Since the late-1980s Luana DeVol has been recognized as one of the great leading-lady voices in Europe. The German opera magazine Opernwelt validated that recognition by twice choosing her as “Singer of the Year.” Such international renown was long in coming, however, and made possible only by leaving the security of a steady job and a comfortable life in her native San Francisco Bay Area. This decision required not only courage but also a conviction that she had a first-class voice. Her determination was eventually rewarded by the acclamation of audiences and confirmation by critics throughout Europe.
As a little girl, however, DeVol had no intimation or inkling of the great singing career awaiting her in Europe. She dreamt of becoming a prima ballerina. Raised in a working-class family in the San Francisco peninsula town of San Bruno, she had only the artistic opportunities that modest means could provide: violin lessons for five years and art classes in high school.
“There was always a love of music in the house,” she say’s of her childhood. “Everyone sang in church choir. Dad had eclectic tastes and I was introduced to Ferde Grofe’s ‘Grand Canyon Suite’ together with Mozart’s ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,’ Stravinsky’s ‘Firebird Suite,’ and last but not least, the fabulous Ella Fitztgerald, but I had no goals about being a professional. Music was fun, a hobby.”
DeVol’s adolescent ambitions had nothing to do with her voice. They ranged from becoming an art student to teaching kindergarten. A high school award for designing a Christmas card gave her six weeks at an art and music camp in Lawrence, Kan. That changed everything. She signed up for five art classes and for a change of pace asked whether she could join the choir. “Probably not,” she was told, because she would have to audition and compete with experienced music students. She passed the audition, however, and at first struggled to learn music her colleagues were sight-reading. For her it was a grueling course, with two concerts to prepare for every weekend—but by the end of those six weeks she was as good as or better than most of her choral colleagues.
“So in those six weeks I actually changed my focus from being an art student to being a music student,” she says. When she returned to high school for her senior year, she auditioned for the choir director, Randy Hunt, (father of mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson). “My dear,” he said, “you should have voice lessons.”
That was the first time anyone had encouraged her to take voice training. She took voice lessons from Donald Stenberg in Burlingame, Calif. and then auditioned for the San Francisco Opera Chorus, which accepted her while she was still a teenager. For several years she was the youngest member of the chorus. During that time she found voice teacher Janet Parlova, with whom she continues to work.
Singing in the opera chorus was just a part-time job while DeVol pursued a college education. After completing her schooling she continued to sing, but spent most of her days earning a living, first at a financial institution, then for the board of directors for the Spring Opera Theater of the San Francisco Opera, and finally for the Paramount Theater in Oakland, where she was first a secretary then an assistant general manager. All the while, she continued to sing.
DeVol left the opera chorus to join the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. She also sang with the Masterworks Chorale of San Mateo College, directed by Galen Marshall, singing everything from Bach to Britten.
“That is when I noticed,” she recalls, “that there were three professional soloists standing next to me and I was the only amateur singer.” A desire to go professional began to gather force within her. While she was attending a performance of a Wagner opera at the San Francisco Opera, suddenly it dawned on her, “I can sing just as well as that person on stage, so why is she up there and I’m here?”
DeVol was well into her thirties when, after a period of serious soul searching, she decided on an all-out effort to make a livelihood from her singing. Because many auditions don’t bear fruit until the next season, she set a time limit of two years to make it happen. Meanwhile, she held on to her regular job. She says she felt, “like a tree, whose trunk has been divided in two and was being pulled in two different directions. I knew that I had to try to be a professional singer first, and if I was not successful at that I would hang up my vocal cords, so to speak, and pursue my career as a theater manager.”
Toward the end of the two-year period, she had achieved a certain degree of success. In 1983 she made her debut in Europe, singing the role of Leonore in Fidelio with the Württembergische Staatsoper in Stuttgart. She performed as Leonore in La forza del destino with the Seattle Opera, and in the title role of Ariadne auf Naxos with the San Francisco Opera, but it was not enough to assure her of a living from singing.
It was part of DeVol’s two-year plan that if nothing big turned up in the United States she would make a last ditch effort by auditioning in Europe. With the cooperation of a supportive boss, Paramount Theater Manager Peter Botto, she arranged for time off in the Fall of 1983 to try her luck in Europe.
DeVol describes this decisive period of her life. “At the end of four weeks I still didn’t have an offer, and I asked Peter if could I stay another two weeks, because I knew this was it. If I didn’t get anything within the next 14 days then I was not going to be a singer. It was tearing me up trying to maintain both aspects of what I was doing: the demands of being a quasi-professional singer with professional standards, and being a professional theater manager. Both were very rewarding full-time careers. I knew that if at the end of the 14 days I didn’t have a contract, the singing would have to go.”
She thinks her height was a handicap in some auditions. “I am an extraordinarily tall woman,” she says. “In one audition, they loved the voice but had contracted a short tenor. For them the height difference would not work.”
