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LINDA RONSTADT REACHES FOR AN OPERATIC HIGH NOTE
www.nytimes.com/1984/11/25/arts/linda-ronstadt-reaches-for-an-operatic-high-note.html
By Bernard Holland
Nov. 25, 1984
Credit...The New York Times Archives
For Linda Ronstadt, ''La Boh eme'' is a tenuous stopover on the way from from a life she no longer wants to a destination still unknown. Rock's brilliant queen of the 1970's is 38 years old as 1985 approaches, and on the eve of her formal debut as Puccini's Mimi at the Public Theater, she seems alone in a world she really doesn't know and for which her past has only partly prepared her - ''too old to rock and roll,'' as Jethro Tull once sang, ''and too young to die.''
Miss Ronstadt may have earned $12 million as a pop singer in 1978, but the steely power that sent ''It's So Easy to Fall in Love'' to soaring, and gave such groaning intimacy to Gordon Jenkins's ''Goodbye,'' helps little in Puccini's opera. The role of Mimi hits Miss Ronstadt's voice in its tenderest spots - her sweet, undeveloped choir-boy upper register and more acutely in the so-called passaggio notes leading to it - the E Flat, E, F and G which carry the voice from its chest tones to those meant to rattle more brilliantly in the cavities of the head.
Miss Ronstadt is clearly worried. ''What am I doing? I ask myself,'' she said after a recent rehearsal, looking shy, cautious, good-natured, a little afraid. And throughout October's rehearsals and November's previews, her moods have swung between cautious optimism and downright despair.
The New York Shakespeare Festival is giving ''Boh eme'' Broadway fashion - with eight shows weekly at the Public using interchangeable principals. The role of Mimi, with all its vocal stresses, was not meant to be sung three days a week as Miss Ronstadt will do, and Joseph Papp, producer of the Shakespeare Festival, says that even if his star has to drop out of performances, he has strong enough singers to make the production work on its own. He also admits, however, that without Miss Ronstadt - or a big name like hers - ''La Boh eme'' would not have happened.
''In her past world, I think she was beginning to feel the earth crumble beneath her,'' thinks one close musical associate. Out of desire or professional necessity - more likely a combination of the two - the move, at any rate, is underway. It began roughly four years ago with her appearance in the Shakespeare Festival's ''Pirates of Penzance'' and has continued with the two albums of traditional popular songs with Nelson Riddle and his orchestra - ''What's New?'' and the recent ''Lush Life.'' Stephen Holden writing in The Times has called the latter ''a dazzlingly confident extension of the musical territory explored in 'What's New,' '' and if the buying public agrees, a third Ronstadt-Riddle collection is a likelihood. Miss Ronstadt will not likely waste the rest of her life on the past no matter where she turns. She has one of the truest ears and keenest minds in the music business, and as she says: ''I've always known my voice could make more kinds of sounds than it did. If I'd been born at the beginning of the 19th century, I'd definitely have been an opera singer; but when I was a teen-ager, I loved Little Richard so much, all I ever wanted was to sound like him.''
''I've been doing rock and roll for so long,'' she goes on. ''And those songs don't tell my story any more. I love them, but they are like old friendships - or love affairs - which didn't turn out to be what they felt like at the time. You sing the same word over and over again and it doesn't mean anything anymore.'' Now, 22 albums and countless tours later, Miss Ronstadt is tired. ''I've been on the road for 20 years,'' she says. ''I'm ready to cool it for a while.''
Wilford Leach, who is directing this ''Boh eme,'' offered Mimi to Miss Ronstadt three years ago. ''First she said she loved the music but wasn't that far along,'' he reports. ''But a year after, she came back and said she'd been singing it in the bathtub.''
''My father used to sing me the tunes in the car, but I'd never heard it all the way through,'' says Miss Ronstadt. ''To me, 'Boh eme' was like an old Buddy Holly song that everyone had forgotten.''
Her rehearsals at the Public Theater followed five strenuous weeks of recording sessions with Mr. Riddle. ''I've been singing five, six, seven hours a day in this new voice I don't know what to do with,'' she says. ''Sometimes I feel like someone let all the air out of my tires, but after a few days, I seem to come back a little stronger than before - like you do when you're lifting weights.'' She says she has had her throat checked by a doctor and that it seems basically healthy but weary.
Rock and roll prizes precision almost as much as it does energy, but in her fanatically well-crafted popular songs of the past, Miss Ronstadt has created her own discipline. She is less untrained than self-trained, and the dictates of Mimi's role lie immutable on pages of music written in another country by someone else 50 years before she was born. In addition, she cannot read the score, so armed with a tape recorder and her self-confessed skills as a ''parrot,'' she has listened to those around her and laboriously negotiated every line of Puccini's music - pondering daily the mysteries of the grace note and the infinite variety of the dotted rhythm.
Still, it is the physical problems that weigh heaviest. As Mimi, she is a little like a European soccer player, who, having spent a lifetime concentrating on his legs and feet, is suddenly required to pitch major league baseball. Miss Ronstadt has centered two decades of singing toward the bottom of her voice, leaving the top frail and the passage to it - which demands a blending of chest and head sounds - largely undeveloped. Vocal cords are naturally thick at the bottom, narrow at the top; and it is the strength of the surrounding muscles that supports brilliance and power of tone. Though Miss Ronstadt's technique is stronger than when she played Mabel, the dainty ingenue of ''Pirates,'' Mimi demands a vocal mechanism well built throughout.
Puccini meant Mimi for singers trained in negotiating register shifts smoothly, unnoticeably. Between Miss Ronstadt's powerful middle voice and her undeveloped top, however, lies a startling chasm; the bridge between these two territories is just where the role largely lies. As a result, she has been exhausting herself daily - crossing and recrossing this still fragile and tenuous span. ''It's not that Mimi is so high,'' she explains in her endearing way. ''It's so middle.''
''And there's this idea that I've been systematically working on my voice,'' she continues. ''It takes 20 years to make an opera technique. I can't do it in six months. Opera singers develop daily habits over the years - exercises, warming up - which I don't have. And let's say I'm on tour and do have a day off to work. I'm in the middle of Ohio and where is my teacher?''
Marge Rivingston, Miss Ronstadt's New York vocal coach, points out that the yelling ''belt'' sound, so prevalent on the rock and musical stage, is in this particular voice mitigated by a blending of head tones. ''That's why it recuperates so quickly,'' she says. Miss Ronstadt is also gaining a more malleable sound. Mr. Riddle, for one, hears a dramatic easing of tone and widening of color from their first record together to the second.
Singers have the option of building the strength around their vocal cords from the bottom up or from the top down. Miss Ronstadt is taking the latter course - as most opera singers do. The business of activating, using and slowly developing the upper muscles began tentatively with ''Pirates.'' Miss Rivingston thinks her pupil can strengthen them a lot more through vocal exercise and that age does not stand in the way.
Miss Ronstadt, moreover, brings an acute musical self-awareness to her problems. ''Singers hear sound within themselves resonating in their bones,'' says Miss Rivingston. ''People outside hear the same thing except it's resonating through the air - it's a softer sound. While opera singers hardly ever have a chcnce to experience themselves from 'the outside,' rock singers are tuned to their own voices. They spend hours on end in recording studios hearing playbacks of themselves.''
''Linda has marvelous projection,'' Mr. Riddle says, ''and you'll hear in the new album how that biting sound has modulated. She's begining to find a real softness and sweetness. Yes, her voice may be frail for Puccini, but perhaps she can capitalize on that frailty, make it work for her.''
If Miss Ronstadt's Mimi is different from any other, so is this whole production. First of all, there is Michael Starobin, Broadway's star young orchestrator, late of ''Sunday in the Park with George,'' who has squeezed Puccini's rich Romantic orchestra into a pit band of 12 players. Mr. Starobin says all Puccini's music is there, but the unwary will be startled to hear the Italian composer's sweeping first violins squeezed into a single soprano saxophone.
There is also Gary Morris as Rodolfo - a country singer who delivers David Spencer's English adaptation with a Tennessee twang. Virtually no one in the production has sung or played in opera before; few have even seen one. Said one musician after an early rehearsal, ''Isn't there any dialogue in this show?''
Mr. Leach thinks opera works only if the singing is incandescent, and he was determined to cast good singers with strong personalities who were the right age regardless of any clash of styles. Thus, he is delighted with his Mimi. ''I like that break at the top of Linda's voice,'' he says. ''What she does is perfectly pure, though it won't remind you of opera singing. It's why I also like Americans doing Shakespeare. They give it a raw energy.
''My interest is in theater, not second-rate performances of opera. But what we are doing is Puccini. It's his plot and his music - not an arrangement of it - though we have moved the action to Puccini's day in the 1890's. I think Puccini might have liked Linda in the part. He was as full of life as she is.''
That these young singers are just now discovering the world's favorite opera, however, should not amaze us. Opera and popular music - now rushing toward their exciting, still virginal embrace at the Public Theater - have not been the best of friends in recent times. Indeed, most of Miss Ronstadt's previous fans have only the faintest idea what opera is, and their experience has taught them (not totally without cause) to mistrust the operatic voice as stilted and unnatural.
