Read Online The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer by Renee Fleming - Free Book Online Page A

There’s a knock at the door, and suddenly all the people they’ve been reading about are standing on their front doorstep, grass skirts and all. I played the suburban mother, and at one point one of the girls, who was sufficiently covered by her beads and long hair, and I were supposed to exchange costumes, which meant I would be going topless. It was a scandal. My voice teacher walked into the office of Juilliard’s new president, Joseph Polisi, and said, “Under no circumstances will a student of mine be pressured into performing topless. There must be another solution!” In the end I wore a body stocking, with garishly painted nipples. Who knew that real nipples wouldn’t read in the house, and that painted ones would look more realistic?
     
    My memories of Juilliard fall into two distinct categories: On one hand there was the school, the productions I was in, the friends I made, and my beloved diction coaches, Tom Grubb, Corradina Caporello, and Kathryn LaBouff. On the other, there was Beverley Johnson. Certainly I have Juilliard to thank for providing the means for us to work together. But then Beverley became a force in my life so much greater than any school could ever be that when I think of her it’s not as part of Juilliard, but simply as part of my life.
    All Juilliard students were expected to find a voice teacher, and at that time they were allowed to study only with someone on the school’s faculty. Beverley taught there and at the Aspen Music Festival, so I approached her about a consultation. Within five minutes she had me on the floor doing sit-ups while she admonished me about several vocal issues. And that was that. We’d found each other. I was looking for the kind of detailed instruction I had gotten from Pat Misslin, and there it was, on Beverley’s living-room rug.
    Beverley had an extremely distinctive look, with a very long chin that she was forever, in all the years that I knew her, trying to hide. Not long after I met her, she decided she would never be photographed again. She was a very slim woman with such perfect posture that if you saw her from the back, you would think she was twenty-five years old, not the approximately eighty she probably was. She might not have had much luck hiding her chin, but she hid her age perfectly.
    Beverley wasn’t a very popular teacher when I began studying with her. Teachers go in and out of fashion over the years, and someone who had taught as long as Beverley had become accustomed to going from being the instructor everyone fights to study with to being last on the list and back again, two or three times in the course of a career. I happened to catch her when she was out of fashion, which was all the better for me because she had more time.
    Although Beverley had studied singing, she was trained as a pianist. Her husband, Hardesty Johnson, was a singer, and it was he who had originally been brought to Juilliard to teach. She eventually joined the faculty in 1964. The interesting thing about her being an instrumentalist was that she intellectualized the voice, studying it much more than a singer probably would have, which ultimately led to her becoming so strong a technician.
    I had technical issues that still needed to be resolved, and she was so technically oriented and focused on physiology that we responded to each other immediately. Between the sit-ups, her breathing exercises, and the way we were able to communicate with each other, it was almost like hearing the locks on a safe all tumble into their correct sequence. I ultimately worked with Beverley for sixteen years, and it’s safe to say that she did more for my singing than anyone else.
    Of course, Beverley wasn’t the only voice teacher who was asking her students to do seemingly strange things. In one master class, I had to sing before an audience while lying on the floor. Another teacher had me leaning against a wall, then leaning over the piano, then singing while bent in half,