Here is an interview with soprano Benita Valente, on the occasion of her last performance in Philadelphia (at age 65). She talks about all kinds of interesting issues we've discussed on the list. This interview was found in the Philadelphia Inquirer on the web <http://web.philly.com/content/inquirer/2000/10/26/magazine/BENI26.htm>
The song is over
By David Patrick Stearns INQUIRER MUSIC CRITIC
Benita Valente nearly sneaked out of her 40-year singing career without saying goodbye. At age 65, the woman who was known for decades as America's smartest soprano will sing Vaughan Williams' Dona Nobis Pacem with the Mendelssohn Club Sunday at the Academy of Music - the last time audiences in her adopted city will hear her.
There will be no galas, no tearful adieus. That's never been Valente's style. Her emotions have always been contained within a small, discreet frame, most suitable for the Mozartean heroines she sang from 1973 to 1995 at the Metropolitan Opera and the German art songs that formed the cornerstone of a distinguished recording and concert career. Talking about leaving it all required some persuasion.
Standing at the door of her Rittenhouse Square-area home, Valente doesn't look much older than in 1960s photos from the Curtis Institute of Music and the Marlboro (Vt.) Music Festival, where she met her husband Tony Checchia (founder of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society) and made her classic 1960 recording of Schubert's The Shepherd on the Rock.
Valente's voice hasn't aged much, either. Thanks to solid training that began in her native California (she grew up on a farm near Delano) and continued at the Curtis Institute and the Freiburg Opera, she hardly sounds ripe for retirement.
"That's the way I wanted it," she said.
Question: What tells you it's time?
Answer: My body. This is the 41st year of my so-called professional career, and it's very strenuous.
Q: Leonard Bernstein said he'd trade it all - all - to be a singer at the Metropolitan Opera.
A: It is a wonderful thing. Nobody is luckier. I've always tried to be with colleagues who are uplifting. I've always sworn that people who sing Mozart are friendlier than those who sing Wagner. I remember walking backstage to congratulate James King, who was a friend even before he was a tenor. He was doing Wagner, I was doing Mozart. He said, "You sing the easy stuff." I wanted to kill him. I said, "You try it, mister!"
Q: Did you long to sing Wagner?
A: Yes! When I was in Freiburg that one year, they asked me to sing Gerhilde [a small role in Die Walküre]. It was such great fun to go out there and yell your head off. I've always said, give me the voice of [Wagnerian soprano] Birgit Nilsson for a day and I'll sing for 24 hours. I guess you always want what you don't have.
Q: You're known for your intelligence. That's sure to get you in trouble with insecure conductors.
A: I always had very strong feelings on how things should go musically. And I've gotten on the bad side of some conductors. But I always say to myself, "If they don't know any better, I don't need to work with them."
Q: Were there many?
A: I always had a list of maybe three people: If they ever ask, I'm busy. I'm not going to name names.
Q: And what about your relationship with Eugene Ormandy?
A: He and I went through our highs and our lows. I'd seen him be so rude. He made a friend of mine cry onstage [during a rehearsal]. I said to myself, "He'll never do that to me!"
My husband often saw Ormandy, who'd say, "Your wife hates me! She passes me on the street and she doesn't even speak to me!" Tony would be so embarrassed he'd say, "She doesn't hate you! She wears contact lenses and sometimes doesn't have them in." I said, "Go back and tell him I hate him.' "
Q: Didn't you work with him?
A: I did something with him I never should've done - Bach's Cantata No. 51 - he didn't have the foggiest idea about [conducting] it. At one point he said, "You sang a B-flat there and it's supposed to be a B-natural." I said, "I did not!" From then on, he wanted me in everything.
Q: Speaking of Bach, I found this recording of Bach's Cantata No. 30 you made with the Brattleboro [Vt.] Bach Festival ages ago. Would you like to hear it?
A: No. It's a very emotional thing to hear yourself, especially now that I'm quitting. I was just sent a live Bach tape, and I thought, "My God, there was a time when I really knew how to sing. This proves it!" It's a very elusive thing: Whenever I went on vacation . . . by the fourth week I'd start thinking, "Do I really get up on a stage in front of thousands of people and sing?"
Q: Let's talk about your breakthrough in the 1984 production of Handel's Rinaldo at the Met. You'd been singing at lots of other visible places for years. But isn't it odd that many people only discovered you with Rinaldo?
A: Tony used to say there's no market for quality. Well, there is, but it takes a long time for people to realize it. I'm not the sort that gets in your face. My manager used to say that when you walk into a room, everybody should know you're here. I think knowing your stuff is more important.
Q: Shall we talk about a not-so-high point? Like that 1986 concert version of the Debussy opera Pelleas and Melisande with the Philadelphia Orchestra that had a record-high walkout rate?
A: I had heard wonderful performances of Pelleas at the Met with half the audience gone. It has too much mystery, that Pelleas. During a rehearsal, one of us said that a lot of people are going to leave. And he [conductor Dennis Russell Davies] said nobody is going to leave my performance. He learned! There was one man in the second row reading a newspaper, with it all spread out like he was doing it on purpose. He was asked to leave.
Q: One of the most important people in your post-Rinaldo career was the glamorous Greek American mezzo-soprano Tatiana Troyanos. You did many great concerts together. How did that duo come about?
A: Columbia Artists wasn't getting her concerts. But Janice Myer [then at Columbia] put the two of us together. People said it wouldn't work. Tatiana was wary of strangers, particularly other sopranos.
Q: Was she difficult?
A: She was a split personality. You never knew who you were going to meet. I knew just how to handle her. I used to tease the hell out of her. I called her "T" or "Tat."
Q: She died of liver cancer in 1993. Were you close then?
A: Most definitely. She was a hypochondriac. She had pills for everything and probably ruined her liver. The minute she knew how bad she was, she was [broken] in two pieces. She took two chemotherapy sessions, and the day of the second, got out of bed to tell somebody to turn down their TV and just dropped.
Q: You've done a lot of caretaking in your life. You looked after your mother when she was dying and saw your cousin William, with whom you were close, in his slow decline from cancer.
A: He died on the third of August. Harold Wright [a clarinetist and friend] died on the 11th. Tatiana died on the 21st. So that was the death month.
Q: You remember those dates still. But you've always held your emotions in check, particularly onstage, which is ironic since your first major teacher was the legendary soprano Lotte Lehmann, who was known for her devastating emotional frankness.
A: She always said you must do it your own way. I first went to her when I was 18. She didn't know what to do with me. I'd sing something she thought was very touching, and then there were lapses where I was as green as all get out. She finally said, "I have contacts in Hollywood, I could get you to a screen test. I think you'd do very well." But I wanted to go into opera.
Q: Do you regret saying no?
A: I never would've had the kind of richness I have now.
Q: Your subsequent training at the Curtis Institute of Music must have given you the technical basis a singer needs to survive physical changes and aging.
A: Childbirth gave me an extra edge. I couldn't sing for three months before the birth of my son Peter. Every time I went for a high note it was like the top of my head was going to blow off. So I said, "That's enough of that!" I didn't sing for six months. And after that, it was as if somebody gave me a new voice. There was more of it.
Q: Opera singers are even less known for marital longevity. Yet you and Tony are going on 42 years.
A: I used to claim it was because I could get away from home so often. Tony is so high-powered, so hyperactive. We're so different. Especially in the early years, it was volatile.
Q: Many travel with spouses.
A: That can be trouble. The husbands are more nervous than you are. I didn't know that for years. Friends said, "Don't you know how the poor man suffers?" And I said, "Why? I'm the one onstage!"
Q: I know you're planning on teaching a select circle of students plus giving master classes. But what else will you do?
A: I could go work at the zoo. I could go to Rittenhouse Square and help them clean up the gardens. I love being out of doors. I love animals. I love plants. And I like people. I like to just get out and talk.
-- Margaret Harrison, Alexandria, Virginia, USA "Music for a While Shall All Your Cares Beguile" mailto:peggyh@i...
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