“You have to decide what success is for you,” says soprano Marquita Lister. “For some people this may just be singing. For others, it’s going all the way. The great careers are supposedly built on three tiers: opera performance, recordings, and concerts/recitals. But young singers need to know that success doesn’t always come because you are or are not talented. Sometimes you are there at the right moment.”
Serendipity may have contributed to Ms. Lister’s rise to international prominence since her conservatory and apprentice years in the ’80s. But she was blessed with “a big, lush voice” (The New York Times, March 5, 2002), and she’s cultivated the wisdom and drive that have allowed her to seize key opportunities that came her way. An outside observer might conclude that this lirico spinto has made her own luck since age 14, when she told her first voice teacher, Margaret Masse, “I want what Leontyne Price has.”
Recalling her teenage pluck, she laughs.
“What I meant is that I wanted to sing the music Ms. Price was singing. And Ms. Masse said, ‘OK, you’re ambitious!’ Then in high school, when I was winning NATS competitions, my mother said, ‘You can do anything you put your mind to! Go out and do your best, and it will be as it’s supposed to be.’”
These days, Marquita Lister feels proud that she has realized her youthful dream: She’s the go-to soprano for Aida and Bess, two of Ms. Price’s signature roles. But she admits it took years of training and a few “trials” to build the opera career that in 2006 will take her to Dresden’s Semperoper (Lady Macbeth), Detroit’s Michigan Opera Theater (Salome), and Buenos Aires’ Teatro Colón (Elena in I Vespri Siciliani).
One of those trials happened in May of 2005 during an Opera Tampa performance of Aida. The chorus threw confetti during the triumphal scene, and, unbeknownst to Ms. Lister, she inhaled a piece. Though she felt something lodged in her throat before Act III, she went bravely on stage, but as the act continued, her throat got tight and her voice grew weaker and weaker.
“I kept walking off stage and drinking water,” she explains ruefully, “but little did I know that the more water I drank, the more that piece of confetti adhered to my vocal cords. When it was time for my love duet with Radames [tenor Drew Slatton], my voice was gone. I was absolutely mortified. I looked helplessly at Drew and whispered, ‘I can’t sing.’ He simply wrapped his arms around me and sang the duet as a solo. They closed the curtain and made an announcement, but since there was nobody to cover me I had to continue until the end of Act IV.” She shakes her head. “One can never prepare for such an incident. But I’ve worked hard to put it behind me.”
When we meet early in the new year, Ms. Lister is taking a holiday in her hometown of Washington, D.C., one of two capital cities where she maintains a residence—she also lives in Berlin. On a drizzly afternoon, she joins me at the Cheesecake Factory, and though her coppery hair is tamed into a French braid and she’s wearing a casual sweater and slacks, the statuesque beauty wins looks from waiters and diners when she strolls across the room. After studying the menu, Ms. Lister orders a low-cal lunch of teriyaki chicken.
“I have to lose 10 to 15 pounds before Salome!” she confides, adding that in the present casting climate, maintaining her figure is as important as any other professional choice she makes.
“Opera is a business,” she explains, “and the day of the physically fit singer has arrived! We’re expected to look the part, and as my agent, Jim Dietsch, tells me, people evaluate you from the top of your head to the soles of your feet. If you don’t have physical appeal, you could sing like all the archangels in heaven, but you won’t get the job.”
Getting the job has been easier for Ms. Lister since the bravas began piling up, though she attributes her present momentum to the guidance of mentors whose advice she followed, even when their suggestions initially caused some consternation.
“When I got to the opera program at New England Conservatory after high school,” she explains, “John Moriarty, the great vocal coach and the author of Diction, became my first mentor. He said I needed to acquire some toughness. He also said there would be great disappointments as well as great victories.
“After NEC, I won the 1983 regional Met auditions, and the Met expressed some interest in my joining their Young Artist Program. I spoke with John Moriarty, and he felt the place for me was Oklahoma City University, where I could study with Inez Silberg, who’d taught Leona Mitchell and Chris Merritt. Well, I went there, kicking and screaming, because I was a city girl who was planning to live in New York! But John said, ‘You need to learn technique and repertoire. You’re barely 21, and you need to grow up.’” She smiles. “He was right. It was the best thing I ever did.”
After receiving her master’s degree from OCU, Ms. Lister was tapped for the Houston Grand Opera Studio (1987-89), where she met her second mentor, Scott Heumann, the company’s late artistic administrator. In 1989, Mr. Heumann said he envisioned her as Aida, and with typical, self-deprecating wit she quipped, “Aida who?” Mr. Heumann replied, “Verdi’s Aida, and I’d like to offer you the second cast for our 1992 production.”
Ms. Lister had sung Fiordiligi and Micaela at HGO matinees, but before accepting the role that would soon become her calling card, she called an acclaimed Verdi interpreter, Martina Arroyo, for advice.
“Miss Arroyo said that if I could sing the third act, I could do Aida,” says Ms. Lister. “I looked at the music—from ‘O patria mia’ to the duet with Radames, to the duet with her father—and decided I could manage it. So my then-agent and I had to find a place for a trial run, and we chose Teatro Bellas Artes in Mexico City. I didn’t know until I got there that the great Aida in that house had been Maria Callas, who had sung a high E-flat at the end of the triumphal scene. So there I was on the phone, singing to my voice teacher, Bill Riley, trying to get an E-flat because management was convinced the audience would boo me if I didn’t sing that note. Normally, on a good day, I had a C, sometimes a D. But my teacher said we could make it happen, and we did! That Aida was a big triumph for me.”
Her subsequent acclaim in Houston’s 1992 Aida produced exciting offers: Vitellia in San Francisco, Alice Ford in Portland, Salome in Austin, Liu in Baltimore, Tosca in Vancouver, Bess in a world tour that played the Opéra Bastille in Paris and Teatro alla Scala in Milan. After singing Nedda and Musetta at the Arena di Verona, Gotz Friedrich, general manager of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, asked her to sing Bess in his Porgy and Bess at the Theater des Westens, a role she reprised at the Bregenz Festival.
After a reflective pause she says, “Some people feel that Porgy and Bess denigrates black people, but it’s one of the few works that gives a platform to African-American singers. ‘Porgy’ has definitely helped me more than it’s hurt me.” She mentions the 2002 New York City Opera production, which was broadcast on PBS and earned her the NYCO Diva Award. This spring she will travel to Nashville to record Bess for Decca, her first principal role in a full-length opera disc.
“I view ‘Porgy’ in an historical context,” she continues, “with works such as Showboat and The Color Purple. We can’t change how it was, but we also shouldn’t forget how it was. I don’t want to be forced to avoid Porgy and Bess, and frankly, Bess is much harder to sing than Aida, because of the physical aspects of the role. With Bess, you have to show her life experience. She’s dealing with drug addiction and sexual abuse, and now that I’ve experienced heartache as a mature woman, I can bring more to the role.”
Before I venture to ask about the losses that have deepened her portrayal of Bess and other complicated heroines, Ms. Lister says, “A child is the one thing missing from my life,” and confides that she might adopt a baby in the future. “All singers have to decide whether they want a family. I chose to have my career first, because I couldn’t not raise a child the way my parents raised me.” She smiles. “As Oprah Winfrey has said, you may be able to have it all, but not at the same time!”
The soprano’s love of children is reflected in her volunteer commitment to the “Negro Spiritual” Scholarship Foundation. The Orlando-based organization, now in its 10th year, promotes the solo singing of spirituals through vocal competitions that award college-tuition grants to African-American students.
“I love the fact that I sing opera,” she declares, “but I love it more that I can use my talent and my standing in the arts community to help educate kids! I take pride in that because I’m doing something truly relevant.” She has sung at many benefits, is the foundation’s national spokesperson, and, along with NBA head coach Glenn “Doc” Rivers, is the co-chair of this year’s “Giving Voice to Hope” campaign, which will raise several million dollars to support NSSF’s mission. “One of my goals,” she adds, “is to preserve the spiritual as a musical form for future generations.”
Perhaps it’s no accident that a song resembling a contemporary spiritual, “Georgia Dusk,” is the soprano’s favorite in the blues-infused song cycle she recently recorded for Edward Knight’s Where the Sunsets Bleed disc (Albany). In a recent e-mail, the composer wrote, “Marquita was a joy to work with and her interpretation was brilliant.” Ms. Lister feels equally positive about their collaboration, although she admits that Mr. Knight’s music, a setting of six poems by Langston Hughes, was a challenge.
“I’d never done a real modern piece before,” she says. “I wondered if I’d be able to negotiate it. I needed to use a range of vocal colors and express the text in a way that listeners could relate to. It had to sound very natural.”
