Jessye Norman Interview (page: 5 / 9) Legendary Opera Soprano	Print Interview

Was there ever a moment in your career when you stumbled, or felt you were making a mistake?

Jessye Norman: Well, yes, that moment when

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I decided that I had to save myself by leaving the opera house. It isn't as though I had, you know, sort of sheaves and sheaves of work. I made this decision because I was trying to save myself. I have always sung more solo recitals with piano than opera, but it isn't as though I had recitals lined up all over the world. I had two or three things that I knew that were coming up, but I didn't have a lot after that. So at that point in my very young life, I wasn't sure whether or not I was going to be able to continue, because it wasn't certain that I would have enough work as a solo performer to support myself. So there were probably about two months before I actually told my parents what I'd done. When I called them, and my mother was on one extension and my father was on the other one, which was in the kitchen, and there was stunned silence. And my father said, "Well sister, how is it going since you've left the opera house in Berlin?" I said, "Well actually, I have two recitals in this place, and another recital in that place, and I think I'm going to be all right." And at some point mother said, "Do you need to come home?"

[ Key to Success ] Courage

What did you say?

Jessye Norman: I said, "No, I think I'm going to be all right."

What did it feel like that first time, singing with a full orchestra, on the stage of the Deutsche Oper in Berlin?

Jessye Norman: By this time I had sung with an orchestra. I had sung with the University of Michigan orchestra.

Was there a standing ovation at the end?

Jessye Norman: There was a standing ovation at the end of the opera, I think because everybody was just so surprised. One has to understand ... think about this. Berlin, December of 1969, just a little bit before Christmas, the Berlin opera house, an African American singing a quintessential German character in a Wagnerian opera in a German opera house. It's completely crazy when you think about it, but that's what happened to me.

How did you learn to speak German?

Jessye Norman: Determination. Five hours a day for six months.

And then Italian and then all the other languages that you've mastered.

Jessye Norman: Yes, and Spanish, yes. Rabbi Freidlander works with me every time I've got to sing in Hebrew. I don't pretend to speak Hebrew. But otherwise I don't sing in languages that I don't speak.

Why?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Jessye Norman: I want to be able to express, I want to be able to communicate, and I want to be able to understand what it is I'm doing, and I want the people whose language it is to understand what I'm doing. And to help me with that, I need to listen to people speaking their own language, to listen to the difference in nuance which, of course, is just... I just love languages, and I love learning and I love listening. I love being able to listen to Italian and to be able to tell that that person comes from north Italy, and that person is from southern Italy, and that person is from Napoli. Only people from Napoli speak Italian like that, and I enjoy that sort of thing.

All modesty aside, how would you describe the contribution you have made in your field?

Jessye Norman: Oh, good gracious. The contribution that I've made in my field. First, I would say that I've contributed longevity, considering how long I've been doing this and how much I enjoy it and want to do it more.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think one of the things, when I talk to younger performers, whether they're singers or violinists or pianists, is that I feel that I have encouraged them to go beyond the limitations of the box in which we can be placed as classical performers. That it really is all right to be a cellist, and to play the Elgar Concerto, but to be also interested in the music of the Silk Road, as Yo-Yo Ma has shown so brilliantly. That the music need not have been composed originally for the classical cello. That doesn't mean that you can't play it, and that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be interested in it. Why should a person who's playing the Brahms Second Piano Concerto not be interested in the ragtime music of Scott Joplin? Why should a singer who's singing Mimi -- a Puccini (role) -- not be interested in the music of Cole Porter? I feel that we so often limit ourselves, because we think that we have to follow a certain line, that we have to follow and do what's been done before, instead of finding our own paths and making our own way. I hope that my performance life encourages -- particularly other singers -- not to be limited, not to be put into a box and to be told, "You are that kind of soprano, so therefore this is the kind of music that you're supposed to sing." I said one clever thing -- and I say this all the time -- I said one clever thing in my entire life, and I was asked this question when I was about 23 or 24 years old. When I was doing probably the second interview I'd ever done in my life, and the interviewer said, "What kind of soprano are you? You sing this and you sing that and you've got sort of fiorituri possibilities.." meaning sort of like coloratura sopranos, "...so what kind of soprano are you exactly?" And so then I said, in all of my sort of 23 or 24 years, "I think that pigeon holes are only comfortable for pigeons."

[ Key to Success ] Vision

Good one.

Jessye Norman: I don't know where that came from, but out it came out of my mouth.

That's a brilliant response. It's one of the questions people have asked for many years about you. "Where does your voice belong? Where does it go?" and you have answered, "Anywhere I want it to go."

Jessye Norman: Exactly. Whatever we're doing. This concert? This is the kind of soprano that I am.

But there are not many singers, not many sopranos or other opera singers, not many people who sing opera who can do that. They sing the same roles over and over and let themselves be limited that way.

Jessye Norman: I think that that is unfortunately the truth. I think it has a great deal to do with listening to one's handlers and all of that, because they'd like to know how to sell you. So if you sing these roles, then they know what to do. I'm not trying to accommodate them. I'm just trying to live my life in song. Wherever that takes me, that's where I want to go. If it's a song that Odetta made famous and it speaks to me, as it does, and I want to sing her song -- which was her protest song against capital punishment, called "Another Man Done Gone" -- then that's what I want to do.

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