On Dec. 6, my mother, Regina Resnik, will celebrate the 60th anniversary of her Metropolitan Opera debut. It is a Cinderella story that blossomed into one of the longest and most varied careers in opera and the performing arts: as a leading dramatic soprano, leading mezzo-soprano, stage director, filmmaker, musical theatre star, co-producer and narrator of her own concert series, and—for the last 20-plus years—coach and master class teacher. In honor of this special anniversary, we were pleased to cull my mother’s seemingly endless experiences into a wide-ranging article for Classical Singer, focusing on a topic of great concern to her: the future of the young singer.
“I feel very deeply for the young singer,” said Regina Resnik, on a short break last summer from her duties as musical director and master teacher of the Eurobottega, a performance preparation program for young singers of the European Union, based in Treviso, Italy. “It’s a question of guidance,” she said. “The young singers today are floating. There was a time when someone was there, breaking the waves for you. That person understood you and your voice, and what you were about. Today’s world is a little more removed—and far less caring.”
How does a singer prepare for a career? As vital and articulate as ever, Ms. Resnik painted several broad arcs of comparison between her own beginnings and those of the thousands of singers trying to make careers today—yet she summed it up under one huge umbrella: “It’s a question of time,” she said.
Ms. Resnik doesn’t necessarily blame the conductors, the managers, the teachers, or the young singers for the current state of affairs. It’s the prevailing economic and artistic climate. Money is tight, rents are high, lessons are expensive, and many opera companies and young artist programs are seeking younger and younger talent. “God only knows why,” she said. “Maturity breeds longevity.”
“Everything has to be done in a rush, with the fear that not doing the audition means someone else will get the contract. That means singers have cut away the big word, which is ‘time,’” she continued. “When I was coming up in the singing world, there was a great deal more attention paid to the study of learning your craft than making money. Now it seems to be the reverse. Maybe it has to be that way. Eighty percent, perhaps, of all the people I have taught have to support themselves, have to take a job in order to pay for their lessons, and that’s not necessarily a part-time job. There are people who have to take full-time work because the career is hard, and they require extra time and extra backing.
“Unless you have the good fortune to come into a big scholarship program where you’re protected, it’s difficult, very difficult, because time is not on the side of learning your craft when one is spread out and working outside one’s chosen field to make a living.
“My parents—who were émigrés without any education—didn’t have any money, but made great sacrifices for my education. I was living at home. I did not have to support myself or bring food to the table. They weren’t sacrificing for my singing—they were sacrificing for my education.
“That meant taking advantage of what the New York Board of Higher Education was offering to those qualified: free tuition to the major city universities for a broad-based education,” Ms. Resnik continued. “Many of the singers who were coming up were not products of universities, with degrees in vocal performance or doctorates in music.”
Ms. Resnik turned down a scholarship to Juilliard and entered Hunter College at age 15, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in music education. But teaching would come to Ms. Resnik much later in life. Instead, she was catapulted into operatic stardom by substituting on short notice in two major Verdi roles—first as Lady Macbeth, with the New Opera Company in December 1942, and then as Leonora in Il trovatore, at the Met in December 1944.
Ms. Resnik says she was prepared for these other major assignments thanks to the time her teachers and mentors made available to her during her intensive formative training, which was concurrent with her Hunter years.
“I believe the time to prepare was uppermost in the minds of those people teaching and coaching me during the war and the post-war periods, as well as in the minds of many agents and managers who were then discovering the American singer,” she said.
The coaches and conductors “breaking the waves” for Ms. Resnik included what she calls “the greatest roster of talent in the world,” the European expatriates who shaped American classical music-making in the 1930s and 1940s: Fritz Busch, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Fritz Reiner and William Steinberg, among others.
Ms. Resnik’s manager for 37 years, William L. Stein, was a devoted, knowledgeable “private” representative who ran his own agency. “He didn’t care about the commission for the job; he cared whether that voice would last the following year.” She also speaks highly of the Met’s general manager, Canadian tenor Edward Johnson, who is credited with encouraging the rise of the American singer in the late ‘30s and ‘40s. Johnson guided Ms. Resnik’s Met career from 1944 until his retirement in 1950. “He cared for me as one of his children,” she said.
Add to this list two indomitable American spinsters—both “taskmasters,” as Ms. Resnik put it—her first voice teacher, Rosalie Miller, and an acting teacher and coach, Enrica Clay Dillon. Ms. Resnik credits these two women with having shaped her voice and body into the person who got onstage and sang for the next 50 years. Their precepts remain central to Ms. Resnik’s teaching today.
