Edoardo Müller loves singers. When you are on stage, he smiles at you as if you can do no wrong-and suddenly, he’s right! Your voice floats out like never before and he beams his pleasure!
Offstage, he is even better as he coaches and gives you cadenzas and ornaments that perfectly suit your voice and temperament and tells you why your particular instrument is so unique and wonderful.
After performances, he and his wife as a team go from performer to performer congratulating them and making sure everyone feels wonderful about the night.
World-famous though Maestro Müller is, the editor of CS doubts there is a single performer the maestro has worked with who feels differently: Edoardo Müller is a singer’s best friend.
On the morning of Tuesday, April 22, 2003, Maria Nockin spoke with Maestro Edoardo Müller over coffee while they enjoyed a panoramic view of San Diego and its harbor from San Diego Opera’s beautifully furnished 18th-floor boardroom.
Maria Nockin: Maestro, how did you begin your career as a conductor?
Edoardo Müller: As sometimes happens, I was preparing an opera for a conductor who did not come, so I had the chance to perform. That happened at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in 1973 with Rossini’s opera Mosé. Georges Pretre was the scheduled conductor. He first asked permission to come one week late, then he asked for two more days and then two more again. Finally he said, “I cannot come.” At that point the management had to decide whether to go on with the production or not. They gave it to me, and it was not too bad…and not too good. (He says with a chuckle).
I learned a great deal about conducting from experience, from watching what conductors were doing. I learned what to do and what not to do. I learned a lot from the bad conductors, not just from the good ones, you understand? (Maestro laughs heartily).
My philosophy is that before art in conducting or singing can take place, a lot of craft time must be put in. By that I mean practice time. You must first know the job. Only then can you fully express your feelings. I see too much of the opposite. I consider myself a different kind of conductor from many other, often very talented conductors, who immediately want to involve everybody with their ideas. They say, “This is my idea, and you have to do this.” It can be great, but it should not be the normal approach to opera. I consider opera production to be teamwork.
What do you do if you do not like what the stage director has in mind?
He also has a right to express his point of view. Sometimes you like what he has in mind and sometimes you don’t, but the first approach must never be to say “no,” because the result of that would be a disaster. If you just can’t agree, then at that point it’s better to leave or to go to the general director of the opera and say, “It’s him or me.”
I am open to change my approach. There is more than one way of doing music, but I must be convinced that the approach suggested to me has some artistic value.
I am generally happy with the productions with which I’m involved. It is a great experience to produce an opera. Sometimes it works very well chemically, and at other times it doesn’t. When one of the singers wants to be the prima donna or primo uomo, the way of working together is not that pleasant.
I also find that I cannot do the exact same thing with two different sopranos. A lot depends on the qualities of a particular voice and its weight. For this reason putting an opera together is a process, and we don’t know at the beginning exactly what the result will be.
Do great singers make great teachers?
Teachers will always tell a pupil to do what they did, because that is their way of singing. If the teacher sang well, he will tell the singer to do good things. Great singers do not always make the best teachers. Tebaldi, for example, tried to teach someone, but then she realized that she was really not able to do that and she stopped. Sometimes comprimario singers have had to conquer problems from which they learned a lot, and as a result they can be excellent teachers.
In order to learn how to sing, technically, it is not enough to get a great teacher, you must also have the right instinct. You must be eager to work hard. You must try to analyze what a given singer does in performance, and why, what he does well and what he does badly. Then you must try things for a short while to see if they work for you.
What can you tell us about working with large voices?
The technical development of a singer has to be taken very seriously. His artistic growth has to be considered as well. If you start with excellent material, a large voice of great quality, there is still no guarantee that the singer will have a great career. It is not enough to focus on just one aspect of a singer’s career. Great singers are complete artists who use their voices as part of their full talent. Their personalities must also be developed.
Working for a few years in a chorus, particularly an opera chorus, helps a lot. You can see what a professional singer does and learn from that. You don’t want to imitate that singer, but to arrive at your own interpretation of the role.
Discovering a great voice is like finding a huge, beautiful pearl. It is a blessing, but the problem is how to use it. It’s a major responsibility to nurture a great voice. There are sacrifices to be made, not just by the singer, but also by the people who have the job of seeing to it that this gifted singer becomes a great artist.
There are techniques that work for one singer and not for another. Finding a singer with a great voice is the greatest blessing you can have. It is extremely difficult, however, to work with this kind of voice without destroying it. When a voice is very big, it takes much more work to produce a finished product. It’s not that people don’t know how to do it, it’s just that it takes much more time and effort than working with a smaller voice.
It can be dangerous to ask a singer with a heavy voice to sing a light role, because instead of that voice developing properly, it may get smaller and the singer’s throat may close. A singer must always have a fully open throat that will let the voice come out in its full richness of harmonics. All the support must come from the diaphragm, the breath. The singer must ignore the fact that he possesses a throat, and that is very difficult.
A conductor usually likes a singer who obeys immediately when he says, “Here, do this little fermata, do this crescendo and do this diminuendo.” For big voices, making an extreme diminuendo is very difficult, so a musician working with a great voice must respect the nature of the singer who possesses it.