Given Ms. Lister’s curiosity and intelligence, however, she never shies away from challenging projects, and even when things don’t go her way, she grows artistically. To illustrate this point, she cheerfully describes her travails in a September 2002 Don Giovanni.
“I was flying all over Europe doing heavy roles (Amelia in ‘Ballo,’ Tosca, and Salome). When you’re singing that kind of big repertory, you’re focusing on long lines and declamato, and if you’re not offsetting heavy roles with coloratura roles, your coloratura can get stiff and slow. Well, I was scheduled to sing Donna Elvira, and I’d underestimated how hard it would be to get that role into my tongue and teeth.”
Recalling her frustration, she sighs. “This can happen to working singers, and it exemplifies the fine line between ambition and reality. You think, ‘I have this under control.’ But when I got to New York City Opera for rehearsals, my colleagues were far ahead of me, and they were fabulous! Everyone was spitting out their recitatives lickety split, while I was singing my recitatives at half speed. My arias weren’t much better! Donna Anna [Pamela Armstrong] sounded like velvet, and I sounded like a Mack truck trying to move through a straw.”
Ms. Lister’s colleagues were supportive, but her performance fell short of her own meticulous standards. So after this experience, she decided she would carve out more time for role preparation, a vow that laid the foundation for her triumphant debut in Verdi’s Macbeth last October.
“A while back I was doing ‘Ballo’ at the Semperoper in Dresden,” she says, “and I was asked to return in October of 2005 to do a second-cast Lady Macbeth. They asked me to come for the entire rehearsal period, after which I’d do one performance. Then I would come back and sing all the performances in February and July of 2006. Since I’d never seen or heard the opera, I thought this situation was ideal because I’d have plenty of time to study and get ready.”
She pauses. “The soprano who was doing Lady Macbeth came in late, which meant I got to sing the role for two weeks in rehearsal. When she arrived, my colleague was in poor voice, but the director, Philip Himmelmann, let the situation go until the maestro, Daniele Gatti, joined us. To make a long story short, the other soprano was ill and I was asked to sing more rehearsals.
“On the day of the piano run-through, the head of the coaching staff came to me and said he’d be conducting because Maestro Gatti would be sitting in the house, listening. This actually seemed like divine intervention. I’d coached with that conductor, and he knew where all my breaths were. Anyway, the piano rehearsal was my big test. Everyone knew I’d never sung Lady Macbeth, so the entire administration was in the audience.”
Although the piano rehearsal went smoothly, Ms. Lister was nonetheless surprised when the other soprano suddenly withdrew and she was offered the premiere and the entire run.
“My coaching with Maestro Gatti went well, and so did the dress rehearsal,” she says. “Everything fell into place. I had great chemistry with my Macbeth, Lucio Gallo, and I got extraordinary reviews.” She chuckles. “Lady Macbeth really wasn’t hard for me. She’s manipulative and evil, but bad girls are always fun to play!”
The other “bad girl” she often sings is the notorious Salome, one of the most demanding roles in the German repertoire. “When Salome was first offered to me, I didn’t want to play her,” she admits. “I come from a very religious family, and I didn’t like the fact that she asked for the head of John the Baptist, one of the greatest saints of Christianity. But when I did some research, I learned that in the biblical text it was Salome’s mother, Herodias, who asked for the head. Salome grew up in an environment of decadence and manipulation, so how could she not be drawn in? I think she was a victim herself.”
These days Ms. Lister doesn’t take a new role unless she really likes the character.
“I want someone whom I can sustain the reality of,” she says. “One of my coaches said I should split the audience in half, imagining that one half is deaf and one half is blind. And if your portrayal can appeal to both halves, you’re a success.”
It’s one of her charms that Marquita Lister continues to marvel at her achievements.
“Joseph Campbell had a wonderful statement in one of his books,” she says. “’Follow your bliss!’ It so happens that I’m one of the few people who is living her dream, and I’m grateful for that. I don’t take it for granted.”
In the future she hopes to sing at the Met and also at Washington National Opera. Her mother, a retired teacher, and her other relatives live in D.C., and the soprano longs to perform in the city where she discovered her voice.
For now, it seems fitting that the last song she recorded movingly for Mr. Knight’s album was “Life Is Fine,” because for this versatile soprano, life truly is.
For more information about Ms. Lister, visit www.marquitalister.com.