“The biggest part of your instrument is your body,” said Ms. Resnik, “not only your vocal cords. The biggest part of a car is the chassis. The rest is how you learn to drive it.”
Recalling her early studies, she said, “Rosalie taught me the meaning of discipline and punctuality. To land in her studio at 7:15 a.m., to be ready to sing at 7:45, three times a week, and be in class at Hunter at 9 a.m.—and I came from the Bronx in those days by subway. That took a good 50 to 55 minutes.
“There was no such thing as warming up, because I warmed up in my lesson—and we’re talking beginning at 15 years of age,” Ms. Resnik continued. “There were 15 or 20 minutes of technique, then at every lesson there had to be an art song and an aria. She pulled out arias, scenes and Lieder programs that nobody sang at the time.
“I cannot emphasize enough the importance of art song that Rosalie instilled in me. What is an art song? It is a three-minute challenge of who you are in relation to the composer and the poet. Art song is who you are as an artist.
“It’s a great challenge to be able stand in front of a concert public and interpret a piece by being completely faithful to the composer in the space of three minutes. And that is one of the greatest lessons learned, far more than singing an aria or a scene. On the concert stage, you are at one with Schubert; you’re not necessarily playing a character. The revival of the art song is extremely important for the singer and equally important for the public.
“By 24 years of age,” she continued, “I had four complete concert programs that I sang all over the country, and there was an audience for it. People listened to a completely classical program—no crossover, no Broadway. Fortunately, we are re-creating that audience for art song. I am now insisting in the work I do, whether I’m preparing operas or not, that there is always art song in the course of study.”
What were the other lessons the young soprano learned? She was taught to listen extensively, not only to her contemporaries, but to the artists of the past. One of these, who became an idol to Ms. Resnik, was Rosa Ponselle.
“I remember asking Rosalie Miller if she could explain to me clearly the word ‘legato.’
“‘Go out and find “O Nume tutelar” from La vestale, sung by Ponselle,’ she said. ‘Come back and tell me what you think legato is.’
“So I came back and I said, ‘What I hear is beauty with no spaces.’ And she said, ‘That’s pretty good. Now, how do you effect no spaces?’ And I said, ‘Carry my breath through both the consonants and vowels and don’t close my throat to pronounce.’ And she said, ‘You’ve just given yourself a definition of legato, so try it.’ I did, and that’s what I teach.”
Rosalie Miller’s discipline about training the whole instrument was not confined to her own studio. “The other part of her discipline—which I find phenomenal in retrospect—was her insistence that, one summer, I study with Enrica Clay Dillon for stage deportment,” said Ms. Resnik. A singer-turned-dramatic coach, Ms. Dillon was one of three sisters in the performing arts. (Another had been married to actor Clark Gable, and the third was a composer.) Enrica Clay Dillon also founded the Deertrees Theater in Maine in 1936. It served first as a playhouse, then as a maverick venue for training young singers and producing regional opera.
“Ms. Dillon was the other kind of taskmaster, a physical taskmaster,” Ms. Resnik said. “That summer, she corrected my walk, taught me how to walk as a baby, as a young lady, an old woman, [how to] sit down in a comic vein, sit as a princess, taught me concert manners and comportment. If everyone took that course, he or she could never sit down improperly on a stage. It was a book of rules on how you move on the stage, and it was the simplest instruction. And—importantly—you couldn’t do what she said without your posture being perfect and your breathing being right. As a result, from age 15 until the time I walked onstage at age 20, I had a basis for thinking what my body is behind my voice.”
Both women also taught Ms. Resnik that, “when you do a role, you read the words first as a play, so that you know what it is you’re about to perform. You don’t go to the music first.” They also encouraged her to research the background of the piece, to learn what was happening in the country where the action takes place, and why the author’s prose is correct for the composer in the context of its time. “All this was taught me and I’ve kept it all my life.”
Finally, Rosalie Miller taught Ms. Resnik the key repertory that she would soon parlay into a startling operatic debut.
“She was very ambitious and thought there was nothing I couldn’t do. She prepared everything I did and I was always prepared,” Ms. Resnik said. “She tried everything with me. Many things were successful, many things were left out, but the idea that a 19-year-old would learn the entrance aria of Lady Macbeth [“Vieni, t’affretta”] was unheard of at the time, and it was a great surprise for people who heard it.”
Ms. Resnik’s rendition of the daunting aria impressed Maestro Fritz Busch, the music director of the New Opera Company of New York, and she earned a contract for December 1942. Ms. Resnik thought she was to be in the chorus of Verdi’s Macbeth, but Busch, to her great surprise, asked her to understudy the role of Lady Macbeth.
Here, again, Ms. Resnik credits the preparation she acquired for the role, not only from her voice teacher, but from the incredible battery of talent the New Opera Company had engaged to prepare the artists. Busch, a renowned Mozart conductor at Glyndebourne who had also conducted the world premieres of Richard Strauss’ Intermezzo and Die Aegyptische Helena, was, in Ms. Resnik’s words, “a great conductor and a great man.” The Macbeth staff also included the stage director, the conductor’s son (Hans Busch, later the opera stage director at Indiana University), Italian diction coach Evelina Colorni (later the author of a seminal textbook on that subject), and the eminent rehearsal conductor and coach Walter Ducloux (a musical associate of Arturo Toscanini and later co-founder of the Austin Lyric Opera). In addition, the company had engaged the great Czech director Lothar Wallenstein to work with the young artists on stage movement, and Macbeth in particular.
“Not one stage director, but two!” recalled Ms. Resnik. “It was a dream situation, and I didn’t have to pay for it, which was fortunate, because neither my parents nor I had any money. Today we would consider it an embarrassment of riches, but this is why I was completely prepared.
“It was quite a long shot that on a Friday afternoon, Florence Kirk [who had been scheduled to sing the role] would be indisposed for the Saturday matinee. I had never imagined I would actually have the chance to sing Lady Macbeth.”
That was Dec. 5, 1942. The New Opera Company, which Ms. Resnik called, “a fine company that did two spectacular seasons,” did not last, but in the summer of 1943 Ms. Resnik went on to appear as Leonore in Fidelio in Mexico City, conducted by the great Erich Kleiber (father of the equally great, late Carlos Kleiber). She then sang in the debut season of the New York City Opera (spring, 1944) as Frasquita, Micaëla and Santuzza. At the same time, Lady Macbeth was again Ms. Resnik’s calling card when she won the Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air. She was awarded a contract to make her debut with the Met as Santuzza that following December.
They say that lightning never strikes twice, but it did on another cold December day in 1944, when the 22-year-old Ms. Resnik received a call, four days before her scheduled debut, to replace no less than Zinka Milanov the following night as Leonora in Il trovatore, another role Ms. Resnik had never sung. Again, she was an overnight success. She went on to sing her scheduled Santuzza and her first Aida (this last a rare student-matinee broadcast on a Friday afternoon). Three roles in her first nine days at the Met—prepared.
This experience and her success notwithstanding, when the prospect arose of singing the Fidelio Leonore at the Met (in English, in deference to a prevailing wartime sentiment against the German language), conductor Bruno Walter treated the young artist as if she had never done the role, which turned out to be the greatest guidance she could have received.
“I had great preparation in Mexico City with Kleiber, where we did the music in German and the dialogue in Spanish,” explained Ms. Resnik, “but Bruno Walter was concerned about my singing the role at the Met at 22 years of age. Although I had sung the three Italian parts, Walter felt that Fidelio was a whole other level of difficulty and maturity, and asked me to work on it with him personally.
“For two months, January and February 1945, I was at the piano with Bruno Walter, in his apartment. He played and I sang, and, working with him, I began to understand the responsibility I had of singing Leonore at the Met.”
Walter and Edward Johnson agreed that, “I would do the Sitzprobe [orchestra rehearsal with singers but without staging] and the first orchestra dress onstage, out of costume. If they found me comfortable and I was comfortable, then I would be able to do the role.” She was comfortable, and she did the role, including the now-historic Fidelio broadcast of March 17, 1945, and a second series of performances in the 1945-46 season.
While she was studying with Walter, he recommended she study a new role, Sieglinde, with the conductor William Steinberg, who was then living in Larchmont, N.Y., free-lancing and guest conducting the NBC Symphony. According to Ms. Resnik, Walter called Steinberg and said, “There’s a young singer here, and you’re looking for a Sieglinde in Mexico City. You should hear her, and if you like her, she should study the role with you.”
