Biting down on my right knuckle, I arrived for my meeting with Aprile Millo an hour ahead of schedule. I was about to meet one of the last champions of Italian opera and my nerves were getting the better of me. The idea of a crooked-toothed kid from Atlanta approaching one of the last of the prima donnas seemed laughable. Yet somehow, I had mustered the courage to meet this great lady.
It all began when I gathered my troops to attend Millo’s performance as Minnie in Puccini’s La fanciulla del West in November of 2004. Those present will testify that we were all part of a wonderful case of mass dementia. To the critics and public, Millo has been a constant reminder of what the glory of Italian opera is all about, but in this performance she went beyond that. More than just providing a window to the glories of the past, she simultaneously delivered a message: “This is what is at stake, and we must protect it.” The sacred fire burned within her, and she set us all aflame.
The ovations, the loudest I have been a part of to date, served as confirmation that we had received the message—and if we needed further translation, Millo later told the New York Times, “Classical music and especially opera need to be defended. It is nothing to be apologized for.”
Needless to say, I made it my business to secure a meeting with this remarkable woman to help deliver her message to a new generation of singers. Thinking of this turn of events, I stumbled upon a flower stand and purchased a bouquet of flowers, which sat on my lap as I awaited Millo’s arrival.
Soon enough, I found myself sitting before one of the most charming, passionate, and down-to-earth human beings I have ever encountered, and our previously arranged 45-minute meeting quickly turned into four hours. I wish it had been longer, but I was attending a performance that night, and Millo practically shoved me into a cab so I would make it in time. As the cab drove away, I looked back and watched her in the early evening light as she became a part of the great miracle that is New York City. Sometimes they don’t know how good they have it.
What events led to your fairy tale debut as Amelia in Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra on Dec. 3, 1984?
The night before, I received word that the singer I was covering wasn’t feeling well. I went to sleep thinking nothing of it, since she was a great and dependable artist. As events would have it, the next morning I was called to arms: The poor folks who took me to a quick rehearsal were crossing their fingers. At the time I was horrible, rehearsing. I shut down and gave nothing, so they thought me very green. I wasn’t, and I said to two of the directors: “It will be less than I want but much more than you expect!”
During my time at the Met, I had developed great friendships. They knew that I loved the “old school” and hoped to be a singer in that tradition. Nina Lawson outfitted parts of my dress from costumes of Tebaldi’s and Milanov’s, and getting the “bocca’l lupo” from my teacher, Rita Patane, and the “Absolutely, you are ready!” from David Stivender was all I needed to hear. I was where I was meant to be from the day I was born.
Sherrill Milnes had rehearsed with me, and he gave me the greatest look of surprise when he saw the confident performer I became that night. The audience too was excited and roared their approval. When the curtain came down, I was thrilled for having failed no one who had believed in me: especially, Jimmy [Levine]. After the formal round of curtain calls, he delayed leaving the stage until I reached him, and just closed the great gold curtain and let me stand there to the roars of the crowd. An unforgettable night!
Critics said your debut marked the return of a singing tradition not heard since the days of Tebaldi and Milanov.
When the first reviews compared me with Milanov, Ponselle, and Tebaldi I was honored. People don’t get reviews like that. I wasn’t copying, but I had been influenced by their great art. People used to go to the theater to hear great singing, style, and individual approaches to the music and roles. I couldn’t, so I went to the recordings of the old school and they put their mark on me from an early age. A large part of the audience expressed their happiness and support at hearing this rare quality and expression. This meant a lot, because my duty is to make the audience feel something.
We are bringing to life a blueprint of the composer, who left his soul in the notes. You must put your soul at its service, find the noblest sound, infuse a truth when possible, and go to a better world for the time you’re on stage. If everything goes well, it is a journey that can transfigure and alter a life forever.
I understand you come from a family of singers.
Yes. Both of my parents were great singers, and I studied exclusively with them. Looking back, I had a golden age in my own house. My father, Giovanni Millo, was a mixture of [Aureliano] Pertile and [Enrico] Caruso, and one of the first singers to appear in televised opera, on NBC. Meeting my mother, Margherita Girosi, brought him to Italy, where he worked with Victor De Sabata. Mom’s voice sounded like Claudia Muzio’s. A ballerina who got polio, she became a singer in Vienna studying with [Maria] Jeritza. The last role she taught me was Minnie in La fanciulla del West, and sadly, [it was] the last thing she heard me sing.
