Although Christa Ludwig had a notably beautiful sound from the beginning, she had to study very hard for her top. “When I had to sing even a single high note, my voice simply collapsed,” she admitted. “The audience made an audible ‘ah,’ and I was extremely embarrassed. The problem was that I had not learned enough technique yet.” It will come as a surprise to all who have long admired the singer’s free and powerful top that this extension which enabled the mezzo to sing so fearlessly such soprano roles as Fidelio and the Dyer’s Wife had to be laboriously built. Her natural range was narrow and stopped at middle F. “It took me a year of hard work to develop each additional half-tone.”
Ludwig was luckier than most singers, however, in that she had a wise and devoted teacher close at hand: her mother Eugenie Besalla-Ludwig, a famous pedagogue, her lifelong teacher. In spite of the carping of the critics about Christa Ludwig’s disappointing top, her mother’s belief held firm. “She told me, ‘the critics are stupid. They understand nothing of the voice; you can do it,’” Ludwig told Classical Singer. “But, of course, you have to have a teacher who is sure of the beauty of your voice. I started at age 17. A big voice needs a longer time to develop.
“The slow development of a voice, of a singer’s mentality and character is essential,” Ludwig said. “I remember when Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was very young and he had a huge success all at once. He was 19 or 20 years old and Germany was crazy about him. His first wife said to me at the time, ‘You know, Dietrich should have now two or three years off so that his personality can develop as quickly as his fame.’ This is also true with Fritz Wunderlich: his fame came quicker than his personality developed. This is not good. Because of this, perhaps, he died so tragically young. He didn’t know what to do with fame, so he did all, let’s say, stupid things.”
Madame Ludwig continually stresses the importance of a slow development. “The main thing is that most of the directors of the opera houses have no idea anymore about a singing voice. They just want to push singers into what ever they need. One good singer I know in Vienna was an example. When Margaret Price cancelled Ballo in Maschera, Claudio Abbado was conducting, and quickly they had to have another Amelia. He found somebody in Graz, a young lady of 23 who just came from school, and he took her. She sang nicely, OK, but she never made a big career. It is not right for a conductor to take a very young woman for a role like this; it is much too heavy. But they say, ‘In a few years, I’ll find somebody else!’ They don’t care anymore. I must protest against the directors and against the conductors. The only conductor I know today who is very careful and who guides a young singer, is James Levine. But this was always true of Karl Böhm and Karajan, all of the old ones. But the world was not so tiny as today.”
The culprits in the rush to haste and chaos that prevails in today’s opera world include stage directors, for whom Ludwig expresses a particular disdain, both in her book and in our conversation. “Singers cannot develop with this modern kind of staging. They can never go deeply into the character of, say, Traviata if they have to be nude on the stage, or I don’t know what.” Imagining for a moment the difficulty of singing a difficult role while naked before thousands, I involuntarily gasped, “Nude!” Madame Ludwig must have thought me a hopeless provincial because she replied, “Of course! Why not?” meaning not that she approves, but that anything goes. “You have this not so much in America; we have this in Europe. I read a review about a new production of Die Freischutz. Everything takes place in a wide bed. There is no woods, no mountains, nothing but a bed! How can a young singer develop into the character when there is no sense on the stage?”
Christa Ludwig’s concern for singers and their struggles is apparent on every page of her memoir, In My Own Voice (Limelight Editions, New York, 306 pages). This remarkably candid and deeply informative traversal of her life and illustrious 50-year career contains the complete lowdown on what it takes to build and sustain a lifelong career of singing at the absolute top. Ludwig sang in the premier international venues alongside the most illustrious colleagues, under the greatest conductors, and at the highest level of vocal, musical and interpretive achievement. In her book, jotted down in notebooks over a period of years during the inevitable backstage waits and down time, she addresses all matters, from the practical to the profound. It’s a thrilling read for the vocal connoisseur and an essential one for the classical singer. Ludwig covers everything from the value of developing a singer’s inner life to explaining the reason singers are often considered to be stupid. Discovering the humanity behind all those years of virtually perfect singing is a tantalizing adventure. Ludwig details the awesome sacrifices necessary to achieve and sustain such consistent quality. Most important of all, she shows why such a life might be worth living in the first place.
Anyone who has devoured and digested this book would have reason to believe he knows this great singer uncommonly well. Certainly I thought so, but she frequently threw me for a loop with her unexpectedly jolly sense of humor. I asked for some general advice for those embarking upon a singing career.
“Mostly, I tell them, ‘Don’t do it!,” she replied, but a hearty burst of merry laughter told me at once that she was teasing. “It’s funny,” she continued, “no, not funny, when you talk to a woman who is already 36 or 37 years old and hasn’t made it yet. I will say, ‘You know, you have to be with both feet on the ground and you have to see clearly your future. You will have to earn your money with this and so shouldn’t you have another profession?’ But they will cry and say, ‘Oh, no! I want to sing!’ And so you can do nothing!” Where else but in singing do the comic and the tragic travel so closely hand in hand?
This all-consuming dream of a career in singing can be so heartbreaking if it doesn’t work out. How is a singer to know if her gift is sufficient to risk spending a lifetime making the necessary sacrifices? “It is so difficult to say,” Ludwig replied with another burst of her endearing laughter before settling down to be serious. “My mother always said that you have to give a singer two years, because, sometimes a voice is not really there. Let’s say the basic voice is there, of course, and a certain charisma, musicality. But maybe the voice is not so beautiful. Maria Callas’s was not beautiful. She had a really ugly voice but she made a great career because everything else was fantastic. So you have to give her two years to see if she can make the voice work for her. Then, if it does not you might say, ‘Think it over.’ And she goes to another teacher!”
I recalled Ludwig’s famous recording of Tristan und Isolde in which she and Birgit Nilsson alternate phrases so seamlessly that their two voices appear to form one continuous musical line. How is this ease of blending achieved? “This was the art of Böhm, of Karajan,” she said. “They taught us how to make a good phrase and how to make the sound nice. Nobody teaches this anymore. This is the mystery, the geheimnis that artists have to have. Some know and some don’t. It is also true with actors. Why is one beautiful woman a better film actress than another one? We don’t know; it is something you cannot touch with words, and not with teaching. It is there. Or it is not. Like I said always, ‘It is singing, not me.’ But, you know, there were always in the whole world 20 first class singers. Not more. There was always one Jenny Lind who earned a lot of money, and one Caruso. There were never so many at any time.”
What the music schools lack in geheimnis, they more than make up in sheer numbers, and Ludwig is far from convinced of a fair trade-off. “There are too many,” she insists, “and here in France, for example, in the Paris Opera school, they get paid. They get paid while they learn, so this is a false world. It’s like the farmer who gets money to keep the cows from giving milk. I think this is wrong. They do too much for the average people and not enough for the exceptional ones.”
As it is those exceptional ones who always fascinate us, I could not resist asking Madame Ludwig about the famous recording in which she sings Adalgisa to the Norma of Maria Callas. This was surprise casting in 1960 as Ludwig had no previous experience with Bellini and very little with the bel canto style. Nevertheless, the blend of these two superb singers resulted in a recording that has retained its legendary status for forty years, and more than one critic has hailed Christa Ludwig as the ultimate Adalgisa on records. But why her?
“I was in the Salzburg Festival and suddenly Walter Legge (the visionary record producer and husband of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf) asked me if I could sing Norma in two weeks because the mezzo soprano was sick. I don’t know who it was. I said, ‘But I have no idea from the style,’ and he said, ‘Ya, ya, you will make it. You can do it.’ And so I did. I was always asking Callas what to do. She said, ‘Imitate me, then it is right!’
I replied that this advice sounded good to me; where else but to Callas would one go to learn Bellini? “But you cannot imitate her!” Ludwig exclaimed “She is the exceptional…not voice, but what she is doing with the voice. This is talent! This is really the example. How did she do it? I think that the whole tragedy of her life is in her voice.
“These are things you cannot tell,” Ludwig said, musing again on the geheimnis of greatness. “My husband (Actor, stage director Paul-Emile Deiber whom she married in 1972) and I were in Oslo for the Queen Sonja competition and there was a young Argentine girl of 22 who sang Tosca and Il Pirata. She was so moving that we all we old horses: Nilsson, Theo Adam, Ingrid Bjoner and I were in tears. And what is it? It was not the voice, which, ya, it was a voice, but how she did it. You cannot explain it.”
Considering the undisputed greatness of Christa Ludwig’s own voice, when considered purely as an instrument, it is interesting to note her emphasis on the other, non-vocal aspects of the singer’s art. Many of the singers she considers to be the greatest artists are not known for their voices. When I reminded her of her of the high praise she lavishes in her book upon Marlene Dietrich’s “immense art of interpretation,” Madame Ludwig exclaimed, “Fantastic! And Lotte Lenya, what she could do! And Barbra Streisand. It’s the same breed. There are many kinds of great singing. It is not only the voice, it is the talent, and this you cannot judge in the first years. Suddenly one comes along and you say, “Wow. That’s it!”
Ludwig’s voice remained in pristine condition to the end of her singing career. In her farewell recital in 1994 (available on CD as Tribute to Vienna (RCA 09026-62652-2), there is no evidence whatsoever that the singer is 65 years old. The breath, the control, the fresh and even timbre, the steadiness and power are all completely intact, and the art of interpretation is at its zenith, perhaps more freely dispensed than ever now that she no longer felt a need to save it for the future. Her decision to retire was voluntary she wanted to have a life at last rather than mandatory.
“I could choose very well,” she said. “You make a career with your brain and not with your voice. When my mother died, I thought it was not necessary to work anymore,” she said with another rippling laugh, “because my mother was very expensive. This is also a profession, remember, to earn money. When she died, I said, ‘now I will stop.’ I needed to fulfill my contracts, so I had two more years to sing. I said in every city, ‘this is the last time I am coming.’ And so they made always a poster: ‘This is the farewell.’ For two years I had a little crown on my head, which was wonderful.”
Do you miss singing? I wanted to know. “Oh, no!” she replied with the heartiest laugh of all. “I am very happy that I can awaken in the morning croaking as a raven and I have not to sing.” And even though she can now, at last, catch a cold with impunity, she finds that she doesn’t. “It all starts in the brain.”
