If a single aria could describe how admirers feel about the voice of American coloratura Ruth Ann Swenson, it might be Handel’s “Endless Pleasure,” which the soprano has performed on stage as Semele and on her eponymous recital CD. “Buttery,” “creamy,” “rapturous,” “silken”—these are words reviewers use to describe Swenson’s translucent tonal beauty. Some coloraturas gain an edge as they move up the staff. Swenson sounds sweeter and richer as she heads into the stratosphere, infusing each phrase with seamless legato and sterling diction.
Whether performing in opera houses or concert halls across the globe, or on albums such as her four versatile solo discs, recordings of La bohème and Romeo and Juliette, and a studio recording of Broadway’s Kismet, Swenson has dazzled listeners since the 1980s when, fresh from Philadelphia’s Academy of Vocal Arts, she was selected for San Francisco Opera’s Merola Program.
“It was really easy to champion Ruth Ann Swenson in the beginning,” says renowned mezzo Marilyn Horne, one of Swenson’s early San Francisco Opera colleagues. “The talent was so big and the sound of her voice was so gorgeous, there was no doubt that she was a star on the horizon.”
A star with discipline, drive, and high-wattage staying power, it has turned out.
In April of this year, 24 years after her San Francisco Opera debut as Despina and still in her radiant prime, the New York Times called Swenson, “a vocally exquisite Cleopatra” when she performed with David Daniels in the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Giulio Cesare. “She dispatched the music brilliantly, with nimble coloratura passagework, musicianly honesty, and plummy sound,” wrote Anthony Tommasini of the “Times.” “. . . This was a great night for the courageous Ms. Swenson.”
Why “courageous”? Because one year ago, while preparing for the Met’s October 2006 Faust, Swenson had a routine mammogram at home in California and learned she had early-stage breast cancer. Having always enjoyed good health, she was understandably shocked—but whereas another soprano might have temporarily cancelled all engagements, this artist declared, “I want to sing!”
So Swenson—accompanied by her husband and vocal coach, David Burnakus—traveled to Manhattan, dove into rehearsals, and sang a series of poignant, note-perfect Marguerites. Ironically, her relocation to New York provided immeasurable benefi ts in treatment options.
Burnakus, as the couple explains, had been a baritone chorister at San Francisco Opera for 13 years (he retired in 1998). One of his former colleagues had contacts at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the world’s oldest and largest cancer center. That soprano put Burnakus in touch with Dr. Larry Norton, deputy physician-in-chief for breast cancer programs. Swenson and Burnakus met with Norton and realized he was the best physician to supervise her care. Norton recommended surgeon Elisa Port, also affi liated with Sloan-Kettering, and Swenson and Burnakus were equally impressed with Dr. Port’s commitment to protecting Swenson’s vocal cords. The soprano managed to postpone surgery until Oct. 24, three days after her final Faust performance.
Flash forward five months to a rainy April afternoon at Gabriel’s Restaurant, a few blocks from Lincoln Center. Swenson and Burnakus are chatting about their shared ordeal, now largely behind them, and they glow as if they’ve just returned from a spa. This seems amazing because only six weeks earlier Swenson finished chemotherapy in California before returning for two final Met performances of Faust—including a radio broadcast—and rehearsals for Giulio Cesare. (The latter production has just opened to glowing reviews and showers of ripped-up programs from the upper tiers, an outpouring of love from the audience.)
“In the old days they used to do that a lot,” the soprano says, “but when that happens today it’s a ‘wow.’ The orchestra stood up and there were flowers and confetti.” Though she resides in Napa, Calif., which she calls “paradise,” Swenson was born in Bronxville, N. Y., 15 miles north of Manhattan, and grew up on Long Island, where she played oboe in the high school band and dreamed of becoming a singer (she’d attended Met dress rehearsals as a student). Her first-night tribute from New York fans moved her deeply.
Wearing a navy-blue, double-breasted Escada suit, Swenson is a trim, beautiful woman who looks a decade younger than her 47 years. Her profusion of reddish-blond hair, a personal hallmark, has been temporarily replaced by a stylish wig, which, for now, covers “peach fuzz.” Swenson says her energy has returned and she’s feeling great. Her prognosis is excellent, and at the time of this interview, she was planning to undergo reconstructive surgery in July, on the advice of her physicians.
To allow adequate time for recovery, however, Swenson had to cancel plans to make her October New York City Opera debut in Handel’s Agrippina. Yet she intends to be in top form by late November, when she’ll sing the title role in Dallas Opera’s The Merry Widow opposite Rod Gilfry. “I’ve never done an operetta,” she says, “and the music is beautiful. I’ll get to do dialogue and get to dance—and the crowd loves that show! I’m sure Rod Gilfry will be a wonderful Danilo—I think he’s done the role a lot.”
