[Dixielandjazz] Deborah Voight Redux - Visual Impact on performances

[Stephen G Barbone]

Warning, not OKOM, but Opera. And it's long. So delete now if you have  
no sense of humor or interest in visual aspects of performance.   
Deborah Voight was discussed on the DJML in 2005 because she was fired  
from an Opera production for being "too heavy" and not able to fit  
into a slinky, black cocktail dress that the director insisted, be  
used. Let this be a warning to chick singers and unkempt musicians.  
<grin>
Cheers,
Steve Barbone

www.barbonestreet.com
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

June 11, 2008 - NY TIMES - by Anthony Tommasini
Second Date With a Little Black Dress

Deborah Voigt is finally putting on that little black dress.

On Monday Ms. Voigt, the acclaimed American soprano, will star in  
Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden,  
in London: the very production from which she was fired in 2004. At  
the time, the director, Christof Loy, proclaimed her too heavy to wear  
a sleek black cocktail dress that he deemed integral to his concept.  
The dress has since become a symbol of skewed priorities among opera  
directors who value a singer’s appearance over vocal artistry.

For the moment Ms. Voigt, who has not appeared at Covent Garden since  
2001 and who had weight-reduction surgery in 2004, is making light of  
the matter. Last week she and her publicists produced a video spoof,  
“Deborah Voigt: The Return of the Little Black Dress,” and posted it  
on YouTube.

As the video opens, a camera pans down a corridor of Ms. Voigt’s  
apartment building in New York. Over ominous sci-fi music in the  
background we hear Ms. Voigt doing vocal warm-ups. A “Beware of Diva”  
sign hangs from the door handle. The bell rings (to the tune of  
Brünnhilde’s “Hojotoho!”), and Ms. Voigt answers. The visitor is a  
slinky black dress on a black hanger, which speaks to her in an  
obsequious male voice.

“We weren’t a good fit,” the dress says, asking forgiveness. “I think  
we can make things work this time around.”

In a telephone interview from London on Monday, Ms. Voigt said: “I was  
sort of surprised that Covent Garden gave me the go-ahead for the  
YouTube video. But they loved it.”

To recap the controversy: After Ms. Voigt was fired from the  
production, she kept quiet about it for several months. When she  
finally went public, her story provoked infuriated reactions from  
opera buffs around the world and widespread coverage in the mainstream  
news media. A leading dramatic soprano, especially acclaimed for her  
singing of Strauss and Wagner, had been fired for being too fat: a  
blatant case of discrimination.

But the incident prodded her to action. It was during the very period  
when she was scheduled to appear in “Ariadne” that she underwent  
gastric bypass surgery, an operation subsidized by the substantial  
fees Covent Garden was contractually obliged to pay her. The procedure  
produced significant results. Ms. Voigt, having noticeably shed  
pounds, talked about her surgery, and her struggles with obesity since  
adolescence, for a New York Times article in March 2005.

Last year Peter Mario Katona, the casting director at Covent Garden,  
called Ms. Voigt to make amends. “I fell on the floor when I got the  
phone call,” she said in a recent interview in New York. “I wouldn’t  
exactly say he was apologetic. He just felt the time had come. They  
had their side, I had my side.”

She had assumed that the rapprochement might not occur until Covent  
Garden had a new administration. “I didn’t expect it to happen, at  
least not so quickly and not in the same production,” she said. “But  
I’m happy it worked out this way.”

Ms. Voigt, 47, defends the right of opera companies to take appearance  
into account when they are casting productions, while insisting that  
vocal artistry should come first. But in this case, she said, Covent  
Garden’s action was insensitive and avoidable.

“When I sang the Empress in Strauss’s ‘Frau Ohne Schatten’ at Covent  
Garden in 2001, I was as big as a house,” she said. “So they knew what  
they were getting when they hired me for ‘Ariadne.’ ”

Could her return to Covent Garden send the wrong message? Maybe. When  
she was overweight, she was fired. Now that her hips are thinner, she  
has been rehired.

