at the top and bottom of my voice than when I started out, and I'm convinced it has a lot to do with the fact that I quit opera from 1975 to 1980. I was being pushed too fast because opera houses always need sopranos to fill the big bread-and-butter roles. But I could see the damage all around me of singers only a few years older who had no control over their voices onstage. I was considered difficult to deal with because I said 'No' so much. But my voice was changing and it needed time to develop. It takes years to get that understanding of how your voice works, years before you're able to divorce yourself from that horrible word we call 'technique' and are able to release your soul."

I asked, "What is it like to be up there producing all that sound?"

"You don't hear yourself when you sing," she said. "You feel whether the sound is being produced correctly. If it is, you feel complete. And if you do it a very long time, you hyperventilate. I've got to the point sometimes when I've had to sit down. It's a great high!"

"And the applause?"

A hand went to her mouth: "Perhaps I shouldn't admit this, but you can't really hear it. You can see it, but you can't hear it."

I said, "Was the American opera star in Diva really you?"

"Yes! I thought it was wonderful! Beineix [the director] had really done his homework—there were so many little details that had to do with me!"

"And the boy who worshiped you? What's happened to him?"

Her voice dropped. "He died last year. He went off to Bangkok and got some sort of virus. I miss him terribly. He did indeed work for the French post office, delivering telegrams on that awful little motorized machine, and he was absolutely but completely, absolutely devoted. We became friends because he didn't push himself on me. He just came to hear me wherever I was in France—this child spent his entire earnings on trains! He would just give me flowers and thank me and go away— there was no hanging around backstage. One night in Strasbourg, his friends invited me to dinner with him and I went. He was so intimidated he didn't say a word. I said, 'Alain, don't you think you'd better eat? Alain, you have to take the night train back to Paris and you'll starve!' He whispered, 'Oh, I won't be hungry.' How could you not miss somebody like that?"

I said softly, "Do you think of yourself as a 'diva'?"

Her voice was very small: "No." Then vehement: "Do you think of me as a diva?"

"Well...urn," I stammered, "you certainly have a... glamorous public presence..."

She flared: "Well, I hope I do! I do think about what I'm going to put on my back before I go out of the house!"

Venturing further onto unexpectedly thin ice, I said, "Well, you're a bit .. .urn.. .grander than most.. .1 mean, I've heard it said, here in England, that you're quite grand, you know, your manner and all... and somehow... in their eyes.. .not authentic."

She stiffened. Her eyes blazed: "I'm not waiting for one particular group of people to tell me if I'm all right! I've been told that by two people whose opinion matters more to me than anyone living in the British Isles, and that's Mother and Daddy. Maybe it should disturb me more, but it doesn't. For-get it!"

Her voice dropped an octave: "About my way of talking.. .You have to understand that what people think about such things. . . it does not touch my life, Charles. I have lived in a number of different places since I was seventeen— Munich, Berlin, Paris, London—and I think you should be able to hear those places in my speech!"

I smiled. She let her anger hover for a moment, then lifted her magnificent head. "Anyway," she said, "I don't think it would be interesting to be universally accepted. I'm not CocaCola!" And out came that great roaring laugh.

I had unsettled her, and she had sent up warning flags: behind her generous manner was a place she fiercely protected. After I left that meeting in her London house, I realized I knew nothing at all about her current personal life—the life she leads in those few moments when she isn't performing or preparing to perform. In New York I called on friends of hers, one of whom answered my delicately put question about "private relationships" with: "There have been several, I think quite passionate, men in her life, which she has kept very quiet. She wouldn't even let them check into the same hotel with her. I wouldn't dream of saying who."

Bobby Short, of whose performances at the Cafe Carlyle I knew her to be a great fan, said, "Jessye's an old-fashioned 'good girl.' She's still very much involved in her hometown—she goes back all the time to Augusta to sing. She sees life the old way. We were doing Cole Porter's 'But in the Morning, No!' for a benefit a few years ago, and she made me take out all the risque lines—they were improper! Jessye's still wide-eyed about the world. At the same time, she's a great example of the importance of European cultivation. She's a Jamesian heroine, except that Henry James would not have known what to do with her. As a black person it's very important to be able to go to a place where your color is not a pressure, where you can be free to know your own true worth. Jessye knows that. She knows herself inside out, which is a great gift."

The tenor Steven Cole has often seen another side of Jessye Norman: "She really gets down. She loves Chinese food with champagne and giggling. She'll say to me, 'Steven, can you teach me how to act like a diva?' I always feel the party hasn't begun until Jessye arrives. The only thing that really irritates her is pretension in others; she has a very strong sense of priorities. The other day, she was outraged that the International Herald Tribune put the story of Maria Ewing's divorce from Sir Peter Hall on the same page as a story about some desperate place like Bangladesh! And she's a great self-improver. She found an old violin in a shop once and decided to learn to play it, and so that was added to the luggage! Another time, she decided to learn Russian, so she traveled for a while with a Russian coach.

What is it like to be up there producing all that sound?

"She works harder than anyone. She swims two miles a day—her weight, by the way, is a private issue—and she comes to work totally prepared. She recently said to me, 'Steven, Erwartung is so in my body that if someone woke me at three in the morning and said, "Sing page 30," I'd go right into it.' When she sings, you know she's investigated every possibility of the song. In an opera, she knows everybody's part. I once caught her on the side of the stage at the Met during Ariadne mouthing all my lines while I was singing. Afterward I complained, and she said she didn't even know she was doing it!

"But the best thing about her is that, even with that crazy schedule, she keeps up an incredible number of close friendships."

One of those friends is Judy Peabody, the New York social activist and arts patron, who has called on Jessye Norman to lend her presence to good causes—and almost never been turned down. "Jessye's radiance gives everybody a lift," says Mrs. Peabody. "When she's in a roomful of strangers she doesn't just stand there; she reaches out and makes everyone feel at home." It was at one such event, an AIDS benefit at Mortimer's restaurant in Manhattan, that I encountered Jessye Norman recently, jostling easily with the glitterati. We were chatting idly about her schedule when she said, "I'm giving a dinner Friday night at my real house. I'd like you to come—if you promise not to write about the place."

I promised, and I won't write about the house she said was where she could do "absolutely what I want to do and just close the door." But I will say that it is beautiful and somewhere in the country, that two dozen people drove out from the city to be kissed and roared at and lavishly wined and dined by their hostess. And that I was asked to carve the turkey. It is a challenge I normally resist, but she was beaming at me commandingly ("Southern girls," Bobby Short said later, "expect the gentleman to carve the turkey"), and I marched into the kitchen.

There it was, the biggest turkey I've ever seen, and as I hacked away I recalled that Jessye Norman had recently suffered a terrible loss while recording Carmen—the death of her mother in Augusta; that she had gone on to finish the recording before helping to bury her; that she had then fulfilled the engagements on her schedule; that she had now, in a brief break, organized an uncatered dinner for twenty-four.

And I remembered a night several weeks earlier when I had been in Berlin and gone to a vast outdoor amphitheater to hear her long solo "O Mensch!" in Mahler's Third Symphony. She was all in black, and when the symphony was over, 25,000 people didn't move. They lit 25,000 candles and they wouldn't leave until finally "Jessye" nodded to the conductor, the conductor nodded to the orchestra, and she sang the whole thing all over again.

My turkey slices, if I may say so, looked damned good that night. It was the least I could do.