When the soprano notices I’ve begun to tape our interview she adds, “You’ll have to edit out all the laughing,” and she means it. Swenson has a mellow chiming laugh, and it erupts often, usually in response to quips from the dapper, bearded Burnakus. In the couple’s easy banter, you can hear their intense mutual respect and the pleasure they take in each other’s company. Gone are the lonely periods of separation when Swenson was performing in Europe or New York while Burnakus was singing in San Francisco. Nowadays they are seldom apart, and when possible they travel with Gino and Luca, their 1-year-old miniature dachshunds, now in residence at the couple’s Manhattan condo.
Burnakus humbly calls himself “the archivist” of his wife’s career, but he was among the first to spot her unique gifts in the mid-1980s when they were doing Rigoletto with the Western Opera Theater, the touring company of SFO’s Opera Center.
“Ruth Ann didn’t think of herself as a Bel Canto/Joan Sutherland type of singer then, although she was doing Gilda,” says Burnakus, who was playing Marullo. “But I noticed that her voice didn’t seem to have limits.”
They started the tour in California and went south to Texas and Florida, then up the East Coast. One day they were messing around in a hotel lounge that included a piano. A tenor colleague was studying Tamino in Die Zauberflöte, and Burnakus, an accomplished pianist, opened the score and began playing “Der Hölle Rache,” the Queen of the Night’s aria. Swenson began to sing, smoothly negotiating all the high Fs, but afterward she said, “I can’t sing them!”
“You just did!” Burnakus replied, and she said, “Oh well, I was having a good day.”
As a lark, Burnakus dared Swenson to interpolate the high notes in Gilda’s “Caro nome” during a performance, so she introduced them at the Fox Theater in Atlanta, singing flawlessly. Swenson jokes, “I told David, ‘I owe you a chocolate chip cookie or something.’” They’d formed an undeniable bond, and the couple began a “tour romance”
that continued after they returned to San Francisco.
Swenson became an Adler Fellow at San Francisco Opera while her future husband—they married in 1986—was trying to launch his vocal career. Burnakus performed part time while working in restaurants and doing church jobs. His next contribution to Swenson’s development occurred when he was singing Sharpless in a Bay Area staging of Madama Butterfly. Burnakus sought technical guidance from vocal pedagogue Dickson Titus, and immediately realized he was a master teacher.
“David encouraged me to sing for Dickson, and I stayed for 19 years,” Swenson says. “He had a gorgeous apartment that overlooked the San Francisco Bay, and I’d look out the window and listen to all the things he was saying—and I would just do it!” She explains that Titus cultivated the middle of her voice and worked “out and down” from there because he believed the middle was the core.
Titus insisted that his students work on exercises from Vaccai’s Metodo Practico (Practical Method), which teaches the Italian legato style. As Swenson’s training progressed she began to view Vaccai as “medicine for the voice.” She still uses the Vaccai book because it reminds her of the basics, especially the purity of the vowels.
“I’ve never stopped studying,” Swenson says, “which I think is the reason I’ve been around for 25 years. Just because you have a voice, and you get a job, and you’re starting a career doesn’t mean you should stop learning, or coaching, or improving your voice. But I think this is a mistake a lot of young singers make. The minute they get an agent and a job, they have a schedule—and they stop. They learn the role, but they don’t get it into their voices and learn the diffi cult places; they don’t get the music into their bodies. I think a lot of people go to teachers on an occasional basis, seeking BAND-AIDs. They want to know, how can I sing this high C? In an hour? But that’s what you work years to achieve.”
When Dickson Titus passed away in 2001, Burnakus opened a vocal studio that preserves and builds on their late teacher’s approach. Burnakus felt privileged to inherit some of Titus’s students, including Swenson, whose technique he tries to maintain the way a tennis coach protects a star player’s ace.
“Dickson was fluent in six or seven languages,” Burnakus explains. “He was always able to correct Italian, French, or German. He also had a distinct idea of the style, whether you were singing Mozart or Puccini. But when you come to a performing situation, it’s the conductor who’ll say ‘I want the music faster or slower,’ or ‘I’d like the aria phrased a certain way.’ That’s why technique is so important. You can’t always come into a situation with your musical ideas set in stone. Technique allows you to be flexible and accommodating.”
Some sopranos might balk at accepting advice or criticism from their spouses, but Swenson has always trusted her husband’s ear. “I have someone who tells me the truth,” she says. “I have someone who says, ‘This is what we need to work on,’ or ‘That was fantastic and don’t listen to somebody who tells you it isn’t.’ I have this person who’s
always there for me, and it’s something I’m so grateful for.” In addition to working on technique with Burnakus, Swenson starts learning each role with him. She also works with other top coaches, including the renowned Warren Jones, the accompanist for her I Carry Your Heart CD.
Looking back, it’s clear that the support of Burnakus and Titus—and the late Terence A. McEwen, general director of San Francisco Opera from 1982-1988—helped Swenson make the leap from young soprano to coloratura sensation on Sept. 14, 1985, the opening night of San Francisco Opera’s Orlando. By then she’d done a number of small parts at SFO, but Dorinda the shepherdess, her first foray into Handel, is generally considered her “breakthrough” to principal roles.
Staged by John Copley, Orlando starred Marilyn Horne in the title role with Sir Charles Mackerras conducting. Swenson’s Dorinda had three arias, two duets, a fair amount of recitative, and some octave-skipping coloratura. In 1999, the soprano reprised the final aria, “Amor e qual vento,” for Marilyn Horne’s San Francisco Opera farewell concert, a performance that again impressed the mezzo. “I will never forget her singing [that night],” recalls Horne. “It was jaw-dropping!”
After the success of Orlando the Theatre des Champs in Paris asked Horne to do Gluck’s Orphee. “I was very happy to ask for Ruth Ann to sing Eurydice, and she was perfect,” says Horne. Sir Charles Mackerras once again conducted, and Swenson suddenly realized she’d found not one but two opera mentors. “It’s wonderful to have a person [such as Marilyn Horne or Sir Charles] who can take a young artist and see potential,” says Swenson, “and to know that person has confidence in you. There’s no other feeling in the world like that kind of validation.”
In the late ‘80s and the ‘90s Swenson’s career took off like a comet. She sang a constellation of roles at SFO, including Juliette, Ines in L’Africaine (broadcast on PBS), Nannetta, Gilda, Pamina, Adina, Lucia, Ophelie in Hamlet, Manon, Semele, Baby Doe, Cleopatra, and Violetta. She also made her 1991 Metropolitan Opera debut as Zerlina and quickly became a hometown favorite, earning bravas for Rosina, Adina, Elvira (I Puritani), Gilda, Lucia, Violetta, Zerbinetta, Manon, Michaela, and Mimi. In addition, she debuted two signature roles, Rosina and Lucia, at Washington Opera in the 1990s, a period when she also sang at Chicago Lyric Opera and Dallas Opera. Abroad, she impressed audiences in Munich, Salzburg, and London with Despina, Konstanze, and Semele.
Because Swenson seeks new challenges, both vocal and dramatic, she has begun to retire some soubrette roles. “One thing I wish I’d done is sing more Mozart,” she says, discussing her ideal repertoire. “When you’re in a coloratura Bel Canto category, you get boxed in a little, and this bothers me. Once everyone heard E-flats, they didn’t hire me as much for Mozart, but in the future I want to sing Donna Anna and Donna Elvira, Fiordiligi, and Elektra.
“I’m not one of those people who is very grand, and sometimes they think—if you’re a nice, jolly person—you can’t play the Countess, but the Countess started as Rosina, and the girls in ‘Cosi’ are fooling around all the time, so those prejudices are just plain silly! But they’re the kind of things you have to put up with in a long career.”
When Swenson sang the Countess in last summer’s “Figaro” at San Francisco Opera, her reviews confirmed that she’s grown beyond the Mozart “…ina” Fach. “Melancholy is the domain of the Countess, who has seen her romantic illusions crumble,” wrote the San Francisco Chronicle’s Joshua Kosman. “. . . Swenson, better known for her zesty portrayals of Susanna, adopted a strikingly different vocal quality for this role, deepening her characteristically bright sound in favor of a husky, slightly shadowy tint that spoke volumes about the Countess’ predicament. . . . And the lushly phrased melodies of her two arias boasted a welcome eloquence.”
When asked to name two favorite roles Swenson mentions Violetta and Gilda, adding that she looks forward to singing a string of “Traviatas” at the Met in March of 2008. “I really needed to grow up a little to do Violetta,”
she observes. “People were asking me to do it as a young artist and I didn’t feel vocally ready or worldly enough to pull it off. I think you need to mature before you do certain roles. I waited until I’d lived enough to understand all the things she was feeling. Now I’m much more confident and secure, and having gone through the unfortunate crisis of battling breast cancer, the final aria, ‘Addio del passato,’ will have a whole new meaning. [With Violetta], you have the sense that life could end any minute.
“As for Gilda, I have always adored her and have sung the role all over the world—but I probably won’t do the role anymore. She’s young and the tessitura is high, all night! When I made my Gilda debut at the Met in 1991, the same year I sang Zerlina, I had my first experience with confetti coming down from the ceiling! It was one of the greatest moments for a New Yorker like me.”
As Swenson reflects on her career, she feels surprised that some critics praise her tone and technique yet accuse her of being bland. “People have told me I should make it look harder,” she confides, “but I hate the antics that some singers go through, the contortions and strange mouth positions. You wonder how they can get anything out.”