Steinberg did like her, taught her the role, and engaged her for his Die Walküre in Mexico City that summer, with Helen Traubel as Brünnhilde and Set Svanholm as Siegmund. Ms. Resnik went on to sing Sieglinde at the Met and in Bayreuth.
Ms. Resnik cites other examples of the right person or persons teaching her the right roles at the right times, notably, perhaps, the French conductor Jean Morel. Ms. Resnik asked Morel to teach her Carmen, the role that became her signature role as a mezzo-soprano and which she sang more than 500 times.
“My decision was correct,” she said, because the last Carmen I sang at the Met, more than 25 years later, was Jean Morel’s Carmen.
“‘Don’t take anything for granted simply because Carmen is so well known,’” she recalls Morel saying about the role. “‘Go back to the score each time’—which I did.
“It’s this kind of advice, this nurturing I had, which I don’t think exists anymore. When they heard me sing, Bruno Walter, Steinberg and then Klemperer all said, ‘No, don’t study that role with anyone else, come study it with me.’ They didn’t talk about money. They had time, and I had time. Without them, I am not sure I would have been able to climb the artistic ladder as I did.
“How many conductors today have time? Very, very few.”
One more major personality would ultimately mentor Ms. Resnik into the next, and arguably the finest, stage of her career: her career as a mezzo-soprano. Giuseppe Danise had been a pre-eminent baritone in the Golden Age of singing. He was, in fact, Don Carlo the night in 1918 that the 19-year-old Rosa Ponselle made her Met debut as Leonora in La forza del destino; Caruso was Don Alvaro. By the late 1940s, when Ms. Resnik first knew him, Danise was long retired from singing, but was widely respected as the mentor/teacher (and husband) of the Brazilian soprano Bidu Sayão, many years his junior.
When Ms. Resnik had to learn the role of Donna Anna in Don Giovanni on six weeks’ notice—at the San Francisco Opera in 1947—she asked for help from Danise, who was there with Sayão (who was singing Zerlina). Danise said no. Ms. Resnik was hurt. When she asked why, the bald, imposing Danise said, somewhat cryptically, “One day you’ll understand.”
By 1954, Ms. Resnik had found a sound in her voice that she liked and wanted to use: a darker, rounder middle and lower voice. It had always been there, but Rosalie Miller had always discouraged the soprano from using it. By that time, roles such as Sieglinde and Santuzza had acquainted her with that rich middle voice; she had also been singing Carmen since 1945. In addition, Rudolf Bing, who became the Met general manager in 1950, had already experimented with Ms. Resnik in roles sung by both sopranos and mezzos, such as Venus in Tannhäuser, and a single performance of a mezzo role, Princess Eboli in Don Carlo.
Ms. Resnik was still singing high soprano repertory—she was a popular Rosalinda in Die Fledermaus at the Met—and had all the notes, but something wasn’t sitting right. Again, she turned to Danise. Still imposing, seemingly severe, but this time willing, Danise put her through a week’s paces in her soprano repertory, purposely choosing the arias with all the pitfalls. On the seventh day, God rested, but Danise did not, and asked Resnik to come back again—not to sing, but to listen.
“You never were a soprano,” he told her. “You were born a mezzo-soprano, and you always were one—but with a superb extension.” Three-and-a-half octaves, in fact.
Ms. Resnik wept, she said—but it was the only time she would ever cry in front of Danise. When she had dried her tears, she decided to pursue further the idea of studying with him. Prophetically, he said, “Keep Carmen. Put aside everything else.” That meant 22 roles, learned and sung over 13 years. “We’ll start with a new role: Amneris.”
It was, perforce, a painful, but not unfriendly separation from Rosalie Miller, who, to her dying day, believed that her star pupil was still a soprano. Ms. Resnik and Danise worked for a year. In the summer of 1955, she made her “second” debut: as Amneris at the Cincinnati Opera.
The next 20 years were, she said, “her great years”—in Vienna, Covent Garden, San Francisco, Paris, Hamburg, as well as the Met—as the foremost Carmen of her generation, in the great Verdi mezzo parts (Amneris, Eboli, Azucena), and in three parts that, along with Carmen, became her signature roles. Her portrayals of these three roles have become the standards of comparison ever since: Klytemnestra in Elektra, the Countess in <i.The Queen of Spades, and Mistress Quickly in Falstaff.
“Danise was my last taskmaster,” Ms. Resnik recalled with obvious respect. “It took nerve on my part to weather my crisis and make that change, but again, as in the beginning, I had support and great guidance. My manager was with me all the way. I had my same coaches. They were all knowledgeable. How many Danises are there today, perceptive and interested enough to take a voice of enormous range and corral it where it should be?”
All too often, she said, a soprano is categorized as a mezzo because she hasn’t found the way to the upper part of her voice, or a lyric tenor is bumped up one Fach because there is simply a dearth of spinto or dramatic tenors.
“It’s the color and quality of the voice that gives its name, not the range, and it’s the quantity of sound that will determine the repertory,” Ms. Resnik emphasized.
There was no doubt about the color and quality of the “new” voice she had found. It was a deep, amethystine mezzo of unique timbre, with a brilliant high voice reminiscent of her former soprano days.
“At the time,” she recalled, “I was in my early 30s, and Danise said, ‘If you make this change and keep your nerves, the wine in the barrel will be the best between age 45 and 55.’”
That may have held true for Regina Resnik in 1955, but what about for singers in 2004?
“Danise’s counsel, wise as it was, was based on the Golden Age of singing, which was already over by the time I began. It may no longer be true today,” Ms. Resnik said. “Many voices today are burned out at 40, not because they’re singing too much, but because they’re not given the proper chance to sing when they’re 30. The general age of singers who are still studying and have not gone into a career yet is older than when I was singing: 28, 29, 30, 31.
“I can safely say that many singers whom I hear in that age group are not completely prepared, yet come to a master class with an aria that is quite advanced. When I ask about a Bellini song, or arie antiche—something that has style and a line but doesn’t overly tax the voice, the singers say, ‘What’s that?’ or ‘Why?’
“I tell them, ‘Everything has a beginning, and you’re trying to be at the middle or the end. What happened to the ABCs?’ And if they trust me and my experience—and some do—they follow my suggestion to find the book of Mathilde Marchesi or Manuel Garcia exercises for the voice, and I show them.
“This important missing step in the singer’s study is very problematic, because if a singer has reached a certain age and hasn’t made it, the managers and opera companies think that singer can’t have a career.
“I also encourage singers to revive a wonderful word, which seems to have fallen out of the dictionary, and that is tradition. I’ve had a few experiences in master classes and young artist programs, when I’ve asked, ‘Whom have you heard singing this piece?’ The student names only the most recent recording—by which I mean one made in the last three or four years. When I mention an artist whom they should have heard singing that particular style—and I’m not talking about Ponselle or Caruso, but rather someone from the last 20 years—I sometimes get a blank stare. I say, ‘Try to find an older recording and we’ll listen to it together, and I’ll show you what I mean by style.’”
Ms. Resnik is in great demand as a master class teacher and coach for special projects. In Italy, in addition to the Eurobottega and the Toti Dal Monte International Competition, she has her own well-known course in singing, also based in Treviso. In North America, in the 2004-05 season, Ms. Resnik’s host institutions include: The Mannes School (where she is a master-teacher-in residence), Northwestern University, Indiana University, the Canadian Opera Company and the Glenn Gould School of Music. But in some of her previous master class work, financial exigencies have led to shorter engagements.
“When I first started doing master class work, there was no period that was under two weeks, and it usually centered on a project—an opera, a particular concert or a song cycle. In a period of two weeks, an artist sang one day, studied the next. Singers were divided into study groups, and at some point, everyone listened to everyone.
“Today, that almost doesn’t exist. For lack of funds, master teachers are brought in for shorter periods of time. We want to offer guidance, but we really are not at our best in that short a period of time.”
Ms. Resnik recalled that one of her first master class engagements, in 1977, was to coach Carmen at the University of Iowa. “That had great value. We had a single thought—that opera—with cuts, with dialogue, but not three days of 20 different arias, which you cannot coach in depth. That’s not really the way to teach, and it’s not really the way for the student to learn.
“In the United States, at Mannes, I am given one project to coach for a period of several weeks, or even more. In Europe, at the Eurobottega and the Toti Dal Monte Competition, the singers compete for roles in an opera to be produced in major houses and festivals. If they win and are cast, preparing the role with me is part of the award. This year, the opera for the Eurobottega was Albert Herring. The opera of the Toti Dal Monte Competition was Il Barbiere di Siviglia; in 2005 it will be Don Pasquale. That’s the real way to work on a project. Then, hopefully, the student can reap the benefits of everything I can teach, and I put my experience of the last 60 years to the best possible use.”