Still, for Ms. Voigt there have been upsides to this humiliating  
episode in her life. For one, she looks and feels terrific. After her  
surgery, by monitoring her diet and exercise closely, this 5-foot-6  
soprano reduced her dress size from 30 (at her heaviest) to 14, with  
resulting benefits to her confidence and health. In recent seasons she  
has been winning acclaim for portraying characters meant to look  
alluring, like Puccini’s Tosca and, in a career milestone, Strauss’s  
Salome, at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2006.

And while she hopes that the little-black-dress incident will not be  
the defining moment of her career, she said, “It’s allowing me the  
chance to talk about the subject of obesity, especially childhood  
obesity.”

“It’s become so much more prevalent in society today, it really  
frightens me,” she added. “I had a weight problem, and will have one  
for the rest of my life. It’s a constant battle. Gastric bypass is not  
a cure, it’s a tool.”

Recently she took a vacation in the Dominican Republic and came back  
six pounds heavier. “I got on the scale, said, ‘O.K., enough of that.’  
” She was down at her gym at 7 the next morning.

Though Ms. Voigt’s position as one of today’s leading dramatic  
sopranos is as solid as ever, there have been varied reactions to her  
singing since her surgery, especially the colorings of her voice. Some  
opera buffs and critics detect a slight loss of warmth in her sound.  
Others counter that her voice has gained brightness and shimmer. It’s  
natural for voices to change colorings as a singer matures, though  
most tend to become darker and weightier over time. Ms. Voigt admits  
that the process of adjusting to a different-size “resonating  
chamber,” as she put it, took longer than she anticipated.

“I feel that I’m back on track,” she said. “People will have  
discussions about whether my voice has changed, the color of it. I  
can’t determine that.”

With her slimmer physique, Ms. Voigt said, she feels a new physical  
empowerment that comes through in her singing. “I would like to  
believe, and do believe, that what I am able to bring dramatically is  
much more interesting, much more liberating and free for me,” she said.

Her voice will increasingly be tested as she steadily moves into the  
most challenging roles of the dramatic-soprano repertory, including  
her first Brünnhilde in Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, which she will sing  
under James Levine when the Metropolitan Opera unveils its new  
production, beginning in the 2010-11 season.

Officials at Covent Garden have been trying to keep the preperformance  
press coverage about Ms. Voigt’s return fairly quiet. Asked to comment  
on the story, the company would only issue an official statement from  
Elaine Padmore, director of the Royal Opera: “Rehearsals are going  
extremely well and we are all looking forward with great excitement to  
Deborah Voigt’s performances in ‘Ariadne.’ ”

The tenor lead for four of the six performances is Robert Dean Smith,  
“my Tristan No. 3, I believe,” Ms. Voigt said. She was referring to  
the revolving-door casting of the part when the Met presented six  
performances of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” this spring, a  
production plagued by illness: Ms. Voigt sang Isolde opposite four  
Tristans.

She and Mr. Smith wanted to insert some inside jokes about the black- 
dress affair into the comic prologue of “Ariadne auf Naxos,” but the  
director, Andrew Sinclair, is hewing closely to the staging as  
conceived by Mr. Loy when the production was introduced in 2002. Mr.  
Sinclair “put the kibosh on the funny bits Robert and I had worked  
out,” Ms. Voigt said.

She has yet to meet Mr. Loy, who has not been attending rehearsals,  
though it is typical for the director of a production to cede the show  
to revival directors after it has been introduced.

The black dress seen in Ms. Voigt’s video, a mere slip of a thing, is  
not the actual costume from the production. “Thank the Lord, no,” Ms.  
Voigt said. In fact, she added, the actual costume has been fitted to  
the sopranos who have performed in this production, each time altered  
“to flatter the singer.”

Her costume fitting, given the attention it has received, was nerve- 
racking, Ms. Voigt said, but everything went fine. So now she simply  
has to sing the role. For Ms. Voigt, that has always been the easy part.




Steve Barbone

www.barbonestreet.com
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband