 . . . Spring 1998
"I knew I would never teach!" Verrett says with a smile, sitting in her cozy, brick-walled studio in the School of Music's Earl V. Moore Building on North Campus. She says this with the bemusement of one who seems genuinely glad to be going back on earlier convictions. For Verrett (pronounced Verr-ETT), one of the most acclaimed dramatic singers of our time, has thrown herself into a new role with the passion of a diva. In 1996, she joined the Michigan faculty as a professor of voice and has been busy nurturing new talent. How has an artist who has performed around the world with every major opera company, including 23 years at New York's Metropolitan Opera, adapted to this new endeavor in a small Midwestern city?
"I've been here a year," says Verrett, settling back on her studio couch on a rainy morning. "I knew that I would be a good teacher, because after graduating from the Juilliard School of Music I became my own teacher. I never wanted to teach because I'm a very much outdoors, traveling, moving-about type of person. My career was a very busy one. I was brought up in the music world with hands-on teaching. Sometimes some of the teachers were absent a great deal because they traveled a lot, but I was very lucky that my voice teacher, Madame [Szekely] Freschl, had had a career and had been teaching for many years before I studied with her. Before that, I had studied with a teacher in Hollywood, Anna Fitziu. She is one of the opera singers in the hard-to-find biography, The American Singer. She felt that if you weren't really interested in a career, no matter how beautiful the voice or how otherwise talented, she wouldn't take you as a student. She loved my voice when she heard me sing and asked me how serious I was. I answered, 'Very serious.' 'You want to have a career?' I answered, 'That's why I'm here.'
The career happened, of course. At the Met, Verrett performed a wide variety of classic roles in Milan, London, New York, Paris and beyond. Her performance of both Dido and Cassandra in the Metropolitans 1973 production of Berliozs Les Troyens was hailed by the New Yorker as a landmark in American operatic history. She sang the first Tosca of her career with Luciano Pavarotti at the Met in a performance directed by Tito Gobbi and telecast throughout the nation in PBS's Live from Lincoln Center series. Verrett has twice performed at the White House, and holds honorary doctorates and France's top artistic accolades.
A star-encrusted career like this one yields a teacher who sees beyond the highly important development of superb vocal technique. Verrett sees her role through a more global lens. Her job, she says, is "to teach the students all that I ever knew, all that I have learned, that I went through myself. About the business. About movement on-stage, and diction. About comportment, about how to dress for auditions, about how one presents oneself to the world. That one does not go to an audition to learn; you go to an audition to win. That's my idea. You don't go there to say, 'Oh, I'll go to get this experience.' Don't waste your time, because you're also wasting the judges' time. Because next time you go, they will remember it if you were not prepared really very well. If you sang well, or if you played well and just didn't win, people will remember that with, 'Oh, that was a very good performer. Maybe a little more seasoning, a bit more preparation in the studio. . .' but don't go to an auditon to practice on the judges! That's one thing that I do teach my students. You go there to win. If you don't win, then fix whatever caused you not to win that time, OK?"
Verrett believes that above all, singing is communication. She sees that many singers ignore some of the most basic principles of communication, and she has set out to remedy this with her students.
"As a performer, I always related to the word. Always. And this is what I hope that I'm bringing to my students here. I tell them, 'Please don't stand on the stage and bore me! I don't mean they should run helter-skelter with arms all over the place, no, no, no! The thought, the mind, has to be connected with the heart. They have to work together. You must know what you're singing about, talking about. The poet, the librettist, did not write this work to be muddled through with words that are not understandable!"
Verrett holds singers to the standards of clarity demanded in everyday speech. "I cannot stand to hear people with very beautiful voices who stand on the stage and one understands one out of 50 words. I'm a very, very harsh judge when it comes to that, and so this is something that I'm bringing to my students."
In 1994, Verrett took a step that many divas would shy away from. She accepted the role of Nettie Fowler in the revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel at Lincoln Center in New York. During her one-year engagement, the production won five Tony Awards.
"It was not that I wanted to do Broadway musical theater," she explains. "The prime reason was that I wanted the critics to see me in another venue. Not as the opera singer, but someone who's doing something else now. It was a good experience. I love Broadway. In fact, people tried to get me to go into that area when I first arrived in New York to go to Juilliard. Well, my whole focus was on classical music from the time I was a very, very young child, and so I said I had to follow my first star."
Verrett was born in Louisiana, one of six children of Elvira and Leon Verrett. The whole family sang. "My mother has a gorgeous, untrained soprano voice. I heard singing from a young age-there was always singing around the house." When Verrett was 12, the family moved to California, where her father, a general contractor, built many houses. She's married to the artist Louis LoMonaco, an associate professor in the U-M School of Art and Design, and the author of a recent book on the history and processes of etching. Their daughter Francesca lives and works in New York City.
The School of Music still seems a bit dazed to count Verrett among its company. Her arrival on the faculty is the work of George I. Shirley, the tenor who in the 1960s became the first African American to perform the role of Romeo and is now the Joseph Edgar Maddy Distinguished University Professor of Music. Verrett and Shirley first met when they did Carmen together in 1962 and 1964 in New York and Spoleto. They also collaborated on a recording of Oedipus Rex directed by Stravinsky. From time to time, Shirley would try to talk her into the move, Verrett says. At first, she thought she'd limit herself to giving some master classes, but one night, at a dinner party, Shirley again urged her to join the faculty. "I looked at him and said, 'I might think about it. That's a possibility.' And that's how it happened."
She keeps her U-M schedule at three days a week because, "as wonderful and as beautiful a situation as it is here, I could not bear to be here five days a week. I need the time off because I'm also pursuing another career. I never stop. My dad always told us never to retire. You retire from one endeavor, and then you begin another one or two."
Verrett's cryptic when asked about that new career. "I don't want to speak too much about that other life yet," she says, "except that it will be in the acting area-a complete departure."
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irley Verrett always knew she would sing. From childhood, the dream was strong and unswerving. She knew her goal: to command the stage at the world's greatest opera houses, to embody operas greatest heroines: Carmen, Norma, Azucena, Lady Macbeth, Aida, Adalgisa, Dalila, Tosca . . . . But she knew another thing, as well.