“Well, in the real theatrical tradition, it was on the last day before hanging up my vocal cords for good that I got a call from the Aachen Opera House that offered me a two-year contract. I accepted it, went home, worked back at the theater for another eight months, and then hung up my managerial career for a singing career.”
When asked why she was able to succeed so well in Europe in contrast to her attempts in the United States, she says, “Well, number one, in Europe you have many more opera houses and opportunities than you do in the U.S. Secondly, as far as repertoire is concerned, by virtue of age and development I had already gone by the Mozarts, and the Rossinis, and the Donizettis. I was already a full-blown heavier Mozart, Verdi, Strauss, and early Wagner singer when I went to Europe. This is one of the reasons my career took off at the beginning. I was versatile. I could sing a wide variety of roles. I was also in a voice category, jugendlich-dramatisch, that was and is much in demand there. I basically had to go to Europe, because that’s where the opportunities were for me. I wanted to sing in the U.S., but Europe offered the last opportunity for me.”
Once established in Aachen, DeVol’s career began to soar almost immediately. Within her first year, a guest conductor came to Aachen to conduct Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer in which DeVol was singing Senta. In his home theater of Bremerhaven they were planning a new production of Tosca, and they had already auditioned 50 sopranos for the title role. When he heard DeVol sing, however, he called Bremerhaven to say, “I found our Tosca.” Within her second year, she was asked to be a guest performer in the role of Senta in Der fliegende Holländer at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, one of Germany’s major opera houses. A guest contract at the Deutsche Oper Berlin followed.
“Senta and Fidelio were two roles that I sang very often,” she says. “They opened many doors to many theaters at a very, very rapid pace.
“In retrospect Aachen was a perfect place for me to start because I was making the transition at a relatively ripe stage of life to start a new career, from a full-time, sitting-behind-the-desk person to a full-time singer. In Aachen I was single cast and did all of the rehearsals and the performances. . . . It was really more like what we call a staggione system, where you would concentrate on one opera and do many performances of that opera while the next opera or two are rehearsing.”
At long last singing had become DeVol’s full-time occupation. During the second opera of her first season at Aachen, she learned that the director of the Bayreuth Festival, Richard Wagner’s grandson, Wolfgang, would be in the audience.
“I was scared to death,” she remembers. “I was singing my first Senta, my first Wagner role. At the premiere, who’s sitting in the audience but Wolfgang Wagner! I tell you, that was stress! I was just so humbled, and I just wanted to sing it so beautifully for this grandson of the master. So that was pretty scary, but my voice was ready for it.”
Mr. Wagner did remember DeVol’s voice. Seven years later, he asked her to sing the role of Brünnhilde in Siegfried at Bayreuth, the Wagnerian Holy of Holies, with Daniel Barenboim conducting. Soon afterwards Wolfgang Wagner arranged for her to sing Elsa in his production of Lohengrin, conducted by the legendary Guiseppe Sinopoli, at the Taormina Festival in Sicily.
Vocal versatility has always been her strength, but DeVol has been able to sense her voice’s boundaries and allow it time to mature. Younger singers, anxious to rise fast, might take on roles for which their voices are not ready, but DeVol has counted on her intuition to decide when her voice was mature enough to handle a given role.
“When I changed opera houses from Aachen to Mannheim, I started doing more strenuous roles like Strauss’s Kaiserin, but I didn’t go into the dramatic soprano category of singing until several years later. It’s not that I wasn’t asked, but there’s a difference with the Brünnhilde in Siegfried. The tessitura is extremely high and it’s very lyrical. As a jugendlich-dramatisch soprano I had no problem at all singing that role.
“I didn’t have any offers at the time to sing the other two Brünnhilde roles, but I did have an offer to sing Tristan und Isolde. I tried it out and I noticed that my voice didn’t like it. I know that sounds kind of funny, but I noticed my voice didn’t like the low part. I didn’t have, at that point in time, the meat you need on the low part of the register to sing that dramatic Fach well. I could have sung it. I could have forced the voice, but it just naturally did not want to do it, and I was sensitive to that.
“At the same time, I had an offer to do Lady Macbeth. So I learned the role well enough to sing with a pianist, and I noticed my voice didn’t like the sharpness, the angles that are in the role. My voice was still basically a very lyric instrument.”
Nevertheless, over the following years DeVol continued to scale operatic summit after summit. She sang Kaiserin in a new production of Die Frau ohne Schatten staged by the kabuki master Ennosuke Ichikawa. She remembers the premiere in Nagoya, Japan, with the Bayerische Staatsopern orchestra under the baton of Wolfgang Sawallisch, as one of the most memorable events of her career. Then there were performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Maestro Sawallisch, to open his first season as director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and with Lorin Maazel and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks. She performed in Japan again in a concert tour, singing Wagner with Horst Stein and the Bamburg Symphoniker.
In the process, she discovered that her voice had matured enough to take on the hochdramatisch repertoire. As she recalls, “Then the next opportunity for Isolde came, and I sang through it again. It sat perfectly. So I knew then the voice was ready and I accepted.
