My wife and I
had just retired to the living-room for
coffee and a liqueur, having had a sumptuous
repast prepared by the lovely Monte Tozzi,
Giorgio’s wife. (I had worked with Monte at
the Sacramento Music Circus my first year in
showbiz ... She was Monte Amundsen then,
singing Tuptim in Kismet, my very first
show!)
The conversation was
lively with a liberal sprinkling of “show
biz” gaffs and anecdotes when Giorgio,
self-consciously mentioned his
long-suffering pitch problem. I volunteered
with laser-like precision-I’ve been watching
a lot of Sci-Fi these days-that he actually
had a terrific ear and the fault was only
one of technique. He graciously began to
correct me saying he should be the one who
knew his voice best
... when I gently interrupted him with, “But
Giorgio, we were there when you showed just
how strong your sense of pitch is!”
I reminded him
that Judith and I had heard him sing South
Pacific the previous Summer and how we were
amazed when he sang “This Nearly Was Mine”
... a quarter, to a half step higher than
the orchestra was playing for the entire
song. His face fell open in disbelief, when
Judith-who has “absolute pitch”- confirmed
the event as I had stated. (He had dated
Judith before I met her and knew “her ear”
very well!) I told him how she and I had
later discussed-with amazement and a little
humor- that it was evident that Giorgio had
decided that there was “no way” he was going
to sing flat in front of the two of
us ... but, by his assuming he would be
under, he therefore pushed sharp ... I mean
really sharp!
I suggested
that his was a simple problem to fix-only a
matter a minutes-because he had always
previously sung on pitch ... it was just he
had somewhere along the line ... lost his
concept of support. Since I had already
stepped into deep ... water, I also
mentioned that this lack of strong, flexible
support also caused the wobble with which he
had been singing ... for the last ten years
or so. I hastened to tell him that I would
fix it in less than an hour if he would come
over some day soon. He came over the next
day ... and I taught him my regimented
“flexible breath-pressure on demand, coupled
with my “breathing” technique ... where one
never actually “takes a breath” ... for the
sake of taking a breath, but rather,
instantaneously “pops the belly-button out,
with the throat open ... and the lungs are
full … instantaneously! (Nature abhors a
vacuum!” Aristotle.)
I had him sing
a straight tone ... that took about ten
minutes to get him to stop trying to put
“vibrato” into the tone and he was smack-dab
on pitch. I worked him up and down the scale
with the quasi-straight tone and ... he
found the voice he had thought he had lost
years before ... sensa wobble!
He had four
straight lessons as I prepared him to sing a
Don Carlo somewhere in Egypt, I believe it
was.
About ten years
later, in 1985, while I was under contract
with the Met-Wilbur James Gould’s
“International Symposium of Voice,”was in
progress at Juillard-I was asked by Jim, at
11:45, for fifteen minutes or so-to give a
talk-to those wished to hear what I had to
say on “working with a young voice” ... and
the audience en mass got up and filed into
the small room to the left of the stage at
the Alice Tulley Hall. The session ended at
1:40 when I had to pry myself outta there
pleading that I was already late for a
rehearsal at the Met.
Apparently,
when the panel had come back to resume the
Conference after lunch and, since no one was
sitting in the house, but still in the room
listening to me, when 1:00 PM came about-my
little talk had become a Master Class-I
suspect Jim had stepped inside and monitored
my last forty minutes.
The next day I
received a call from Jim’s secretary asking
me to see Dr. Joseph Pelosi, the new
President of Juilliard. No information,
nothing ... so I was kinda blind-sided. I
walked in and he mentioned my “talk” and
told me Giorgio Tozzi was leaving and that
he would very much like me to take his
place! Wow!!! And what did I say-since I
hadn’t the time to think it through, with my
busy schedule and forty students of my own?
I reluctantly declined his magnificent
offer, stating I was simply overloaded. It
never occurred to me that the offer wouldn’t
be out there sometime later when perhaps I
wouldn’t be as pressured. I suspect that
wonderful man, Dr. Pelosi was floored at my
response to his unbelievable offer ... or at
least thought I was nuts having been offered
the Premier Voice Teaching job in America,
if not the world. You would think I would
have learned from that, right? A year later,
Helen Vanni called from Manhattan School of
Music and made the same offer ... but I was
just too damn too busy ... In reality, it
was my sense of responsibility to my other
students that engendered my decision. With
Juilliard, I should have said something
like, “Great ... but I will only be able to
take ten students my first year ...” or
some-such thing ...
Oh yes ...
about seven or eight years later, I met up
with Giorgio again ... at a rehearsal of Don
Pasquale, he the Don and I Dr. Malatesta
(Dr. Sickhead, for the uninitiated! ;-) )
(Beverly (Sills) had changed the opera from
L’Elisir D’Amore to Don Pasquale because she
didn’t have time to learn it! I, however had
it two-thirds memorized ... and had to set
it down and learn Pasquale in Italian, only
having sung it in English ... comedy, you
know, in the language of the people ...
America, you know!)
Giorgio was
back to singing flat with a wobble. (He
probably wasn’t performing enough to keep
the voice up and humming!) During the first
rehearsal, he occasionally glanced at me
with a rueful smile. The rehearsals
progressed and he vocally showed no
improvement and, in a week or so, we moved
into the house for stage rehearsals. On that
first day, as I was heading for my dressing
room, I passed Giorgio sitting in his. He
beckoned me to enter. I sat down and again,
the rueful smile as he uttered, “It hasn’t
been going too well.” I allowed that I had
noticed and asked him the obvious question,
“Giorgio, don’t you still have the cassette
tapes from the four sessions we had?”
And-you’ll never guess-he said, “I never
thought about them!”
Beat ... beat ... “Giorgio
... why don’t you just go out there, pop and
rest, give a kick to the center of the first
tone growing ... and sing the whole role,
wiht line, with a quasi-straight tone, vowel
to vowel?” I smiled, patted him on the
shoulder and went next door to my dressing
room. When later we met on stage ... he was
at NINETY PERCENT ... and thereafter,
back to his own great voice, powerful
personality! And ... he walked away with the
reviews!!!
CLICK LINKS BELOW TO VIEW PREVIOUS TIPS...
JULY 13 -
FROM THE LIPS OF
OPERA GREATS OF THE PAST