Other than my parents, I worked with Rita Patane (an expressive soprano who had studied with Maria Carbone), and David Stivender, the chorus master at the Met. Today, my vocal guardian is Bill Schuman, a brilliant teacher who studied with Luisa Franceschi-Verna, herself a student of [Arturo] Melocchi and [Luisa] Tetrazzini.
How did you transition from student to professional singer?
I was lucky to have sung for Larry Stayer, who convinced me at 23 to be a part of the Young Artist Program at the Met. In the meantime, I auditioned for Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who took me to Von Karajan. After hearing me, he literally put his head in his hands and snapped: “You are not an apprentice!” With their help, I made my European debut in Karslruhe as Aida and at La Scala as Elvira in Ernani.
When I returned to the Met, I began to doubt if things were working out for me in the Young Artist Program, until Jimmy Levine asked to speak with me in his office. This proved to be the meeting that changed my life.
“You have a rare voice and you can put your stamp on a whole period of history here. Give me this period in your life to prepare for a big future, and I will make you the Verdi soprano of this house.”
I wasn’t stupid. James Levine is the salvation of Italian music and the closest thing we have today to Tullio Serafin. I trusted his incredible instinct and did as he instructed. I made my Met debut with him at 26, and 23 years later still represent the great traditions for the Italian Wing in that gorgeous historic house.
As a developing artist did you struggle to master any aspect of your voice?
The very early voice was a mezzo, with a warm and beautiful middle, if I may say. Not until seventh grade did I become interested in coloratura. I became very smitten with a handsome young man who loved Joan Sutherland, so we would sit for hours running scales, going up to high Ds and E-flats. In the process, I became enamored of the Bel Canto period.
Later on, I became good friends with Louise Caselotti, one of Callas’ great friends during her early career. I would spend a lot of time at her apartment in order to hear all the stories. In the process, Louise taught me all the coloratura tricks that Callas had learned in those early days. Skills like “the goat,” and how to make the transition for all the notes.
“The goat?” Like the animal?
Yes! It’s the coloratura technique that you hear when Callas sings, say, the chromatic scale at the end of “Casta Diva.” You can hear every single note on a puff of air but still within a legato gesture. It gives you a facility that is unheard of, which I used whenever I had the honor of singing Il trovatore, Luisa Miller, or Il pirata.
We’re not used to big voices singing florid music nowadays. Sadly, young singers find themselves being discouraged from developing a large sound.
People don’t know what to do with young dramatics, for the most part. The course here, and around the world, dictates that vocal conservation for young voices is in Mozart. This is one of the most difficult and exacting disciplines in music for the voice, and you must have a voice for Mozart. Most teachers will know what I mean by that.
So restricting a larger voice to adhere to Mozartian discipline in the early days may steer bigger voices the wrong way?
It all depends on the kind of voice. Mozart is for a master. Bel Canto is what should be everyone’s first association with music. Singing the even lines and legato, pure tones, and homogenous quality required for Bel Canto is medicine for the voice. I find this best for keeping baby spintos and tenors in a discipline that allows them to grow without breaking their spirits or taxing their young throats.
This allows for a beautiful transition, a healthy sense of line and legato, and encourages “on the breath” singing, which is nowadays asked for—but what I hear in some is a lazy vowel. The young ones rely on using the muscle to “push” it out, and when their youth ebbs they literally cannot sing. So “on the breath” singing is the salvation, and allows the voice to grow along normal lines for a future in Verdi and possibly even Wagner.
What does the term Bel Canto mean to you?
It developed in Italy in the late 16th century. Castrati and later all voices had to adhere to an expectation and display of technique. More athletic to begin with, Marchesi and Garcia aimed to find how the freest sound could be emitted from a human throat, producing a perfectly homogenous sound with no visible interruptions in color or fluidity. The training began as vocal scales meant to encourage a type of “beautiful singing,” and evolved into a total expectation from the composers who wrote with this criterion in mind.
The music written by Bellini, Rossini and Donizetti managed the informed and emotional approach to the music—a display of prowess wed to a melancholy. The search was for beauty and technical display rather than volume, all bound by recitativo, cavatina, da capo with invention, and then cabaletta. This evolved into what I like to call the veristic Bel Canto of Verdi.
The early Verdi operas are models of true Bel Canto. Lower voices existed in the Bel Canto period . . . [they] were even lower and considered mezzo, but subdivided into alto, contralto, and contraltino (usually considered the tenor). Today, the schools are confused and sometimes make bad decisions for their students.
Along with Bel Canto, the term “Verdi soprano” is sometimes overused. Is there such a thing?