“The ‘Tristan’ came first. Then came my second Brünnhilde in Die Walküre. The Götterdämmerung didn’t come until a couple of years later. That role debut was at La Scala with Ricardo Muti. My voice needed to grow into those roles, but you have to remember: When I did that, I was already over 50 years old. A lot of people think they’re going to be finished at 50. I was just starting! And here I am and I can sing the Dyer’s Wife in Die Frau ohne Schatten in one evening and the next day I can sing coloratura in Norma.”
Her interpretation of Isolde in Leipzig landed DeVol in a three-way tie with Edita Gruberova and Hildegard Behrens for the Singer of the Year Award in 1997. The magazine Opernwelt grants this distinction according to the consensus of some 50 critics. DeVol won that distinction again in 2000 with a decided victory for her interpretation of Brünnhilde in Götterdämmerung.
Larry Lash, in a May 2002 Andante magazine review of a performance by DeVol, offers this explanation for her remarkable success:
“The big news here was the Brünnhilde of Luana DeVol, singing her first Ring for the Vienna State Opera. This voice is afraid of nothing, and the Heldensopran sailed over every hurdle thrown her way by Wagner, including all the high Cs and trills. After a Walküre filled with steely, youthful insolence, her brief but taxing part in Siegfried was distinguished by golden tone, generous phrasing, and a tender ‘Ewig war ich.’ A touch of vulnerability was allowed to shine through in her duet with Siegfried in Götterdämmerung, but when deceived in the second act, DeVol spat out her vengeance in a flow of fiery vocal lava. She concluded the cycle with a noble, eloquent Immolation Scene filled with rich details, such as the pathos in her ‘Ruhe, ruhe, du Gott.’”
Standing more than six feet tall, DeVol has an imposing even majestic presence on stage. Her innate but cultivated acting skills bring a dramatic passion to her roles. Her ability to create believable characters is one of her great assets.
When asked whether her interpretation and communication of feeling comes naturally or is something that took training, she says, “Perhaps all of the above. My teacher, Janet Parlova, emphasizes, ‘Mean the words.’ That means sing the subtext. I had another teacher, the wonderful heldentenor Jess Thomas. He was a magnificent singer, and I was lucky to have him as a teacher, a friend, and a mentor. He was a wonderful poet on the stage. He colored the words. . . . This, perhaps, was the advantage of all my time in the chorus, standing behind many, many famous singers and picking out the ones that I liked. For example, Leonie Rysanek. Talk about a singer with feeling! She burned, blazed on stage!
“My brother is a former actor, so there’s definitely the ‘ham’ gene in the DeVol family. I do like to act, and I think I have developed over the years what many people say is a unique quality: to be able to make the acting and singing combine into one. I think that’s a very great compliment. I think that is what singers used to do on stage. There’s still a few around, like Jean Cox or Franz Mazura, people who are not singing any more, but I was able to see them perform. I was intrigued by how Leonie Rysanek and Jess Thomas sang so expressively, not only in terms of the music but of the text as well.
“Wagner believed in what we call the Gezamtkunstwerk, or ‘work encompassing all the arts.’ Of course, he himself practiced Gezamtkunstwerk in that he wrote the text, he imagined the scenery, and he created Bayreuth, a place for his unearthly music to be performed. Some of it is so inspired it is just incredible! All of it fits together, and so should the music and the words, but it takes experience. I strived for it when I first started but only after 20 years of hard work am successful. Each time you go out to do a performance, you have a goal to do it better than the time before, and you must seek a new way to express a phrase of music. Your search keeps your audience listening, because they can sense something is going on, musically and expressively. You have to keep working at it.”
Musing about how her career took so long to flourish, DeVol is not bitter or regretful.
“Perhaps I wasn’t ready for it,” she says. “Perhaps I was not meant to be leading this life back then. I think you have to be a bit philosophical. I think you have to be accepting of your fate and where you are in that particular moment, but I can’t say it was a horrible thing not to make it sooner, because what it did for me was allow me to do other things which were also richly fulfilling. Being an assistant theater manager certainly gave me experience on the other side of the footlights, and I know a lot about theaters that other singers don’t have the foggiest idea about.
“I think perhaps it was just not meant to be. It allowed my voice not to be used too early. I was doing other things while the voice was maturing. I was 40 when I started at Aachen and I was ready to go! I was really ready to take on Europe and all the jugendlich-dramatisch Fach which I sang for 12 years until I switched to hochdramatisch.
“My voice was fresh at 40, and my voice and body mature. I was experienced enough to be able to stick up for myself and realize that if I’m really tired and need to protect my health, then I’d better develop a stomach ache and get some rest. Young singers can fall victim to impossible schedules of rehearsals and performances. So for me it ended up beneficial to start my professional career late.”
Finally, DeVol provided her formula for success: “It’s 50 percent very hard work so that you are prepared when opportunity knocks, 25 percent talent, and 25 percent luck.”