Two hundred years ago, when music had fewer listeners to reach and smaller places to do it in, all kinds of singing shared much the same values and techniques. As audiences have grown, however, opera has turned to more ringing declamation while popular music discovered the microphone.
But popular singing styles, as the critic Henry Pleasants once pointed out, may not really be a new frontier at all but rather a return - albeit an unconscious one - to previously occupied territory. The singing methods of the earliest operas of the 17th century, in other words, bear a striking resemblance to those of the Crosbys, the Sinatras, the Vaughans and the Ronstadts of our own day. Monteverdian opera, like the songs of Louis Armstrong, did not bowl us over with stentorian set pieces but rather carried on a musical conversation. Words shaped the music and not the other way around.
The Public Theater's ''Boh eme'' will operate from a theater seating several hundred people on three sides of the stage, so that Rodolfo and Mimi and their friends will be able - to borrow a Ronstadtian phrase - to ''snuggle up'' to their listeners just as Caccini and Cavalli were able to do three centuries before. Still, the principals will use the body microphones so prevalent in New York's musical theater.
Microphones or no, vhese players will still find themselves trapped between Puccini's demands for aural brilliance and their mandate to tell a story intimately. The upper passages worry Mr. Leach. ''Up high,'' he says, ''only half of the vowel sounds are coming out,'' and what he is confronting is one of opera's ongoing problems of communication - the position of the throat muscles and vocal cords in the upper register which limit the range of accurately produced vowels. Mr. Leach is reluctant to transpose the music downward into more comfortable ''pop'' keys, fearing the change would alter the music in a harmful way.
So in a sense, Linda Ronstadt is right at home in this production - she, too, caught between two worlds of style, like one of those science fiction heroines frozen between dimensions and looking for a way out. She has the mind and the spirit to move anywhere she wants, but in ''La Boh eme'' her technique and her ambition are in a race which has yet to be decided. This very vulnerability may make Mimi a success and then, it may not.
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 25, 1984, Section 2, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: LINDA RONSTADT REACHES FOR AN OPERATIC HIGH NOTE. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
www.nytimes.com/1984/11/25/arts/linda-ronstadt-reaches-for-an-operatic-high-note.html
By Bernard Holland
Nov. 25, 1984
Credit...The New York Times Archives
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November 25, 1984, Section 2, Page 1Buy Reprints
New York Times subscribers* enjoy full access to TimesMachine—view over 150 years of New York Times journalism, as it originally appeared.
SUBSCRIBE
*Does not include Crossword-only or Cooking-only subscribers.
About the Archive
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.
For Linda Ronstadt, ''La Boh eme'' is a tenuous stopover on the way from from a life she no longer wants to a destination still unknown. Rock's brilliant queen of the 1970's is 38 years old as 1985 approaches, and on the eve of her formal debut as Puccini's Mimi at the Public Theater, she seems alone in a world she really doesn't know and for which her past has only partly prepared her - ''too old to rock and roll,'' as Jethro Tull once sang, ''and too young to die.''
Miss Ronstadt may have earned $12 million as a pop singer in 1978, but the steely power that sent ''It's So Easy to Fall in Love'' to soaring, and gave such groaning intimacy to Gordon Jenkins's ''Goodbye,'' helps little in Puccini's opera. The role of Mimi hits Miss Ronstadt's voice in its tenderest spots - her sweet, undeveloped choir-boy upper register and more acutely in the so-called passaggio notes leading to it - the E Flat, E, F and G which carry the voice from its chest tones to those meant to rattle more brilliantly in the cavities of the head.
Miss Ronstadt is clearly worried. ''What am I doing? I ask myself,'' she said after a recent rehearsal, looking shy, cautious, good-natured, a little afraid. And throughout October's rehearsals and November's previews, her moods have swung between cautious optimism and downright despair.
The New York Shakespeare Festival is giving ''Boh eme'' Broadway fashion - with eight shows weekly at the Public using interchangeable principals. The role of Mimi, with all its vocal stresses, was not meant to be sung three days a week as Miss Ronstadt will do, and Joseph Papp, producer of the Shakespeare Festival, says that even if his star has to drop out of performances, he has strong enough singers to make the production work on its own. He also admits, however, that without Miss Ronstadt - or a big name like hers - ''La Boh eme'' would not have happened.