Verdi requires a Bel Canto voice capable of thrusting past a more layered orchestra and encompasses a complete, lyrico-spinto soprano with agility, adept at handling the very contrasting requests of his declamatory phrases and cantilenas, while wed to moments of the most lyric and piano of expressions.
My teacher, Bill Schuman, tells me that his teacher, Luisa Franceschi-Verna, had a student who possessed a wonderful, dark-quality voice, the type one would think perfect for Trovatore. She started singing Trovatore, and Luisa comes screaming out of the back room: “What’s the matter with you? You don’t have the right-colored voice to sing this!” The old school took it all very literally: “You don’t sing Verdi if you don’t have a Verdi voice.” Some young singers darken their sounds unnaturally, which is disaster. Sing with your voice!
You developed strong friendships with Renata Tebaldi and Magda Olivero. Did you also study roles with them?
Yes. With Magda, I discussed Tosca, Adriana Lecouvreur, and hopefully, soon Manon Lescaut. Magda is very special. The voice is very unique, with a soul and expression that were admired even by the composers who heard her sing their music. Her ability to go from the very piano and take it to forte, married with the understanding of the word, is riveting. She is an amazing artist and a lovely friend.
I met Renata briefly before my debut in Europe by introduction of Carl Battaglia and later with Eugene Kohn. She agreed to work with me, and I was greatly honored to be the first person she ever trained. I worked with her first on Andrea Chénier, then Otello, and later “Forza.” The last conversation I had with her was regarding “Fanciulla.” She enjoyed singing that role tremendously, and thought that I would be splendid in it.
I agree! I was part of the audience that night at Carnegie Hall when you revealed your Minnie to the world. It remains among the great nights at the opera for me.
Thank you so much. That night, I was singing for my mother, who was in the final stages of her brave battle with cancer. She had always wanted me to sing this role, and used to say: “You are Minnie. You have this warmth and this sweetness. You don’t know how pretty and special you are!” I wanted to sing it for her, and as fate would have it, “Fanciulla” was the last opera she would hear me sing.
She sat in the third row, dressed like Lohengrin in a beautiful complé [ensemble] of silver, and thinking only of her I became completely unafraid and put my heart into everything I sang. And then, after the orchestra signaled the end of the second act, following the “Tre assi e un paio,” the roof came off. It was one of the most exciting things, because, you know, when you give your all, then, to hear the public go crazy.
At the end of the night, I threw my flowers to her, and the audience gave her a big ovation. To have my mother meet the applause for the last time marks that as a legendary show for me. There was a friend of mine in the audience yelling so loudly he subsequently lost his voice for about two months. Afterwards he told me: “We can’t thank you enough for what you did that night. You have the courage to release everything that you were feeling, all the emotions that you had, with that beautiful Italian sound.”
He’s right: The world is always telling us to not make sound, that we have to look a certain way, that we cannot do this or that, to not stand out. But that night, the audience felt the great emotions of Puccini’s girl, felt the rapture of great music, and they erupted. They felt great joy, and unafraid, responded to my emotion. It was such a victory.
The operatic atmosphere we’re living in today focuses too much on pushing visual innovation towards the forefront, frequently to the detriment of the work at hand. How do you handle yourself when faced with productions of this nature?
I leave or I make them change it, if possible. I recently took part in a production in France where the stage was made of rubber. The smell of petroleum was so unbearable that it literally took your voice away.
The famous tenor scheduled for the entire run of 16 performances sang only 7 and complained bitterly about the scent. I spoke loudly in rehearsal about the idiocy of having a staging rank [as] more important than the health of the singers, and I’m sure made myself very unpopular. I succumbed to the smell after only one performance.
I worry that directors are using opera as a means of getting any work at all and they inflict on these masterpieces their unique “visions.” Nothing is allowed to be what it is. The big, unwashed masses are supposedly bored and will come only if motorcycles ride alongside the Nile for Aida. Opera will survive these rampant egos run amok, but it will take some time.
The other concern nowadays centers around a singer’s girth.
It is a real dilemma today. People are casting more for the look than the quality and correctness of the instrument. They want a Stradivarius in the body of a ukulele. One doesn’t have to be obese, but it does take a bit of weight to support the larger repertoire. Opera must go forward but remain authentic, and ultimately, my loyalty is to the composer, not the camera or the recording mic. One prays that the people doing the casting remember the core audience, otherwise you will find voices ruined because they deceived themselves into the wrong repertoire. Looking the part doesn’t provide protection, and there’s no getting past roles being sung by voices too small to fill them.
I understand the move to encourage people to attend opera by filming and broadcasting the great art to places unable to enjoy it first-hand. I tend to think of it as a sample of what it would be like to experience it live in the theater. That is where opera is at its full seduction, the victory of a human being standing on stage with 100 or more people singing over an 80-piece orchestra in front of 4,000 people, all without a mic. It remains the last bastion of unplugged human communication.
How has your voice changed throughout your career?
The voice is larger now but has stayed fresh, thanks to having spaced my performances well. The natural progression of my kind of voice at my age is to branch off into verismo. It isn’t that the Verdi is not there. I just want to sing verismo with a fresh, young voice. I hope that, like Milanov’s, my voice retains its natural height as I grow old. Even she said, “I think you’re going to sing for a very long time because you sing very well and you don’t go outside your box. Where you will have trouble is emotionally.” She was right. Because of a little less stage time, nerves come into play more than before, and have made the piani for which I am famous not as easy to do. You need to be on stage in front of the beast with all your courage intact, because fear is the worst thing for a singer.
Take Callas. She said nothing she ever did was without nerves. She felt every performance was a very noble battle. I saw one of those comeback recitals she did, and I’ve never seen that kind of a power and charisma from an artist trying to seduce a very divided audience. Yet her desire to express something to you from within her was so great, you forgot the earthly things around you, and you didn’t want to move until she had finished her expression. The piano would finish, she would stop singing, but her hands would still be moving to extend the impact of her final gesture. No one moved. It became a journey, something bigger than the opera experience altogether, and she won. I loved her.
A similar thing happened when Leonie Rysanek was on stage. She sang, in the first Wagner experience that I had, as Elisabeth in Tannhäuser, and when she came out to sing “Dich, teure Halle,” it was no longer an aria. This was a woman exulting in a memory of her lover’s voice in that room, a room that had held the man she adored.
I had always thought that Wagner was very layered and magnificent music that I didn’t necessarily understand, until she started singing it. And at the end of the “Allmächt’ge Jungfrau,” she began to exit upstage, yet instead of getting smaller, she got bigger as she walked away because she was depicting the growth in stature of the soul of Elisabeth, her transfiguration, portrayed in this optical illusion brought off by total commitment, acting even with her back. The audience was aware of what was happening, and was drenched with emotion by the time she left.
Would you say that this sort of magic is missing today?
That, and a sense that singers should be unafraid of the spotlight. Everyone today is taught not to want it: “I’m singing, don’t look!” Diva is now an earthly term, signifying no mantle of divinity but an ordinary person singing. They become media stars with scandals and controversy, yet little music is ever discussed. Stars used to know their worth and make you feel special just by hearing the amazing gifts they had.
In 2001, I was part of a memorial gala dedicated to one of my first agents, the legendary Nelly Walter. I have enough of a sense of grandness when I sing, and I believe God is present in the gift I am able to share, but that afternoon the best example of humble but assured knowledge of one’s gift was given by the great Leontyne Price. She walked on stage knowing that she had the most gorgeous instrument to share with you—and there was this unabashed sense of: “I am presenting to you the very precious and rare. Be present and receive.” And it’s not arrogance at all. She knew her blessing, and you knew that you were in the presence of greatness. She brought it all, in memory of Nelly, who had been her first and greatest champion, and she had not forgotten. There she was, everything that she represented, still glowing in her throat like a ruby. That’s what’s missing today.
You have established a great career in this difficult profession. With success, however, come sacrifices and compromises. Do you regret anything?
My only great sadness so far is not having had children. I assume for now, turning 50 this year, my children will have to be the operas I have served. They are my lovers, too. I literally went from high school to the stage, and so I missed having a private life. New York has watched me grow up.
My early press lauded me as a rare and great voice that would be of significantly important service to the Italian repertoire all over the world. I [will] have been [singing] for 25 years in 2009. I even took time away from the stage to find out what it was all about to have a private life, but found it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
Life is an adventure. People are divinity. Not everything is rose-colored glasses. We are at war, yet people say opera plots don’t make sense. Art itself must compromise to exist, which makes me very afraid. Yet in every dark corner there is hope. The master painter gives us dark to see the light and light to see the dark in a painting.
A person’s heart and soul is sacred. Their pursuit of what makes them “ring” and “sing” is their divine right. My acceptance of them rests in the brilliance of their smile or the gleam in their eye, not how much money or power they have. My service to this tapestry is to give it some extra color, nuance, and a sense of magic. That is what opera has brought to my life: a sense of magic. I will be forever humble to God for that blessing.
