A Pavarotti International Competition winner at 25, Esperian found herself all but forgotten by age 33. Many thought she had retired. What happened? And how did she begin her climb up back to the top?
Everybody knows – or should by now – the part that sheer luck plays in a successful opera career. Sure, talent, inspiration and preparation are essential, but without a generous dollop of dumb luck, you’re sunk before you begin. Or after. Take soprano Kallen Esperian. Due to a series of bad breaks, her profile in New York, America’s operatic center, is not as high as it was after she first burst upon the scene as a winner of the 1985 Luciano Pavarotti International Voice Competition. Although her career is now firmly back on the track in many of the other large American cities and in Europe, she quite naturally wished to raise her visibility with Manhattan’s taste-making opera goers. She was thrilled, therefore, to accept an offer to sing in a Carnegie Hall event guaranteed to garner maximum attention from the press, the music moguls, and the opera cognoscenti. Surely luck was on her side this time.
The event was a concert version of one of her favorite roles, Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello, and her leading man none other than the great Carlo Bergonzi. What could go wrong? Everything. The tenor’s spectacular crash-and-burn was the first epic disaster of the new century and quickly became the talk of the international opera world; when the dust had settled, it seemed only the hall itself was left standing. Amidst the fallout, Esperian’s Desdemona was hardly even noticed, except by the New York Times which stated that only when she sang the “Willow Song” and “Ave Maria” did a performance of Verdi’s opera actually seem to be taking place. Kind words, these – and true – but hardly the sort of rave to make a gal the talk of the town.
It appears that the moral of the Kallen Esperian story is don’t think you’ve got it made just because your career gets off to a great start. And by any standard, Kallen Esperian’s career got off to an auspiciously great start. In 1985, she won the Luciano Pavarotti International Voice Competition after one initial false step. “I entered the Met competition as a mezzo,” Esperian says. “My voice tended to be very round and rich in color. My teachers wanted me to go slowly, so I trained as a mezzo. But when I sang for the Met, they said, ‘We think you are a soprano. Go home and re-study.’ I knew they were right, and it was only five months later that I did Luciano’s competition as a soprano. I was ready; I just had to learn the five arias.”
Esperian’s first complete role in Italian was Mimi in a touring production of La Boheme with Pavarotti. She was just turning 25. “It was very frightening,” she admits, “but fortunately, I had great coaching from Maestro Antonio Tonini. What a dear, sweet man. He taught me Mimi and I treasure the memory of working with him.”
When Boheme reached Berlin, Esperian was offered a new production of the opera. “Luciano told me to learn Luisa Miller; there was a chance for me to cover it in a small theatre in Verona. I coached it with Luciano himself. He was very generous and worked with me daily. He is an incredible, instinctual musician with wonderful insights and he knows so much about the style and the language. Louisa Miller is a hard part,” Esperian says, “harder than I realized. The first aria is so difficult and then it’s over in three minutes.”
She sang her one performance in Verona with great success, and went on to Milan to study Italian. A call came from Vienna that Katia Ricciarelli had cancelled a Luisa Miller and Pavarotti had recommended Esperian as cover. “My wallet had been stolen that day,” she recalls, “my passport, all my money. Luciano was so sweet; his wife Audua called the consulate, a man showed up at my door with some money and I took the night train to Vienna and then went straight to rehearsal. This is the way it all started.”
Esperian did a lot of covering in the beginning. She made her Met debut in La Boheme with Placido Domingo as cover for Izamo D’Amico, then covered for Susan Dunn in Il Trovatore in Central Park, one performance each. In Paris she appeared in a new production of Otello at the Bastille, again with Domingo. After her first Donna Elvira in Palm Beach opposite the Don Giovanni of Sherrill Milnes, she was called back to the Met to replace Susan Dunn who had pulled out of a series of Luisa Miller performances. “I came up, watched a rehearsal and stepped in without ever having done a rehearsal on stage.” There were more Louisa Millers at La Scala, covering again for Ricciarelli, and some performances of I Vespri Siciliani for Cheryl Studer. Five years ago, she sang the first ever La Scala performances of Verdi’s Stiffelio with Jose Carerras; now she had shared the stage with all three of the Three Tenors.
“Things happened like that,” she says, eyes radiant with remembered excitement. “To be in the same dressing room where Callas sat and was made up! I was so aware of it, the history in that house. And on stage when you stand on ‘the spot!’ It is just to the right of the prompter’s box and no matter what the staging, every singer gravitates to that spot. It doesn’t sound different to the singer, but to the audience, it’s as if there is a microphone there. The very boards are worn. Things happened like that for me in the beginning. It was all very fast and furious and exciting.”
How, then, did it begin to go wrong? And when? “The year I became pregnant I had a lot of really fabulous things coming up,” Esperian explains. “A lot of productions were being mounted for me. I had to cancel Pagliacci at La Scala with Luciano and Muti, my Covent Garden debut in Otello which, again, was to have been with Luciano. I cancelled Verdi Requiems with Zubin Mehta; there were some big things I had to leave go. I sang during the pregnancy, up until the eighth month, and it was fine. Then, after John was born, the trouble began. My son is the light of my life; I will tell you that right now. But some singers can bounce back easily from a pregnancy. I didn’t. It took me two and a half years. I’ll never forget it. Two weeks after John was born I thought, ‘Hmm, I’ll go in and see if I can sing a scale.’ I took a breath and nothing happened! It was as if there was jello instead of muscle. Nothing. It scared me to death. I thought, ‘Oh, boy, this is gonna be fun!'”
