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平衡感——记美国女高音玛丽亚•卡妮奥瓦 The sense of equilibrium
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“妈咪”的妈咪角色
Lightening Up
The night before we spoke one
morning last August, Maria Kanyova was onstage at Glimmerglass
Opera as Janacek’s Jenufa. She spent the summer playing a
harrowing scene in which the body of Jenufa's baby boy, frozen
under the river ice for months, turns up with the little red cap
his mother made for him. Kanyova has also sung Cio-Cio-San, who
sends her child out of the house so that he won't see her kill
herself, and Suor Angelica, a woman locked in a convent, who is
coldly told that the child she never knew is dead. Kanyova is the
mother of a four-y….y and a three-year-old girl. I ask thc soprano
if she has ever simply fallen apart in any of these roles. The
answer is immediate, and a bit surprising.
"Yes," she says quickly. "But,
I do it in rehearsal, and I allow myself to do it several times.
It's something of thinking about the children and going that far
that allows me in performance to monitor those feelings. Even so,
last night it caught me just a little bit off' guard, I got a
little bit of it. Usually, because I've already gone that far, I
can pull it back and still have the intensity of the scene." At
Central City Opera in 2005, Kanyova did a run of Butterfiys under
the direction of Catherine Malfitano, a mother herself. "She
allowed me to experiment with finding those emotions. I did allow
myself to go that far in rehearsal, but even in performance,
there's a certain point after which you know you don’t have to
sing anymore, that you can't help it, you pretty much have to go
there, and I did every show with mascara running down my face for
the bow. And even in Suor Angelica, I think I did. But with
Jenufa there's more to do. It's
heart-wrenching."
Mercifully, Kanyova is now
headed for the cartoonish, averted child abuse of her first Gretel,
at Los Angeles Opera this month. She's been collecting material
from her own kids. "My daughter laughs like ... we call her the
sailor. She laughs like a drunken sailor. Teeny little petite
thing, tiny little voice, and then that laugh comes out of her and
shocks everyone. And then my son has a wonderful laugh. That fuels
the child in you. If we can be animals, if my husband and I can be
a cat or a frog, that just cracks them up. The way my daughter runs
-- we've had to videotape it from behind, because we just can't
catch enough of it. It's like a wild animal running, all limbs are
flailing. I thin Humperdinck even mentioned this about children,
that the change so quickly -- they can go from crying to giddy in a
matter of seconds, and there are elements in the opera that are
like that. Gretel is probably going to come very easily to me. I'm
just a big kid. When my children are playing with toys, move over,
let me in, Mommy's best at playing with toys."
But Mommy also plays well with
others, which becomes clear when we talk about the directors with
whom she's worked. Malfitano was a noted Butterfly herself-- at the
Met and at other theaters. Did she attempt to transfer her own
ideas onto Kanyova? "She allowed me to create my own character,
which was fantastic. With that, though, she was able to stage it in
a way that was very smart for singing. From her point of view it
was advantageous to allow the staging to go a certain way, that we
knew we had everything at our disposal in order to sing the work.
We weren't on our heads or singing upstage. One thing that was very
insightful was to create a lot of the role as conversation, that it
wasn't such a grand singing event. Which of course it is, but she
really allowed us to investigate how much we could create in
conversation, and really make it a vocal dialogue between one
another. And that was Nntasuc, because It's dlttlcult to sing, and
it can turn into just who can sing louder and longer and higher.
And obviously Jenufa is like that -- it's quite conversational and
very psychological."
Robert Altman's direction, for
the premiere of William Bolcom and Arnold Weinstein's A Wedding at
Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2004, was oddly similar. Even though he
developed the characters himself for his film, on which the opera
is based, says Kanyova, "He allowed us to create our own. There was
very little reference to the movie. And with that, everybody
brought to the table their own rendition. You 'almost forgot that
he was Robert Altman, because he was so approachable." Kanyova
played Rita Billingsley, the ball-breaking wedding planner, created
in the film by Geraldine Chaplin. "The whole experience was
surreal, because early on I watched the movie, and I thought, hmmm,
mats so ironic, because I kind of look like her, and I immediately
had the character in mind from her." Kanyova was a delight, opening
the show with a long solo scene as she bossed around staff and
guests alike. "It was great -- the adrenaline just waiting to start
the opera. You just burst onstage. I love comedy. As my mother
says, 'Usually you die.' "
Kanyova has special praise for
James Robinson, who directed her in Suor Angelica, as well
as Nixon in China, Il Viaggio a Reims and Le Nozze
di Figaro. Earlier this year he guided her first Die
Entfubung aus dem Serail in Denver. "Jim's specialty is finding
these subtleties that just pull you into a character. There were
different things about the Constanze that, staging-wise, brought
out my ability to find other avenues for that character to go. He
helps you as an artist to expand the character without really being
told what to do. Through the staging I was able to find it, and
that's how he works, through these pinpoint, very carefully
orchestrated moments that give you ideas."
She was delighted with the way
they solved the opera's notorious directorial problem, the aria
"Martern aller Arten." She even came to look forward to singing
this monster challenge. "His take on it was that the Pasha is
torturing her with furs and jewels and the wonderful things that
she's somewhat attracted to, and through these she might be
attracted to him. She's being teased by these things, and she
almost succumbs. But it occurred to me that as he keeps trying, and
he puts the fur back on her, I could just revel in that. It fit the
music perfectly -- all the coloratura was just about that fur. And
the audience loved it. It could have been just that he put it on
me, and that's how it was staged. But bringing that seconcl level
to it, me reacuon, now the music fits it – there were moments like
that that were very clear to mc that made her kind of comic in a
way, even though it's a very serious situation, a serious aria. It
was ingenious."
The Glimmerglass Jenufa was
directed by Jonathan Miller. The common view of Miller -- that he
talks a good game in rehearsal, he's smart and funny and snows the
critics at press conferences, but that what ends up onstage doesn't
relate much to the opera at hand -- was confirmed. It's a Beverly
Hillbillies version, with Laca as Jethro and the Kostelnicka as
Miss Jane Hathaway. But when I ask Kanyova about
some of the most egregious missteps Miller made, I am bowled over
by the assurance with which she plays devil's advocate for the
production. For example, does Miller really believe that Jenufa
goads Laca into slashing her by the way she pinches and pushes him?
(The libretto is ambiguous as to whether it might even have been an
accident, let alone premeditated.) "We left it with the idea that
we're not sure. What I felt below the two characters was this
brother-sister type of relationship. I talked with Jonathan about
showing her as a multidimensional character at that point, that
she's preoccupied with her plight [of being secretly pregnant by
Steva], but on the other hand that she's still a young girl, that
there was something flirtatious and fun. Why would Steva fall for
her? She was very smart, if he cared about that, but she could
probably talk him into anything with her wit. That's the side of
Jenufa I thought maybe the audience should see just a little bit
of. That's what I discussed with Jonathan -- that she can't be
morose the whole time, we have to grow as a character to the end,
to what she ultimately becomes."
The production was poor but not
debilitating. The conducting was something else -- the worst I've
encountered in an ostensibly professional situation. But I felt, as
I often do, admiration for so much that Kanyova's generation of
singers docs. And this time I felt something more -- a paternal
pride in what Kanyova, her Kostelnicka (Elizabeth Byrne, in an
indelible performance, looking like a daguerreotype of a face from
Mount Rushmore) and her Laca (Roger Honeywell) pulled out of thin
air.
The singing life is tough.
Before Kanyova arrived at Cooperstown in June, she had already in
2006 sung a run of Don Pasquale in West Palm Beach, her Constanzes
in Denver and Pat Nixon in Chicago. Is this really what a young
singer bargains for? "I look back on it now, and I think, 'Oh my
God, did I do all that? That's insane.' But I kind of like to be
busy. And even with the chaotic life that we have now, traveling
with two children, we have a kind of mantra that says we will live
one day at a time, enjoy the moment, because the kids grow up so
fast. So with all the craziness of those four productions happening
all at once, we take a lot of tome to sit and enjoy the kids. When
you look back on it, it sounds kind of crazy, but when it’s
happening it isn’t quite as crazy as it seems, because of that
concentration. It just takes a great deal of organization in order
to get the jobs done and the roles learned – and to really say,
‘When I’m home, I’m home,’ and then it doesn’t seem as
frantic.”
Home, theoretically, is Chicago
– where Kanyova, a native of Missouri, was a member of the Lyric
Opera Center for American Artists. Kanyova’s husband, Polish
musician Robert Kania, is head of the piano department as Judson
College in Elgin. The sense of equilibrium Kanyova exudes does not
stem merely from the way she combines the children, from whom
she’s never been apart, with the full-time career. There’s also
the package of fiery acting (it’s more than the fact that she’s a
tiny slip of a thing that makes critics compare her to Teresa
Stratas) added to some real vocal beauty. On Jenufa’s great
despairing Act I call of “nevim,” she added a perfectly
controlled diminuendo to the high C-flat, something I’ve never
heard any other soprano manage, even though Janacek asks for it. So
it’s not surprising that her two other passion cancel each other
out. She’s a devoted runner, yet she’s also over the moon about a
particularly lethal chocolate cake. “One of my dearest friends,
Sarah Swanson, gave me the recipe. When she calls, she’ll say,
‘Oh hey, can I come over?’ And I’ll be like, ‘Well, yeah – and
bring your cake.’ ”
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