Free The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer by Renee Fleming Page B

life, and they were all as close to perfect as it gets; her Konstanze in Die Entführung aus dem Serail is a particular marvel.
    Arleen’s floors-in-the-hotel analogy helped me to consciously even out my range. One of the first tasks for a singer looking to develop an operatic range is smoothing over passages, or breaks. A break is a transition in the voice, the best example of which is the kind of high lonesome yodeling that made Hank Williams Sr. a legend. Yodelers go from high to low with a huge, audible break in between, and while it’s charming in goat herders and country-music icons, it can sink an opera singer in the course of a single aria. Our breaks may not be as audible, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t still very much there. What a teacher has to do is to increase the singer’s range while establishing an even sound from the top to the bottom of it. We use the word passaggio, which is Italian for “passage,” to describe usually two transition points in the voice. A singer must make sure the passage is a smooth and seamless one. Within a range of anywhere from one and a half to three octaves, a classical singer, unlike a pop singer, needs to have a sound that’s homogeneous throughout, without any breaks the audience can hear. The sound also has to be beautiful, another burden that most pop singers don’t carry. In opera, vocal production must sound easy and effortless, and that’s where the challenge lies.
    I think of my voice as an hourglass. The bottom has breadth and width and a color that is deeper and darker. As I go up through the passaggio, which for me consists of the tones between E-flat and F-sharp at the top of the staff, I must imagine a sound that is narrow, like the waist of the hourglass. The passaggio is slim and focused, and there can be no pressure or weight there, just as you wouldn’t want to put any weight on such a delicate passageway of glass. As the voice moves into the top of the hourglass, the sound can open up and blossom. It takes on warmer colors and more breadth again. Every voice is different, and many singers might think of their voices as a column that is even all the way up and down, but for me the defining feature is the curve, the passaggio.
    It’s in the dangerous straits of the passaggio that many singers come to grief. They try to carry the full weight of the middle voice up through it, muscling their way to the top, or they carry the head voice down, causing weakness and fatigue in the bottom. Singers can also get away with a lot based on youth, strength, and enthusiasm, only to find ten years later that what was once just a niggling problem has brought their careers to an end. Lower-passaggio tones between the chest voice and middle voice are also problematic for women, especially for mezzo-sopranos. When we speak of a singer as having two or three voices, it’s because she has allowed these transitions to become abrupt gear shifts, which can be fine for dramatic emphasis or for Hank Williams Sr., but a steady diet of them isn’t recommended for a classically trained voice.
     
    I had a great deal of admiration for Arleen, not only as a singer but as a person. She had very high principles and she was always clear about where she stood on every issue. Early in our lessons she said to me, “I will teach you to the best of my ability, but I will not help you professionally, because really, you young singers are breathing down my neck. Professionally, you are on your own.”
    Coming from anyone else, such a declaration could have been off-putting to say the least, but Arleen presented it as simply a statement of fact, making it clear how she could help and how she couldn’t. I appreciated that kind of candor, as it meant that our lessons stayed purely in the realm of learning an art form, and I could, at least for the time I was with her, leave the business of business at the door. Of course, Arleen did help me professionally, not only by improving my voice