Esperian’s voice began to come back, but it had become very dark and heavy. “There was a veil over my voice. Very strange. It wasn’t as if I were making ugly sounds, or doing anything disgraceful, but it just wasn’t the same. It wasn’t getting out and there was nothing I could do. My husband heard it, but he never said a lot. Now he will talk about it, but then he didn’t want to frighten me.
“I needed to go back to work. I had to earn a living and the first thing I did was La Boheme in Los Angeles. John was only six weeks old when I started rehearsing. The Bohemes went well enough, but I could tell; it just wasn’t quite the same. And even Placido, God bless him, was saying, ‘Maybe you should wait. Maybe you shouldn’t come back so soon.’ For one thing, I was exhausted all the time. John was not a good sleeper, and I wanted to be Mommy. Plus, my emotions were raging and I had this little baby to deal with. We were rehearsing from ten to five every day.
“Then I made what for me was a mistake. It was a great opportunity, but it was a mistake for me. I came in to New York to do the Met opening with Luciano and Placido. It was the 25th anniversary of their debuts at the Met and I did the first act duet from Otello with Luciano and some of the third act of Trovatore with Placido. It wasn’t disgraceful or embarrassing, but it wasn’t my best singing, not even close. We make those choices along the way. Both of these men had been very instrumental in my career. This was high exposure, but it’s when things started to go wrong.”
Esperian continued her career with a production of Simon Boccanegra in Paris that was made additionally stressful by the kind of political in-fighting so common in that city. “I was still very young, thirty-three. I was just trying to hang in there and do the best job I could. I went for several years when I was exhausted all the time and I didn’t know it. Certain singers and certain kinds of voices can get away with more, but I wasn’t one of them.” Her reviews had begun to reflect her distress.
“There came a time three or four years ago when I made the decision something had to change. I was feeling burned out. Like one of those gerbils on a wheel; I was putting out a lot of energy and going nowhere. I cancelled a lot of things, the French Don Carlos in Amsterdam with the Concertgebouw, Katyna Kabanova in Dallas, Tales of Hoffmann at the Met. And at the same time I decided to switch management. I was with Hanns Boon at Breslin. Although I have nothing but good things to say about Hanns, I felt there had been a lot of missed opportunities over the years. I was young and they were being very careful with me and I thank Hanns for that. But I don’t think the job of managing me at that time was difficult. The phone was ringing; people were asking for Esperian. Now, I felt I needed a change, a new direction, some new input.”
Knowing nothing of the management world and itching for a change, any change, Esperian jumped out of the frying pan into the well-known fire. She went with Bill Garry Guerri at Columbia, whereupon she promptly got lost in another large company with a big roster. “He is a perfectly nice man, but I think they didn’t know me, or what I do, well enough. My career had been primarily in Europe and they had never heard me do my best things. And, frankly, I wasn’t hot. They had other people who were hot that they were pushing. I was with Columbia for two years. Two lost years. I am surprised that I stayed so long when nothing was happening. People were saying that I had retired. I believe in Destiny; it allowed me to be home with my son for two very important years, but it was a painful time. No one was calling to ask for me and I still had so much to give. My voice was coming back, and I believe I needed that removal from the stress. I needed to go back to my original joy in singing, the reason I wanted to do it in the first place. I was na•ve and I think that is a beautiful thing. It keeps your vulnerability intact. So, in a way, it was the best thing that could have happened.”
Esperian credits Tibor Rudas, the “Hungarian Barnum,” whom she terms “a very loyal man,” for keeping her afloat during the difficult years by sending her out on short tours with his “Three Sopranos” package. Her success in this venue made her all the more eager to resume her career full time; she knew that she had to get new management at once, and this time it had to be right. “I had met Matthew Laefer Laifer in Italy,” she recalls. “He was so nice to me and I could tell it was genuine. I also could see how hard he was working for his artists. At this time, I got a manager, hired a publicist and I found a voice teacher, Bill Schuman in the Ansonia. Again, someone was watching out for me. It’s like deja vu, but this time I feel ready, I feel reborn. It is such a high for me to be able to make the sounds that I always knew I could make. It is important to me not to let down the people who have believed in me and my talents.”
Alice Ford in Falstaff at Lyric Opera of Chicago began Kallen Esperian’s 1999-2000 season, which continued with her Dallas Opera debut as Rosalinde in a new production of Die Fledermaus. Just completed is a new Verdi role, Elisabetta in Don Carlo at the Bayerische Staatsoper under Zubin Mehta and soon to come is Gulnara in Il corsaro at the Athen Megaron, which will be televised.
In 2002 she adds two Puccini roles to her repertoire: Manon Lescaut and Madama Butterfly in Munich and Amsterdam. “I have been very lucky,” Esperian says fervently. “If my career were to halt now, I could look at the things that I have been able to do, the people I have performed with and know I’ve been blessed. I feel like Cinderella! These things are amazing to me. I remember watching Placido sing Otello on TV when I was in college and never dreaming that one day it would be me. What are the chances of that? You’ve got to follow that dream and cherish every moment of it. Enjoy it. Try not to get so bogged down in the politics and the stress and nerves of the business that you forget to enjoy the singing.”