''In her past world, I think she was beginning to feel the earth crumble beneath her,'' thinks one close musical associate. Out of desire or professional necessity - more likely a combination of the two - the move, at any rate, is underway. It began roughly four years ago with her appearance in the Shakespeare Festival's ''Pirates of Penzance'' and has continued with the two albums of traditional popular songs with Nelson Riddle and his orchestra - ''What's New?'' and the recent ''Lush Life.'' Stephen Holden writing in The Times has called the latter ''a dazzlingly confident extension of the musical territory explored in 'What's New,' '' and if the buying public agrees, a third Ronstadt-Riddle collection is a likelihood. Miss Ronstadt will not likely waste the rest of her life on the past no matter where she turns. She has one of the truest ears and keenest minds in the music business, and as she says: ''I've always known my voice could make more kinds of sounds than it did. If I'd been born at the beginning of the 19th century, I'd definitely have been an opera singer; but when I was a teen-ager, I loved Little Richard so much, all I ever wanted was to sound like him.''
''I've been doing rock and roll for so long,'' she goes on. ''And those songs don't tell my story any more. I love them, but they are like old friendships - or love affairs - which didn't turn out to be what they felt like at the time. You sing the same word over and over again and it doesn't mean anything anymore.'' Now, 22 albums and countless tours later, Miss Ronstadt is tired. ''I've been on the road for 20 years,'' she says. ''I'm ready to cool it for a while.''
Wilford Leach, who is directing this ''Boh eme,'' offered Mimi to Miss Ronstadt three years ago. ''First she said she loved the music but wasn't that far along,'' he reports. ''But a year after, she came back and said she'd been singing it in the bathtub.''
''My father used to sing me the tunes in the car, but I'd never heard it all the way through,'' says Miss Ronstadt. ''To me, 'Boh eme' was like an old Buddy Holly song that everyone had forgotten.''
Her rehearsals at the Public Theater followed five strenuous weeks of recording sessions with Mr. Riddle. ''I've been singing five, six, seven hours a day in this new voice I don't know what to do with,'' she says. ''Sometimes I feel like someone let all the air out of my tires, but after a few days, I seem to come back a little stronger than before - like you do when you're lifting weights.'' She says she has had her throat checked by a doctor and that it seems basically healthy but weary.
Rock and roll prizes precision almost as much as it does energy, but in her fanatically well-crafted popular songs of the past, Miss Ronstadt has created her own discipline. She is less untrained than self-trained, and the dictates of Mimi's role lie immutable on pages of music written in another country by someone else 50 years before she was born. In addition, she cannot read the score, so armed with a tape recorder and her self-confessed skills as a ''parrot,'' she has listened to those around her and laboriously negotiated every line of Puccini's music - pondering daily the mysteries of the grace note and the infinite variety of the dotted rhythm.
Still, it is the physical problems that weigh heaviest. As Mimi, she is a little like a European soccer player, who, having spent a lifetime concentrating on his legs and feet, is suddenly required to pitch major league baseball. Miss Ronstadt has centered two decades of singing toward the bottom of her voice, leaving the top frail and the passage to it - which demands a blending of chest and head sounds - largely undeveloped. Vocal cords are naturally thick at the bottom, narrow at the top; and it is the strength of the surrounding muscles that supports brilliance and power of tone. Though Miss Ronstadt's technique is stronger than when she played Mabel, the dainty ingenue of ''Pirates,'' Mimi demands a vocal mechanism well built throughout.
Puccini meant Mimi for singers trained in negotiating register shifts smoothly, unnoticeably. Between Miss Ronstadt's powerful middle voice and her undeveloped top, however, lies a startling chasm; the bridge between these two territories is just where the role largely lies. As a result, she has been exhausting herself daily - crossing and recrossing this still fragile and tenuous span. ''It's not that Mimi is so high,'' she explains in her endearing way. ''It's so middle.''
''And there's this idea that I've been systematically working on my voice,'' she continues. ''It takes 20 years to make an opera technique. I can't do it in six months. Opera singers develop daily habits over the years - exercises, warming up - which I don't have. And let's say I'm on tour and do have a day off to work. I'm in the middle of Ohio and where is my teacher?''
Marge Rivingston, Miss Ronstadt's New York vocal coach, points out that the yelling ''belt'' sound, so prevalent on the rock and musical stage, is in this particular voice mitigated by a blending of head tones. ''That's why it recuperates so quickly,'' she says. Miss Ronstadt is also gaining a more malleable sound. Mr. Riddle, for one, hears a dramatic easing of tone and widening of color from their first record together to the second.
Singers have the option of building the strength around their vocal cords from the bottom up or from the top down. Miss Ronstadt is taking the latter course - as most opera singers do. The business of activating, using and slowly developing the upper muscles began tentatively with ''Pirates.'' Miss Rivingston thinks her pupil can strengthen them a lot more through vocal exercise and that age does not stand in the way.