You cannot just say, “You must do this and that.” You must try to stimulate him to discover new solutions to the problems of how to sing, how to phrase and how to hit a particular note beautifully. It’s not abstract; you have to work with each singer and his way of singing.
Did you study singing yourself?
No, but I played the piano for many singing teachers when I was young and made some money that way. I heard all the lessons and learned a lot by listening to the advice given by great singing teachers to their pupils. Thus, I developed my own ideas on singing technique.
When you coach singers, you have to sing, and you have to try to see if the singer’s technique is good. I’m proud of the fact that I can give some technical advice, but I always leave the final choice to the singer. I only say, “Why don’t you try this?” or “If you do that, it may be that you will find it a little easier.”
Good Italian pronunciation helps a lot in shaping a beautiful sound. The Italian “a” and “o” are much easier to produce than a German “uh” or an American “uh.” It is fascinating work and I love doing it.
Do singers with large voices always have difficulty recording?
It is very difficult for singers with large voices to make good recordings. The recording industry adores small voices. Recording a big voice is a technical problem and, on the recording, you don’t get all the overtones that you hear in the opera house. Big voices need the open space of the theater, because there the voice goes out and comes back. With the microphone the voice only goes out.
How early should singers begin to sing heavier roles?
It is very dangerous for a young singer to assume a heavy role. For example, I would never recommend that a 24- or 25-year-old sing the role of Norma.
What do you think about Adina Aaron, a lyric soprano, having sung Aida in Busseto?
First of all, that was a very small theater, and all of the singers were more experienced than those in a Young Artists program. It was a unique experience and a big success.
I worked with the tenor Scott Piper who sang Radames in that Aida. He did Nabucco with me in Cincinnati. He has a beautiful voice, but it’s not an Aida voice. He knows it and will not repeat the role. Actually, because of the success in Busseto, they made a tour of bigger theaters, but Scott did not go. He did the TV broadcast, however.
How do you get singers to perform at their best?
Sometimes you learn what not to do. I learned that if a conductor is not good, if he gets hysterical and screams, then the singer is not comfortable and cannot breathe. Then the singer becomes nervous, so the color of his voice and his phrasing are bad. Even if you are nervous, which is often true in our profession, you have to fake it! (Maestro laughs knowingly.) Restrict your tantrums to just one per week! Then people won’t fear you but will respect you instead, and they will know that you have a personality, too. You want to show your own personality, but not too often.
Maestro, should there be an age limit for Young Artists programs?
By age 30, a singer should already be formed. After that it would be difficult to become fully professional. Singers are athletes, and after the age of 30, they no longer have much new territory to work with.
The aim of the Metropolitan’s Young Artists program is to form singers and make them ready to have first-class careers. Unfortunately, they cannot take 200 singers, so if they take someone who is 32, they have to reject one who is 22. There must be a turnover of singers. When a participant is finished and is singing well, opera companies will hire him.
I can speak of this, because for some years I was the director of the La Scala program for young artists. Their cutoff was age 35 for men and 32 for women, but it was not a program for learning how to sing. It taught Italian style and gave the singers a chance to be coached in the great Italian repertoire. Only fully formed singers were accepted, and we did not change their technique. We only worked with their style and attitudes.
The Met program is much larger, much more interesting, because the young artists participate in the life of the company. They can attend the rehearsals of other singers and conductors, and they can observe the workings of the company. The La Scala program was more restricted, but there were interesting exchange possibilities for Russian singers. La Scala sent dancers to the Bolshoi Ballet, and the Bolshoi Opera sent singers to La Scala. We had a bass, Paata Burchuladze, a tenor, Yuri Gegoriam, and a soprano, Marina Mescheriakova.
One of the most important aims of a Young Artists program is to give those young singers who are not rich enough to afford expensive lessons the chance to work with great coaches.
What are your thoughts about passing on operatic traditions?
You hear a lot of bad things about tradition and I agree with many of them, but traditions come about for some reason. The danger is in overdoing them. You must not become a routinier. Even composers at some point accept a little rallentando that is not written. There are documents which show that Verdi accepted different notes, for example, the famous high C in “Di quella pira.” He said that if the tenor had a good C he should use it. I am not a purist; I look for the emotional values in a production, and I don’t necessarily take a strict approach.
How do you contend with all the stress of your profession?
I consider meditation a great way of finding your true personality and learning what is inside of your human soul. We should all meditate sometimes; otherwise our life just passes by. Why do we live? We have much more inside of ourselves than what we use. We are much richer than we know, and each of us could really be a different kind of person.
Playing music is a kind of meditation. When you prepare a show, a production, you organize it, and you also have to do a bit of improvising that is suggested by your personality. Hopefully, you are in tune with the personality of the person singing. There is even an exchange of personalities with the orchestra. This is the ideal way of performing music, not imposing, but always suggesting and keeping track of the response. It is a two way street. That is why I usually have good relations with singers. I love singers, and they feel my attitude toward them.
Tell me about your family.
I have a wife and two grown children in their thirties. My wife, Giovanna Manetti Müeller, was a singer, a soprano, and at one time a pupil of mine. She has an extremely beautiful voice and she won many competitions, but she gave up singing professionally because it is not easy to manage two careers if you want to be a real family. In my opinion one of the careers in a two career family will always have to defer to the other.