Burnakus weighs in saying, “I think some of the criticism Ruth Ann takes for being dull is because she makes it look effortless. The most important thing to Dickson Titus was a free tone. He hated manufactured, overly focused, manipulated tones. He wouldn’t even say the word ‘focus’ because of what it would do to the sound, so he concentrated on breath support and on making a really free emission.”
Swenson is also bemused by the growing trend of high-concept productions in which directors have little knowledge or respect for operatic works. In one European Rigoletto, for instance, she was told to hug a giant red ball while she sang “Caro nome,” a bit of business that proved distracting for everyone. In a German Rigoletto she worked with a film director who wanted to cut “Caro nome” because he felt the aria slowed the action. “And the days of having an opinion are slim to none,” Swenson adds, sounding blasé, “because then you’re deemed difficult. You have to be very ‘tip-toey’ about it because you have to explain why you feel the way you do.”
In contrast to those odd productions, the Met’s Giulio Cesare was a dream. The director was John Copley, who has staged every Handel opera Swenson has done, starting with Orlando. “Mr. Copley’s a musician,” she says, “and he’s brilliant with Handel. He knows how to make 25 arias work, and how to make the characters believable, and how not to make the opera funny—or silly.”
Whatever situations she faces in a particular production, Swenson is the kind of person who takes problems in
stride. “I’m really thankful that I can sing and do what I love and make a living,” she says. “Having cancer does put a lot of things in perspective: What things are important, what things are dear to you, and goals in life or things you want to think about. Family and friends. Support. The cards all fall into different places than they used to be before. I do know I couldn’t have made it this far without my incredible husband. I feel that way even when I don’t have a crisis. It’s a real team thing.”
Throughout our interview, Swenson has been remarkably candid, and now she mentions that it was the prospect of returning to the Met for Faust and Giulio Cesare that kept her afloat as she went through chemo.
“I had my days—but you have to have a good sense of humor, and every book, every pamphlet, told us you have to have a goal. You have to have something to reach for. You can’t just curl up in your bed,” she says. “You need a light at the end of the tunnel. Marguerite in March was mine.”
Marilyn Horne also understands. “I cannot express how happy I was to hear her sing Faust on the Met broadcast, and it brought tears to my eyes to hear her really pumping out the sound in that last big trio,” said Horne. “I couldn’t wait to speak to her, so I called her in her dressing room.”
Horne’s gesture was all the more generous because she, too, is battling cancer. Says Swenson, “I was so happy to hear from her. She said, ‘Girl, you did it! I’m so proud of you. It was gorgeous!’ And I said, ‘How are you?’ And she said, ‘Never mind me. I’m doing great. You just keep going!’”
Horne’s exhortation seems to be Ruth Ann Swenson’s mantra: she’s a soprano who always keeps going! When asked what advice she’d give to singers who might want to emulate her example she says:
• Try to stay healthy. “Rest and try to protect your voice. You can’t go out and party and go to clubs. You can’t shop all day before you’re going to sing. You have to eat right, get a good night’s sleep, and take vitamins. Remember: what you do at 25 takes a toll at 45. Start putting good habits into practice when you’re young.”
• Learn to say no. “That’s been a big word in my life. Bring a score to your teacher and discuss the right repertoire. Just because they ask doesn’t mean you should be singing it. You won’t end your career by saying no. I turned down Manon, at 25 because the craft of getting through an opera like that was not part of me yet. Preparation is gradual. You build up a sense of technical ability so you know you can handle an opera’s challenges.”
• Stick to what you think is right. “There will be a lot of people telling you things. If you want to be an opera singer you have to give up a lot, so if you can do something else, do it, because it’s really hard. If you don’t put every ounce of your soul and person into it there’s no chance—but frankly, the chances of making it are slim even if you do.”
• Develop a thick skin. “Opera is ‘show biz’—now more than ever.” Swenson’s eyes are on the future, which includes engagements she is not at liberty to mention. She’s excited about her June 2008 return to
San Francisco Opera, when she’ll sing Ginevra in Ariodante opposite Susan Graham. John Copley will again direct, with Patrick Summers conducting. This opera will mark her 25th anniversary with the company where she launched her career.
“I love singing at San Francisco Opera,” says Swenson. “The public is so warm and generous to me, and I can live at home in Napa—it’s 51 miles from our door to the opera house. To sleep in my own bed and be able to sing is heaven!”
Speaking of heaven, that’s another word fans use to describe the singing of this quintessential American soprano—and with luck we’ll be able to enjoy the “endless pleasure” of Swenson’s luminous artistry for years to come.
Special thanks to Georgiana Francisco of ByGeorge Communications for her invaluable assistance with this article. Thanks also to Marilyn Horne, Denise Pineau of Columbia Artists Management, and Carter Hallett, Ms. Horne’s assistant.—SD
