As opera singer Barbara Bonney tells it, her career started almost by accident when she more or less had to sing for her supper, writes Michael Dervan
Barbara Bonney is everything a prima donna is not. She gives no hint of airs or graces, or that overblown temperament which so invites lampooning. She is graceful and charming, but also sharp. She makes connections quickly, and seems to have little fondness for beating around the bush.
As she tells it, her career is almost an accident. Becoming a singer was something which "decided itself for me, I guess. I needed to make money. I was a student, and I put myself through everything. I paid for university and all studies. I simply had to make some money. I was still studying at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, and an audition came up in Darmstadt. I went and did it, and I got a job.
"I thought rather than scrape around as a student and pass up a job in a German B house, as their light lyric soprano, which is what I was after, anyway - those jobs are hard to come by - I decided to stop school and went straight to work".
She'd studied cello as well as singing, and had thought about music-therapy as a career. "I didn't think I could possibly perform. Who would want to listen to me? And I was pretty shy, I guess, I didn't have really the make-up to be an opera singer. Opera was certainly something I didn't understand, didn't quite get. But I was always a chamber musician, so that made sense to me."
The success at the Darmstadt opera house audition took her by surprise. "I was a professional calligraphist, and I had learned to cook professionally, so I had lots of other options. But it just ended up that way." In the early years, that way was the opposite of operatically glamorous.
If she'd known what she was in for, she would probably have stayed where she was. "In the first year I sang 120 performances in 10 operas, and I didn't know any of them. I had to learn them all, on the spot. And that continued for four years. I did a lot. People turn to me and shake their fingers at me and say, 'Oh, you've turned your back on opera'. I think, wait a minute! I've done 65 operas, it's not like I haven't invested my time and energy and brain-power in it. That was great training, actually. I basically got my training on the spot, rather than in school. I didn't study opera in school, I studied Lied."
Time off was scarce in Darmstadt (four days in her first year is what she recalls) and "I lived in a room with no kitchen, and I was allowed to use the ladies' bathroom. I had no refrigerator, nothing. That's all I could afford. And I was an opera singer!"
She was, she says, in a sort of trance, doing what had to be done in order to survive. She found out what worked for her, what didn't (including Manon and Gilda), and she did "all sorts of stuff, lots of dramatic stuff. It didn't matter. It showed me where my limitations were. You get away with it when you're young, and hopefully you don't hurt yourself".
As she tells it, she's always been one for the head-first experience, jumping into Beethoven's Missa Solemnis without having seen the score, ending up sight-reading Haydn's Nelson Mass in the recording studio.
"That's the kind of thing you have to do. If I were smart I would not have done that. But thank goodness I wasn't smart, because I'd never get anywhere. You have to have a certain amount of balls. Throw caution to the wind. Go for it!"
Even today, she says, she has difficulty saying No.
"I still work round the clock. It will be 16 months without a break for me this year. My first break is in December. That shouldn't happen, but it does. Someone like Simon Rattle or Nikolaus Harnoncourt comes along, and what do you say? No? You're stuck. That's the way it works."
Working with great conductors is one of the rewards of a career at the top. Early on, she learned from Carlos Kleiber about the importance of "taking what you've got in front of you and being free with it. This is one of the most important lessons I ever learned. He said, 'Please, please, don't be together with me. Because if you are, it will be so boring, because there's no tension'. It's so subtle it's almost imperceptible.It's just that elastic band being stretched a little bit. Because if it goes, 'Eins, zwei, drei, vier', who cares. It's so boring.
"That's in a way why I think it's good that we're not exact. I prefer not to be exact.
"Of course, it sounds like it's together, but it's not really. And when it is together - when I teach students and they sing exactly in time - there's no freedom, no nuance, no rubato, no anything, it's the most boring thing I've ever heard in my life.
"You've got to show a landscape in the music. There's no point in being digital, in being mathematical about it."
Singing is often put forward as the most natural form of music-making. But the trained voices of the opera house and concert hall are anything but natural. Bonney is a performer who has always retained an impression of artless nature in her singing.
"I try to sing as much as possible with my untrained voice. Every day I go back and work on my untrained voice so that it retains its unique, youthful, honest quality. And sometimes I succeed, sometimes I don't. When I have to sing heavier repertoire, it's very difficult.
"For instance, for two months now I've just been singing repertoire that's extremely heavy for me. And now I'm coming back to singing Lieder, I'm finding it so hard to get back to my Lieder-singing voice, which I carry around with me always but now it's slightly, not compromised, but the envelope's been pushed just a little bit, so I've got to pull the envelope back.
"For me right now that's the biggest challenge.
"I've been singing for 25 years, I'm almost 50 years old. I have to work very hard at retaining the lightness, the lyricism, the purity of my voice, and not let it get bent out of shape, because then I can forget it."
Making the switch has become harder with age, because her voice has developed, and takes more readily now to heavier roles.
"It used to be easier. Because I didn't have the capability to sing more heavy roles. My voice just wouldn't do it. But with age it has expanded a little bit, and now I'm finding it increasingly difficult to go back and sing little girl stuff. I want to keep singing the big girl stuff, but unfortunately my calendar is booked in such a way that it's not quite in the new vein yet.
"That's a very tough thing to get exactly right, especially when you're planning three years in advance - you don't know what your voice is going to sound like in three years' time."
She's clearly quite proud of her achievement in retaining her vocal freshness. "Basically, I still sound like a young girl, compared to lots of young girls I teach, who sound twice as old as I do."
Bonney's Dublin recital will find her in her element, giving a song recital in a hall of modest proportions - there's some operetta in the mix, tying in with a new CD release. She still tries to learn about 40 new songs a year, approaching them in the first instance through the texts.
"The first thing I do is I learn all the words. That's the first thing you forget, the words. We're musicians. We don't forget the music, unless you're totally unmusical. But if you're standing there, and everything you do is by memory, which it is, the first thing that flops out of your brain - somebody pulls out a handkerchief or opens a little sweetie or something - the words just go flying out the window. Unless you have them so deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply ingrained, they're just not there.
"I spend hundreds, thousands of hours writing out texts. I write it all down. Time after time after time. And then, slowly, it seeps in, but it seeps in very deeply through the writing process."
Her greatest rewards as a performer, she says, come from recitals.
"In opera performances, people go crazy when someone sings really loud and lots of high notes. It's all very pyrotechnical.
"When you sing a Lied recital and you sit there and you singinto someone's eyes, you sing into their heart, and they come up afterwards and they say, 'That changed my life'. That's rewarding. In opera they want an autograph."
Barbara Bonney (soprano) and Malcolm Martineau (piano) perform Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leben plus songs by
Wolf and Liszt, and excerpts from
operettas by Heuberger, Dostal, Zeller and Lehár in the The Irish Times/NCH Celebrity Series next Saturday at the NCH, Dublin. See www.nch.ie or telephone 01-4170000