Miss Ronstadt, moreover, brings an acute musical self-awareness to her problems. ''Singers hear sound within themselves resonating in their bones,'' says Miss Rivingston. ''People outside hear the same thing except it's resonating through the air - it's a softer sound. While opera singers hardly ever have a chcnce to experience themselves from 'the outside,' rock singers are tuned to their own voices. They spend hours on end in recording studios hearing playbacks of themselves.''
''Linda has marvelous projection,'' Mr. Riddle says, ''and you'll hear in the new album how that biting sound has modulated. She's begining to find a real softness and sweetness. Yes, her voice may be frail for Puccini, but perhaps she can capitalize on that frailty, make it work for her.''
If Miss Ronstadt's Mimi is different from any other, so is this whole production. First of all, there is Michael Starobin, Broadway's star young orchestrator, late of ''Sunday in the Park with George,'' who has squeezed Puccini's rich Romantic orchestra into a pit band of 12 players. Mr. Starobin says all Puccini's music is there, but the unwary will be startled to hear the Italian composer's sweeping first violins squeezed into a single soprano saxophone.
There is also Gary Morris as Rodolfo - a country singer who delivers David Spencer's English adaptation with a Tennessee twang. Virtually no one in the production has sung or played in opera before; few have even seen one. Said one musician after an early rehearsal, ''Isn't there any dialogue in this show?''
Mr. Leach thinks opera works only if the singing is incandescent, and he was determined to cast good singers with strong personalities who were the right age regardless of any clash of styles. Thus, he is delighted with his Mimi. ''I like that break at the top of Linda's voice,'' he says. ''What she does is perfectly pure, though it won't remind you of opera singing. It's why I also like Americans doing Shakespeare. They give it a raw energy.
''My interest is in theater, not second-rate performances of opera. But what we are doing is Puccini. It's his plot and his music - not an arrangement of it - though we have moved the action to Puccini's day in the 1890's. I think Puccini might have liked Linda in the part. He was as full of life as she is.''
That these young singers are just now discovering the world's favorite opera, however, should not amaze us. Opera and popular music - now rushing toward their exciting, still virginal embrace at the Public Theater - have not been the best of friends in recent times. Indeed, most of Miss Ronstadt's previous fans have only the faintest idea what opera is, and their experience has taught them (not totally without cause) to mistrust the operatic voice as stilted and unnatural.
Two hundred years ago, when music had fewer listeners to reach and smaller places to do it in, all kinds of singing shared much the same values and techniques. As audiences have grown, however, opera has turned to more ringing declamation while popular music discovered the microphone.
But popular singing styles, as the critic Henry Pleasants once pointed out, may not really be a new frontier at all but rather a return - albeit an unconscious one - to previously occupied territory. The singing methods of the earliest operas of the 17th century, in other words, bear a striking resemblance to those of the Crosbys, the Sinatras, the Vaughans and the Ronstadts of our own day. Monteverdian opera, like the songs of Louis Armstrong, did not bowl us over with stentorian set pieces but rather carried on a musical conversation. Words shaped the music and not the other way around.
The Public Theater's ''Boh eme'' will operate from a theater seating several hundred people on three sides of the stage, so that Rodolfo and Mimi and their friends will be able - to borrow a Ronstadtian phrase - to ''snuggle up'' to their listeners just as Caccini and Cavalli were able to do three centuries before. Still, the principals will use the body microphones so prevalent in New York's musical theater.
Microphones or no, vhese players will still find themselves trapped between Puccini's demands for aural brilliance and their mandate to tell a story intimately. The upper passages worry Mr. Leach. ''Up high,'' he says, ''only half of the vowel sounds are coming out,'' and what he is confronting is one of opera's ongoing problems of communication - the position of the throat muscles and vocal cords in the upper register which limit the range of accurately produced vowels. Mr. Leach is reluctant to transpose the music downward into more comfortable ''pop'' keys, fearing the change would alter the music in a harmful way.
So in a sense, Linda Ronstadt is right at home in this production - she, too, caught between two worlds of style, like one of those science fiction heroines frozen between dimensions and looking for a way out. She has the mind and the spirit to move anywhere she wants, but in ''La Boh eme'' her technique and her ambition are in a race which has yet to be decided. This very vulnerability may make Mimi a success and then, it may not.
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 25, 1984, Section 2, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: LINDA RONSTADT REACHES FOR AN OPERATIC HIGH NOTE. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe