Entrevista com Jessye Norman

A FAMOSA SOPRANO AFRO-AMERICANA JESSYE NORMAN CONCEDEU UMA ENTREVISTA MAGNÍFICA PARA NA BIBLIOTECA PÚBLICA DE NOVA YORK.
ROLEX ARTS WEEKEND JESSYE NORMAN in Conversation with Paul Holdengräber November 11, 2011 LIVE from the New York Public Library www.nypl.org/live Celeste Bartos Forum PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Good evening. Good evening. How wonderful. I mean, this must be a dream come true. I come onstage and Jessye Norman says “good evening” to me. Is this for real? Is this possible? I’m just going to pinch myself. Forgive me a second. Yes, I think it is for real. It is so wonderful to welcome you here tonight to the New York Public Library. It’s a great pleasure and privilege to have Jessye Norman here. It’s a great pleasure and privilege to be working with the Rolex Mentorship Program. My name—I sometimes forget to say it—is Paul Holdengräber, and I’m the Director of LIVE from the New York Public Library. As all of you have heard me say so many times, my goal at the Library is simply to make the lions roar. The lions have names—you may not know them and I’d like to inform you about them. Their names are Patience and Fortitude. The way to remember Fortitude is quite easy—it’s closer to Forty-second Street. (laughter) And so, as I said, my goal is to make the lions roar, or when we have Jay-Z, to make them rap. With Jessye Norman it is to make them sing in all tongues and all songs from, well, her repertoire, we’ll see, is so broad and so extraordinary and so expansive. As I was saying to her earlier, before coming onstage, I spent many years growing up— insofar that that happened—in Belgium, and there was something called, I think it still exists, called Discotheque Nationale, where every week I would go and get ten, twelve, fifteen records for very, very, very modest cost, and every six months I would have to bring in a stylus. They would look to see if the stylus still could play the record well. Seems very antiquated now and it makes me feel rather old. But it was really fantastic because I remember there were weeks which were Jessye Norman weeks, where I would bring out every possible record the Discotheque Nationale had of her music, so it’s magnificent and marvelous to have her here tonight. I have thank-yous, bear with me, these are all people who have been extraordinarily important in bringing this weekend together. We began yesterday with Gilberto Gil, who’s here in the front. (applause) Gilberto Gil, one—it was one of the most extraordinary evenings of my life, I’m still sort of recovering from it. And tomorrow I will have the great pleasure of speaking with Osvaldo Golijov and José Van Dam. I don’t know if José Van Dam is here tonight, but I’m very much looking forward to that evening and there are so many events. Hans Magnus Enzensberger is speaking with Tracy Smith. Ben Frost at the very end will do a performance in the Reading Room. We’ve only done a couple before. Once with Maira Kalman, I think that was probably the first time, I got into quite a lot of trouble. But it was really great fun. We had E. B. White and she did an illustration of E. B. White and Strunk, and we had opera singers singing the rules of grammar and probably breaking every possible rule thereby of silence in the Reading Room. It was great, it was great to do that, and I’m very glad that we’re finishing this festival with that performance. Brian Eno and Peter Sellars and Anish Kapoor will be here on Sunday. You have the program. Please take a look at it. I would like to very much thank Rebecca Irvin, the director of the Rolex Mentorship/Protégé Arts Initiative. Rebecca, thank you so much. (applause) And I won’t say too much about the mentorship program except that in some very deep way it means so much to me in an age when craftsmanship seems to be waning to some extent. Maybe we’ll talk about that, because I know it’s something that Jessye Norman is very interested in as well reviving through education so powerfully and so—with such passion and such optimism and dare I say such joy in the face of extraordinary adversity, of course, this notion of craftsmanship. And I—when this program was presented to me and the opportunity came about to realize it, I immediately thought and I mentioned this yesterday, so forgive me for those of you who have heard it yesterday, but there’s a wonderful essay by Walter Benjamin where he compares the storyteller to the potter. The potter leaves his fingers on the pot, the storyteller leaves his imprint on the story and that passage between a younger and an older generation, between someone who has perfected their craft and someone who’s learning their craft, the whole notion that it takes time, and that there really are no shortcuts to becoming fully able, as Gilberto Gil was saying, we aspire to totality but in some way you know it’s an aspiration. We are total and yet it’s a work in progress. There are other people I would love to thank. Nicholas Bohnet, also from the Rolex Foundation and all his wonderful colleagues. I have had the pleasure of working with them now for many months and it’s been a great joy. The office, I would like to thank, Rachel Chanoff, Olli Chanoff, Nadine Goellner, as well as Alison Buchbinder, Fred Schroeder, from the Resnicow Schroeder Associates, who have helped us do an enormous amount of outreach, you’ll be reading a lot of articles about this initiative and the various programs. All of my colleagues at the New York Public Library who have supported this magnificent endeavor, from Kate Stober in our press office, to Charles Jabour, or Charlie Jabour as some people call him, my new producer, Mariel Fiedler, the office coordinator and Tumblr maverick, Anthony Audi, my research assistant extraordinaire, to all my colleagues too many to mention who have assisted me in making this evening possible, to our new president Tony Marx, who extends his warm welcome to all of you tonight. Thank you so very much. (applause) Now it is my great pleasure, really my great pleasure, to bring up to the stage Jessye Norman. (applause) And it is my great pleasure also to bring Jeb Patton and one thing to tell you before I leave the stage, because I think this is not a moment for me to stay here, is that Jeb Patton is tonight having his debut with Jessye Norman. (applause) And finally, as I leave you in the company of the resplendent Jessye Norman, you know that for the last couple of years I’ve asked various people who have come to this stage, the extraordinary talent we have the opportunity of bringing here, to give me a biography of themselves in seven words, a haiku of sorts. I think Gilberto Gil gave me nine words. Jessye Norman was more obedient, and she gave me seven words a few moments ago and I would like to read them in the order she delivered them. “Curious. Busy. Engaged. Focused. Joy-filled. Human. God-loving.” Jessye Norman. (applause) JESSYE NORMAN: Thank you. Thank you very much. Jeb Patton and I are delighted to be with you and to bring you three songs. Harold Arlen, “Sleeping Bee,” Duke Ellington, “Solitude,” George Gershwin, “I’ve Got Rhythm.” (Jessye Norman sings “Sleeping Bee”) (applause) JESSYE NORMAN: Thank you. Thank you very much. (Jessye Norman sings “Solitude”) (applause) Thank you guys, Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. And now for something totally different. (Jessye Norman sings “I’ve Got Rhythm”) (applause) JESSYE NORMAN: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much! We don’t know anything else. Thank you very much. Now let me see if I know how this works. Thank you, Jeb Patton! (applause) Good evening, everyone. We’re so delighted to be here with you. I would like to speak for a few moments about art. Big A-R-T. You are no doubt filled with your own knowledge of the importance of art in our lives. Give me just a moment of your time as I find we are too often treated as though work with our bodies were less important than work with our minds or our heads more important than our hearts. If you and I had been sitting here in an era other than this wildly modern one, we would rest on chairs or stools made by hand, each one a little different from the other, each one a unique expression of human creativity. We would wear woven clothing and carved jewelry that would be a part of a communal tradition yet individually unique. We would celebrate with food and drink that would be creations in themselves, taken from vessels that would be objects of art as well as utensils for everyday use. We would surely be singing and dancing together. We would be living artfully without trying. Education in the arts for our children is not only desired; it is essential. We who support our communities and thereby our school systems are remiss in allowing arts education to simply fall away from the schools’ curriculum. (applause) Yes, we are remiss. We owe it to our children, this education in the arts, all children. We have to do better. Art brings us, all of us, together as a family because it is an individual expression of universal human experience. It comes from that part of us that is without fear, prejudice, malice, or any of the other things that we create in order to separate ourselves one from the other. Art makes each of us whole by insisting that we use all of our senses—our heads and our hearts—that we express with our bodies, our voices, our hands, as well as with our minds. In Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s single poem, which he called “Ode,” he wrote in praise of artists everywhere, “We are the music-makers and we are the dreamers of dreams, wandering by lone sea-breakers and sitting by desolate streams on whom the pale moon gleams, yet we are the movers and shakers of the world forever, it seems.” What a thought. Creative spirits, the movers and the shakers of the world. Where could all this lead? We might come across the notion that an awakened spirit, this ability to express ourselves through these individual offerings, could well be the real meaning of life, that the exploration of our own imagination might be our real life’s work. Please listen to the words by an unknown author that arrived in my mailbox recently and which I offer to you as a kind of watchword for this beautiful weekend devoted to all that art can be, can do, all that art is: “On the surface of the world right now there is war and violence and things seem dark, but calmly and quietly at the same time, something else is happening. Underground an inner revolution is taking place and certain ones of us are being called to a higher light. It is a silent revolution from the inside out. We are slowly creating a new world with the power of our minds and hearts. We follow with passion and joy our spiritual intelligence. We are dropping soft love bombs when no one is looking. Poems, hugs, music, photography, movies, kind words, smiles, dance, beautiful graphic art, random acts of kindness. We each express ourselves in our own ways with our own gifts and talents. “Yes, be the change that you want to see in this world. This is our motto that fills our hearts. We know it is the only way to real transformation. We know that quietly and humbly we have the power of all the oceans combined. Our work is slow and meticulous like the formation of the mountains. And yet, with this opening of the spirit self, entire tectonic plates shall be moved in the decades to come. Entire tectonic plates. This intelligence of the heart is embedded in the timeless evolutionary pulse of all human beings. Be the change you want to see in this world. No one can do it for you. The door is open. All are welcome.” Now is that not something to find in your e-mail in-box? The point of that wonderful message and my charge to you this evening is that our world is in need of you. In need of the compassion that a practice in the arts can well help to develop and that we must reach out to one another with arms outstretched to all comers. The malaise is ours to correct. I ask you to offer the teaching of your hearts and minds, the fullness of art, the true music of your soul. And imagine if you will the harmony this could bring to our world. Thank you. (applause) JESSYE NORMAN: Thank you. It was okay? PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I think it was okay. JESSYE NORMAN: Thank you. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I think it was very good and I think we should talk about that first. JESSYE NORMAN: Okay, let’s talk about that. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I think you’re a woman on a mission, are you not? JESSYE NORMAN: Yes. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Arts education matters to you so very much that you felt the need to open a school. JESSYE NORMAN: To open a school in the town in which I was born, Augusta, Georgia. I’m very lucky to have a wonderful board of directors and wonderful people who do the day-to-day work at this school and we take children at their most vulnerable, and their most difficult age, middle-school age. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: That’s twelve— JESSYE NORMAN: Eleven to about fifteen. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Oh dear. (laughter) JESSYE NORMAN: Yes. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Having a nine-year-old, I’m fearful. JESSYE NORMAN: Yes. Coming in thinking that, “well, I mean, gee whiz, I passed the audition, and I get to go to this school tuition-free, but, you know, what’s it going to be like, I mean, am I really going to learn anything?” And they come in walking sometimes, looking at the floor, and I go back in six weeks and they say, “Hello, Miss Norman, I’m a writer, (laughter) my name is Louise Miller,” and I say, “Well, I’m so glad to know about you, Louise, and I will tell Edward Albee to pull his socks up, because you’re on your way.” And they are so full of joy, once they understand what it is that the school is offering them, which is a way into their own spirits, a way into self-discovery, and they feel and they can show, of course, in their auditions, which we do have, and we also have agreements and contracts with their parents, that mean that they must rehearse and practice whatever it is they’re studying with us at home as well, and the parents are very happy to be involved and it helps us so, so much and they change practically before your eyes. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The parents sign what? JESSYE NORMAN: They sign a contract that the children, whatever it is they’re studying with us, whether it’s a single instrument, or group singing or dancing or writing or art or pottery or whatever it is, that they will also practice at home, so that when they come to us, because they go to regular school, as it were, and they come to us after school for three and a half hours every day and they are so talented some of them, it just makes me weep when I see some of them with these marvelous voices, and they are thirteen, fourteen years old, and I just hope that they are going to be all right, and that they won’t be exploited, and that that voice will still be in that body at age twenty-five and not having been ruined by an overzealous somebody or the other, and that is probably particularly for the young little singer people, the singers, that’s always my worry, that they will be exploited and the voice will disappear, because voices unlike sort of other instruments, if we abuse them, the vocal cords are probably some of the least forgiving parts of our body. If we abuse that instrument and if we do not learn how to support that sound that we like to make, that we do not understand what the diaphragm is or what the xiphoid process does or how the lungs are meant to expand and all of that sort of thing, and we put sort of emphasis on this so that our chins are held a certain way and all the rest of it. It is unforgiving. These muscles are for chewing. They will give way and your voice will shake and it will sound like that and that can happen very early on, it doesn’t have to wait until you are sort of ninety-five. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But for every age—for every age there is a certain kind of music one should sing? A certain kind— JESSYE NORMAN: Well, every age there is a certain—I think I would say—I don’t know if I would say kind, let me think of a word. I would say that for every age there is appropriate music to sing. And that a thirteen-year-old Madame Butterfly could be very interesting, (laughter) but she won’t be an eighteen-year-old Madame Butterfly, and that is what I find really very distressing. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: At the same time, a twenty-five-year-old Madame Butterfly— JESSYE NORMAN: In the right house, with a good conductor, with an orchestra that knows what you mean when you do this so that you—I don’t want to get too technical here, but in Puccini a great deal of the time, as the singers in the audience will know, very often what you’re singing is also being played by the violins or some other instrument in the orchestra, which means that your voice is being doubled by something and if your voice is not sufficiently prepared, therefore meaning you’ve had enough training and enough experience to cope with that, you can compete with the orchestra rather than being carried by it. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But I’m also interested by a twenty-five-year-old Madame Butterfly as opposed to a forty-five-year-old Madame Butterfly who might understand something very different about Madame Butterfly, and the relationship between age and taste, between age and understanding, between reading a book, if one goes in that direction, when one is younger than some of the protagonists and rereading it when one is older than they are. JESSYE NORMAN: Yes, yes, of course, you are going to bring more of your own life to this whether if you were twenty-five and lucky enough to sing in the right circumstances this particular opera that we’ve mentioned, that could be a wonderful experience and if you’re very lucky to still be sort of doing this at age forty-five, you will have so much more of your own life experience to bring to that role, and it is a tragic role for those of you who know that particular opera, Madame Butterfly, it does not end happily. And there are so many instances where the character might be described as a very, very young person, and there is a tendency, and I understand it, to have a very, very young person to do that particular role, but it is not very good for that very young person. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What you were saying earlier about the frailty of the voice. I mean, there are such examples of it, Anna Moffo, I mean there are so many examples of singers who, I mean you were talking earlier about the fear you have in your school that some of these children may be used too much. JESSYE NORMAN: Well, they certainly won’t be used too much at our school, because, but if they’re heard by whomever and somebody says, “Yes, well you must come and do this particular role and we’ll take you off-Broadway,” or whatever, that kind of thing, it’s tempting, and it’s wonderful, and you want them to have wonderful success, but we want them to be ready and prepared for it. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: So one of the things your school tries to teach the students is to say no? JESSYE NORMAN: Patience. To understand that in the arts, that doing something over and over again in a rehearsal space is a very good practice so that when the occasion arrives that you might be able to do that in front of an audience you are absolutely ready to do it and we try to teach that it is important to understand that practice is necessary. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And there are no shortcuts. JESSYE NORMAN: And there are no shortcuts, and this whole idea of these horrible reality shows. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I like how you say that. (applause) JESSYE NORMAN: I’m sorry, I blame television for everything that is wrong in the world, so you people will have to forgive me. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It makes it simple, at least there’s one place. JESSYE NORMAN: But children somehow gather the idea that if they sort of sing loudly enough and for the right person that they’ll have a recording contract that night and they’ll be famous next week, which could happen, but then, you know, what about the week after that? PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Because this sentence matters to you so much I’d like to repeat it. JESSYE NORMAN: Yes. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And for you to expand a little bit more on this quotation that I do love also, the Albert Einstein quotation, “the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.” JESSYE NORMAN: Yes. And I think that when one realizes and understands and knows about the brain of Albert Einstein that he would feel that the possibility of going into your own mind on exploration was somehow more important than all of the knowledge that he had. I mean, when you think of the knowledge that he had and the knowledge that he imparted to us, and there was probably a lot more that he never got around to writing or saying, but when one imagines that a person of that depth of thought would say to us that positive fantasy is the way to go. It’s rather wonderful— PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But do you think it’s partly because he believed in fantasy that he was able to become so deep in some sense, that the possibility of imagining other realities— JESSYE NORMAN: Yes, of course. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: —of empathy, of putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes, however uncomfortable they may be? JESSYE NORMAN: Absolutely. I’m trying to think, I want to get this straight, maybe somebody in the audience can help me with another quote from Einstein. He said something like if at first an idea is not seen as ridiculous, there is no hope for it. (laughter) And I think that that is wonderful. If it doesn’t seem as though it is completely incredible and has no merit whatsoever, then there is no hope that it can ever be. And I think that that is wonderful. I really love that. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I do too. I’m wondering why I love it. Can you repeat it one more time? JESSYE NORMAN: Yes, it’s—I’m sure that I’m not using exactly the right words, but he said something like, “If at first an idea is not thought to be ridiculous there is no hope for it.” That a new idea has to seem quite unbelievable. I mean when you think about Steve Jobs saying that he would create what he was able to create, it had to have seemed to the people to whom he first spoke, “What is he talking about? The Inter-what? The tablet for what? It will be able to do what? Are you kidding? We can hardly get the telephone to work properly.” (laughter) I’m sure at first the idea must have seemed incredible. I have a story of friends of mine, they tell this on themselves, that a long time ago, not that long ago, they were approached by the young man called Bill Gates and he said that he was working on something in his garage, in his garage we say in this country, sorry. And that he needed some financial support to get him going and he explained to them what it was he was thinking about doing and they said, “You can’t be serious,” and they unfortunately didn’t invest. (laughter) They tell this story on themselves. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Why those three pieces of music to start out with, because you sent them to me in advance and I can’t figure it out, quite. JESSYE NORMAN: It doesn’t have any sort of meaning other than that I happen to love them, I mean there are so many songs that I love, but, you know, you have to sort of choose, and you can’t sort of sing everything you love every night, we’d be here for quite a few days, (laughter) but I sing a lot of American music in Europe and I talk about the composers and I talk about the people that have made some of these songs famous, and I talk about them because I wish to point out that outside, even taken away from the context, taken out of the musical and simply presented as a song onstage in a recital, that these composers were wonderful composers and that they have merit, and I love being in Vienna and someone is asking me about, “What is it about Duke Ellington that you find so fascinating?” And I love to say that Duke Ellington said something that I think is really very, very clever. He said there are only two kinds of music, good music and that other kind. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Which reminded me of the preface of Dorian Gray, where he says, books are well written or badly written, that’s all. JESSYE NORMAN: That’s all. I quite agree. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: That’s all. End of story. JESSYE NORMAN: Absolutely. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Now let’s go to some of the music that was so important to you. I’d like to start by surprising you with track number seven. (“Autumn Serenade” plays) JESSYE NORMAN: Oh, let’s listen to the rest of it. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You were really getting into it, huh? JESSYE NORMAN: Well, “Autumn Serenade.” PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Coltrane matters greatly to you. I don’t know if Hartman does, I imagine he does. JESSYE NORMAN: Yes, of course. But all of them matter greatly to me. One of the most enlightening things that I think I experienced was preparing over a period of more than two and a half years a festival that happened under the guidance and sponsorship of everything of Carnegie Hall two years ago that we called Honor!, and in researching what had happened on the stage at Carnegie Hall I first of all was so pleased and my heart simply sang, understanding that Carnegie Hall had opened its doors in 1891 and that on that stage in 1892 an African American soprano was singing on that stage—unlike a lot of other places, where African Americans were not welcomed—at Carnegie Hall, Sissieretta Jones was onstage singing music from Traviata. It happens that she was a friend of Harry T. Burleigh, wonderful composer, marvelous arranger of African American spirituals, and that Harry T. Burleigh was a friend of Anton Dvořák, who by that time had come and was looking at the new world and writing that lovely Symphony Number 9 that we love so much. In my research I spent so much time listening to the music of all of these wonderful singers, jazz singers, pop singers, classical singers, of course, all kinds of other musicians that had performed over this incredibly long period, 120 years now, at Carnegie Hall, and I said to myself, “Now, why in the world don’t you sing this music more? This is really quite silly.” And so I decided then and there, Okay, we’re going to do American music for a while now. We’ve done a great deal of Strauss and Berlioz and Schubert and everybody else. Let’s talk a bit about the music that Odetta sang. Let’s talk about what a beautiful voice and a beautiful being Lena Horne was. Let’s talk about Josephine Baker and the decision, the decision to leave the United States and to perform in France, where she was welcomed and beloved even to this day. All I have to do is walk out onstage and say I’m going to sing “J’ai Deux Amours” and I don’t need to sing it. (laughter) Everybody knows it and everybody is singing along. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Maybe not everybody here does. How does it go? JESSYE NORMAN: (sings “J’ai Deux Amours”) (applause) JESSYE NORMAN: Thank you! PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I mean, I mean— JESSYE NORMAN: That was a trick! PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: That was a trick, and it’s not the only one. JESSYE NORMAN: It’s not the only one. You’ve got more. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I’ve got more tricks up my sleeve. Of course the French would love that and of course the Parisians would be—I have two loves my country and Paris. I mean, please, could you imagine? JESSYE NORMAN: It works. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Could we look at the video clip, the A clip? (video clip plays of Jessye Norman singing “La Marseillaise”) (applause) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What did it feel like to be draped in the French flag? (laughter) JESSYE NORMAN: Well, I kept saying, “I’m American. I’m American.” PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You’re American and you’re African American. JESSYE NORMAN: Yes. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And this was an important point to make. JESSYE NORMAN: This was an important point. And it was a point that President Mitterrand wanted to make. But I wanted to be sure and it was one year before the bicentennial and someone from the president’s office—I was making a recording in Paris at the time—said he needed to meet with me, and I didn’t know what that meant exactly, but I did meet with this person and he said that for the next year, for the bicentenary, the president would like you to sing the “Marseillaise.” And I said, “Where?” And he said at the défilé, at the parade, and so I said, “Okay,” and he was called Monsieur Du Pavignon and I said, “Of course, I would be honored. However this was meant to happen, this would certainly be a great honor to do this,” and before he left the room, I said, “Monsieur Du Pavignon, I just want to make sure that you understand that I’m African American and that I’m not Guadalupe or Martinique or Haiti or anywhere.” PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Because if you do believe that— JESSYE NORMAN: Because I spent so much time sort of singing in France, I just wanted to make sure that we were very clear, and he said, “No, no, no, the president knows what he’s doing,” and of course. And it was quite unbelievable. I mean, there we all were working on this and when I think about it none of us, none of the people working on the dress or getting ready for this were French. Jean-Paul Goude is French American, his mother is American, and Azzedine Alaïa, who created the dress, is Tunisian, and I was American, and there we are sort of putting this thing together. I thought it was quite wonderful and it really gave true meaning—for once—it gave true meaning for this idea of fraternité, égalité, because it really is what is meant by “La Marseillaise” and the meaning of all of this, this tricolor, the three colors, and it still has great, great meaning for me. It’s really quite unbelievable when you consider this was twenty years ago and I’m not kidding when I say to that at least—still, after all this time, at least once a week, at least once a week I will meet someone who will say, I was on the Champs-Élysées when you sang “La Marseillaise,” by now I’ve met all the million people that were standing there, (laughter) but it really is quite, quite, quite amazing and it’s very seldom that I’ve seen this videotape. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: How does it feel to you, I’m curious about that, to see your— JESSYE NORMAN: It feels like a video of someone else. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Really? JESSYE NORMAN: Well, because I remember it all so well as kind of amazing. This Monsieur Du Pavignon, a wonderful person who worked with the president, they had created a dressing room for me in—quite near the obelisk at the Place de la Concorde where this all took place and so I could see on a television—on a monitor screen, all the parade that had happened before the ending when I was going to sing, so I wasn’t just sort of sitting in a room with nothing to sort of watch and Monsieur Du Pavignon was sitting with me and unlike a lot of these things, sort of the openings of this and the closings of that, very often singers are singing to playback, which means that actually it’s already recorded and you’re sort of mouthing the words. This was live, and Monsieur Du Pavignon came to me and he said in French, “are you nervous?” and so I said, “no,” he said, “That’s not normal. Three billion people around the world are going to be watching you sing in French.” I said, “Monsieur Du Pavignon, I believe in practice. I believe in rehearsing. You can pinch me at any time of day and out will come all of the texts for “La Marseillaise,” I promise you. Do not worry. This will be fine.” PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And in a sense this leads me to something you have said early on, that “Music was always in my life. I’m told that I started to sing about the same time that I started to speak.” JESSYE NORMAN: Yes, that’s what my parents have told me, yes. And that as a child sometimes I would sing what it was I wanted rather than to speak it. So I have no memory of not trying to sing. I have no memory of that. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And you were brought up we were talking a little bit earlier you mentioned your hometown, which was so important to you. I’d like you to bring us to—back to Mount Calvary Baptist Church choir and to your sister now, but before we do, let’s just listen for a minute to track five. (“Rusty Bells” by Mahalia Jackson) JESSYE NORMAN: What a voice. Mahalia Jackson. My goodness. What a singer. Imagine making that quality and that amazing noise, with no training whatsoever. Not in the sense that we think about vocal training. And she did it all her life. She could sing until she passed. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And she was very, very important to you. JESSYE NORMAN: Well, important in that she was such an amazingly simple person. I want to say that I mean that in the best sense of the word. She was an uncomplicated human being. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Humble. JESSYE NORMAN: Humble, yes. And very respectful of what she considered—and it was—her gift. And I knew a lot of people who knew her very well, I did not know her personally, but I know a lot of people who were very close to her and it was apparently a remarkable thing just to be around her and how she would, they say, gather herself together when it was time for her to perform. It was as though she were calling in all of what nature can provide and then she would simply give it out again. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I’m so taken by these early stories of what forms us. JESSYE NORMAN: Yes, yes. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Yesterday with Gilberto Gil we were talking about early stories when he was two, two and a half, three years old. Music again—as seems to be so often the case that one’s mother—it seems the importance of the mother is never overstated. JESSYE NORMAN: Precisely. Well, my mother and three of her sisters had a group and they were all sort of very young, sort of schoolteachers, and they were not yet married, and they had a little group that they went around sort of you know from church to church sort of singing and apparently they were quite good. I’m sorry I never actually heard and of course isn’t it awful that there are no recordings of this kind of thing? But I spent a lot of time listening to my mother singing, and also my grandmother. And as I always say, I could tell the mood, I always say this because it’s so true and we kid about it a great deal now with my siblings. We could always tell Grandmother’s mood by the song she sang because if she were feeling sort of happy and everything was going along, of course it was a very happy song, and if she was very concerned about something it was more mournful, and it was very interesting to be around this kind of thing as a very, very young child because of course you can’t articulate what it is you’re thinking and feeling or taking in in the same way as an older child. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And no wonder in a sense that when you tried to articulate some things early on you would do it in song. JESSYE NORMAN: Yes, because it was simply easier. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And your mother told you early on to pay attention to one particular singer and look at one particular movie that she said, you know, just come here. Very similar story once again to the kinds of stories you were talking about yesterday or for that matter when Harry Belafonte came here and said, you know, how incredibly important Paul Robeson was for him, but for you the person who mattered at that moment—you were eleven, I think, ten or eleven or twelve. JESSYE NORMAN: Yes, about ten or eleven. Marian Anderson. The film was The Lady from Philadelphia and as a ten- or eleven-year-old, I was out in the garden playing with friends and my mother said, “come in and dust yourself off, there’s something on television that you have to see.” And I thought, “Oh well,” and it was Marian Anderson. That stately, beautiful, majestic, graceful Marian Anderson. And at about that time her biography was available. And I read it and there were parts of it that made me very said because of course she was completely—in the time when she was performing there were all kinds of obstacles, obstacles unimaginable, in the way of this once in a—I don’t know. I think it was Toscanini who said it was once in a hundred years, but I think it takes even more years before one has another voice quite like that. But I later on had the privilege, that’s all that I can say, of being able to spend a little time with her. Those were truly golden moments, truly golden moments, to be able to say, “Tell me about the time that you sang for the King of Norway and how that all went,” and all the rest of it, and she was always—I always say this, she was always so kind. She wanted to know what I was doing and I didn’t want to talk about that. I wanted to know about her. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I feel the same way, I want to know more. JESSYE NORMAN: That’s very sweet. She was so kind and so welcoming and I would come back from a trip or something and ring up the assistant to say, “Is it a good day, may I drop by?” And she would say, “Well, yes, if you come about five o’clock, that should be good,” and it was just—I treasure those moments, I cannot tell you. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What, when you came in from the garden and saw the film, what music of hers did you hear her sing first? JESSYE NORMAN: The first thing that I heard her sing I had already heard her sing, because I had heard the alto rhapsody of Brahms that she had recorded with Munch in about 1937 or something like that. I’m sure somebody can look up that and tell us exactly the date, and I remember listening to that recording and I said at the time, I was about nine, ten years old, “Is that just a voice? There’s nothing else there? That’s a woman singing? Is that even possible?” And so I had already—I had her already in my mind at the time that I was called in to sort of watch the film, and it was, and it still is something that absolutely stays with me. I know what her voice sounds like in the Brahms alto rhapsody, but the first thing that I heard her sing on that film was “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing,” and that was from Easter Sunday, Washington, D.C., the Lincoln Memorial, 1939, Eleanor Roosevelt had gotten together with the Department of Interior, and she’d had a word with her husband, I would imagine, as Marian Anderson had been denied the right, and there were all sorts of stories, but the truth is she was denied the right to sing on the stage of Constitution Hall, which was the concert hall at the time, by the Daughters of the American Revolution. They’ve asked me very often to stop saying that but I never shall. (applause) Somehow Eleanor Roosevelt found out about this and decided, “Okay, we’ll do something else.” So instead of singing for a few thousand people in Constitution Hall on that Sunday, Marian Anderson sang for tens of thousands of people and because she wasn’t a person to hold a grudge, she wasn’t a person to do anything except allow her voice to speak, there were many things that she might have said or might have done on that beautiful morning, but she allowed her voice simply to say, “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty,” that was the first thing that she sang at the concert. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s extraordinary, no? JESSYE NORMAN: It is. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Because one could imagine such bitterness. JESSYE NORMAN: Yes, but she was never bitter. I allowed myself at some point to ask her, because one of the things, as a very young child reading that biography, there’s one passage in the biography where she needs to have her dress prepared for the performance and wherever she was staying, the people couldn’t be bothered to help her, and so she had to press her own performance dress kind of in the back garden of the hotel or something. I mean, it was really very, very disturbing for me to read that. And at some point when I thought it was okay to ask that question, she said, “Oh, it didn’t mean anything, it simply meant that I was just taking care of this dress. It had been given to me by someone,” she’d mentioned, “and so I was taking care of it myself, it was all right, it was fine.” Imagine that. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Did you feel she felt otherwise? JESSYE NORMAN: No, I did not, I truly did not. I didn’t think that she was saying that so that I would feel better or to sort of just get it out of the way, no I truly felt that she felt, “Well, that’s the way life worked at that moment,” and she was going to simply do what needed to be done, because—and that was something very good to learn at a very young age, that the people that are coming to hear us perform, I’m sure Gilberto feels the same way, they don’t care about the stories behind the stage, and neither should they. They’re coming to hear a performance and that’s what they should be given and all of the dramatics that might have happened beforehand are interesting and sometimes difficult for those of us, but the audience should get the performance. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: We have to listen to a little bit of Marian Anderson. Let’s listen to track number one. (Marian Anderson music plays) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: So there it is. JESSYE NORMAN: Can you imagine sort of being at my next-door neighbor’s house, listening to her hi-fi, and listening to that at about age nine, trying to figure out what in the world, I mean, it was—it still touches me in the same way, it’s amazing, isn’t it? Truly, truly. (begins to sing) Oh no, no, no. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: That trick won’t work. So to come back to your hometown and I was trying to mention the role your sister has now at the Mount Calvary— JESSYE NORMAN: Oh, yes, but that was a long time ago, I think you’re talking about something that was on CBS years ago, when she was still a student and conducting the choir at the church, but she’s long since moved on. No, no, my sister, we call my sister the three degrees. First she got a bachelor of science, and then she couldn’t figure out what she wanted to do with that and then she decided to get an MBA and then she decided she didn’t like being a businessperson, so then she went to medical school to be a nurse, so now she’s a director of nursing, so that’s what she does. But she still sings in the choir. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: In that choir? JESSYE NORMAN: No, no, no, she lives in Dallas now. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Augusta has another very famous singer that mattered to you greatly and I’d like us to listen to track six if we could. (James Brown, “I Lost Someone”) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: James Brown. JESSYE NORMAN: James Brown! PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: How old were you when you heard him? JESSYE NORMAN: Oh, gosh, I don’t remember. First grade or something, you know, at the school. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Did you meet? JESSYE NORMAN: Well, the thing is, I must tell you a story about James Brown, because it is quite unbelievable. I was—now let’s see, it was about—it must have been more than fifteen years ago, it’s certainly more than fifteen years ago because he’s been gone for a while. But I was in Augusta to do something or the other and I had had a meeting at a hotel and I was coming out of the meeting and sort of rushing out the door, generally as always, rushing going to something else, and there was James Brown, and I thought, “Well, I must meet him. You can’t just walk past James Brown,” so I walked over and I said, “Hello,” and he said, “Hi Jess!” (laughter) And I said somebody must have told him, and so I said, “James Brown, how in the world?” And he says, “I know all of my homegirls, don’t you worry.” (laughter) Can you believe that? I have to tell you my nephew was very impressed—oh yeah, oh yeah. My star went up a great deal that day. But it was really quite a wonderful thing and to just to have a chance to talk to him a little bit, he wanted to know where I was living and how it was all going. I thought that was just marvelous. I—there was no reason for me to think that James Brown had the faintest idea that I shared the planet. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: One more early influence that you mentioned a while ago. Let’s listen, if we could, to track number four. (Odetta, “Motherless Child” plays) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Odetta. JESSYE NORMAN: Odetta. My goodness. I love to sing some of the music that she sang, and I love to tell particularly my European audiences, and I feel I need to do this a bit more in the states, too, because too many kids nowadays haven’t the faintest idea who she was or what she did. But I think that one of the things that tells you exactly the impact she that had on the world while she was in it, is that at the time that she was given by President Clinton the National Medal of Arts, he said to her that she was able to prove that music, and a person’s music, could change the hearts and minds of people. That is what he said to Odetta when he gave her the National Medal of the Arts, and it really is something that we probably need to remember more today than ever, that with the arts it is our, very often our responsibility to share what it is we consider to be our gifts and to use those gifts to change the hearts and minds of people, to broaden minds, our own as well as those of those we would like to help to have a different view perhaps of the world. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: How do the arts do that, I mean, do it? JESSYE NORMAN: First of all, we need to have as many people as possible participate in—as I was saying before, to live artfully without even trying. I mean, you don’t have to have a particular talent, you can do something as simple as keeping a diary, to decide that every day at a certain time of day or night or morning, whatever, that you’re going to sit down and write about your day. That is art. Or that it doesn’t matter that you’re forty-five and you’ve never studied dance before. There are lots of places, particularly in this city, where you can go and study dance and study with people that are the same level of participation as you are so you don’t feel, you know, too uncomfortable, but those things I think are very important. The self-awareness, first, helps us understand that the other person across from us has the same thing. I love it—I mean, for instance in Thailand, when—and it’s so beautiful, imagine this. Little children sort of dressed in blue and white sort of getting ready to go to school. Imagine someone about this tall greeting a person about the same size and they put their hands together and bow and what that means is that “my good spirit greets the good spirit inside of you.” If only we could feel that way, if only we could be that way with one another, but I really do feel that if we allow ourselves some form of art, whether it’s writing or painting or movement or singing or playing an instrument or whatever it is that we can do. If we understand that we have that inside of us then it must be that everybody else does too. So how can you dislike that person just because that person looks differently from you, because that person has that same spirit that you have, so it makes it a little bit more difficult to hate, it makes it a little bit more difficult to be intolerant. It helps you to understand that humanness is what we share and that we must share, otherwise I don’t know what’s going to happen to us. (applause) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You found it important to go back to what you call your heritage, your inheritance, your legacy, what runs, one might say, deeply in your veins, what’s natural to you. You said this amazing comment, “I wasn’t born Austrian, I wasn’t born German, my roots are from Africa.” JESSYE NORMAN: Yes. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And you said also, “there is more memory inside of me for the spiritual tradition of Negro music than perhaps for most of the European music that I sing because this music was sung by my mother and grandmother and great-grandmother and all of the other people that have made me.” JESSYE NORMAN: Yes, and they have made me. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: How so? And I would like you to comment on this, why this urge, I mean, to on the one hand, yes, of course you have studied Schubert. JESSYE NORMAN: Yes, of course. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Yes, of course, you have studied Brahms. Yes, of course, you have studied and performed Wagner and so many other great European musicians. JESSYE NORMAN: Yes. And I don’t sing in a language I don’t speak. No? PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: No. JESSYE NORMAN: Jamais. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Jamais. JESSYE NORMAN: No. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: So it’s I mean to change the subject for a second, but I want to come back to the subject at hand. It’s important to understand what one sings. JESSYE NORMAN: Well, as I always say to young singers as musicians we have yet another level of responsibility. We have words. And it’s rather important that they should be understood, and if we don’t understand them, it is very difficult to make that person sitting in the last row of the family circle, who’s actually in another town, (laughter) understand what it is we’re doing. And I really believe and I insist that if we as singers are doing what we’re supposed to do, meaning that we know precisely what we are singing at every point—we know what is the modifier, what is the verb, what is the noun, what all of the words mean and all of that, that the audience need not speak that language in which we are singing in order to understand what it is about what we are singing. And if we are doing our jobs properly it should not be necessary to have the little words across the screen. But too many of us choose not to take the words as seriously as I would like and I have to—it’s very funny, I have to say this, because I was working with some singers and I had a person say a very surprising thing to me and I repeat it because it’s still, even after three years, it’s still a mysterious thing to have heard, and I was talking to her about the text and why we needed to work on that and to work on the language and so on, and she said, “Yes, I understand that you are a text-based singer.” (laughter) So I said, so that we could move on in our lesson, “Oh, I didn’t know there was another kind, thank you.” (applause) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: This does bring me back to the heritage and in a very simple way. These words that run, that you were saying you particularly like singing in Vienna, you like singing in Europe, because they mean something universally. And they mean something universally but they also mean something very personally and particularly. JESSYE NORMAN: Yes, but I have to tell you that when I have the opportunity to sing American music and spirituals that all over the world, it doesn’t matter in what country I happen to be. If I present a program and for some reason a spiritual isn’t sort of included at least as a part of the program or as an encore, someone will come to the foot of the stage before I leave the stage and say, “But you have to, please, sing a spiritual.” And, you know, it was the Brahms year or the Schubert year or something and I’d sort of done the whole concert of Schubert, and I thought we’d done pretty well. And somebody comes up to the stage and says, “Could you sing a spiritual, please?” And I understand and I do it as often as I can, and it really is remarkable to me that this music because of Roland Hayes and Robert McFerrin, Bobby McFerrin’s papa, grandfather, and Marian Anderson and Mattiwilda Dobbs and all of these people, the Fisk Jubilee Singers who were the first choir to take spirituals out of the country to Europe and so on that these songs are a part of the fabric of the world, not just the American fabric. The tapestry is very big and it encompasses the world and it is so wonderful to sing in Korea and to sing a spiritual and look out into the audience and somebody is mouthing the words with me. It’s a beautiful thing to experience. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You have had all these extraordinary mentors in your life. Yes, yes, yes, it will come. That would have been too obvious. JESSYE NORMAN: Let’s be a little more subtle. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Just a little bit of patience and some fortitude, I promise you. I will do anything in my ability to make this happen. But before I do that, there have been incredible guides, mentors, whether it’s Khia or Burn or others who have mattered to you greatly but you have also in this particular program mentored a singer and I’d love you to talk a little bit about that and here we are doing these evenings and afternoons—what happens during that year where you and your protégé— JESSYE NORMAN: Protégé. Susan Platts. What a beautiful mezzo-soprano this is. What a beautiful voice. What a gift. I had the opportunity to—there were a number of singers that wanted to work and I had friends of mine whose judgment I trust, various people in the world of music and theater and so on to listen to a great number of singers and I had the opportunity then to listen to eight of them and to talk with them and to try to figure out with whom I felt I would be able to do some good. And it was apparent to me in speaking with Susan that first of all she was serious, that she was focused, and that she understood the idea of actually working to make something better and not in a superficial way but to go very deeply into this thing that we call singing, to find out how to do it and to make it mean something to the people that would come and listen to us, and so it was very clear the person with whom I wished to work, and because this was 2005, 2006, and because I do feel very strongly about her gifts and talents, even though the mentor/protégé thing for us is long since gone we still work together because we like it. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You’ve spoken rather beautifully about choosing your roles and how important it is to choose the role— JESSYE NORMAN: Yes, rather than have them choose you. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Right, and José Van Dam, who will be speaking tomorrow said you build a great career as much on the roles you turn down as on the roles you take on. JESSYE NORMAN: Absolutely and he’s absolutely right. What a wonderful thing to have said. I’ve never put it quite like that, but I quite agree with that articulation of the thing that can happen to a young singer. I had the good fortune of having the artistic director of a Berlin opera company to hear me here in the states and to decide that I would be invited to come to sing a debut at his opera house. And it happened that I sang the second aria of Elisabeth in Tannhäuser, this particular gathering of singers, and for those of you that are familiar with Tannhäuser, the character of Elisabeth comes into the opera in the second act, sort of after Venus and all of that in the first act, and she comes in the second act with a very big aria, “Dich, theure Halle,” and it is a beautiful aria, but it is not as difficult as the aria that comes in the third act, and my teacher at the time, Alice Duschak at the Peabody Conservatory had said, “if you can learn to sing this aria then the other one will be much simpler for you, and it will be much better for you to be able to show that you can sing this, “Allmächt'ge Jungfrau,” instead of singing “Dich, theure Halle,” which is a much more obvious thing to sing in a contest, because it requires a very steady breath control, it is very slow and you are only accompanied by the brass of the orchestra, so there’s nobody doubling you, there’s nobody sort of covering those things that don’t quite work properly, and you’re quite exposed.” And I sang this aria and this particular artistic director heard me, Egon Seefehlner, and he came to me afterwards and he said, “Do you know the rest of the opera?” And I said, “Well, no,” I was twenty-two, I think. And he said, “Are you prepared to learn it?” And I said, “I could learn it next week.” And I really meant it, there’s not a lot on the hard drive at twenty-two. (laughter) We know that. But he said it doesn’t need to be quite that quick. So six months later I found myself in Berlin, singing this entire opera, which of course I had learned backwards and forwards, and up and down and all the rest of it, and because I did not wish to make a fool of myself, I had actually gone to Duke University to study German language. I was not going to go to Berlin and not be able to talk to my colleagues. It simply wasn’t going to happen. I didn’t know that everybody in the world speaks English all over the world, how should I know that? So I studied German also for five months, so when I went I could say “guten Morgen,” “guten Tag,” and all of the rest of it. And it’s quite—because it sounds like a fairy tale I have to tell it. Venus and Tannhäuser do the first act. Then the second act comes the character that I sing, Elisabeth. Egon Seefehlner came into my dressing room after the second act of the opera—now we still had the third act to go, there’s still a lot going on. He said, “This is going very well, I’d like to offer you a contract for four years,” and I said, “But Herr Seefehlner, I still have to sing the third act.” He said, “I heard you sing that aria in New York, you knew it, you’re fine.” And he actually offered me a contract that night and I said I couldn’t sign it because my papa said that I mustn’t sign anything that I can’t read, and who could read sort of English legalese, much less German legalese? So along I went to the American commission, the consulate, the next day, to make sure that I understood everything and I signed a contract. Ridiculous. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Trust, also. JESSYE NORMAN: Trust, absolutely. And there were many occasions when I was offered roles for which I knew in my soul were not things that I should sing. Imagine being twenty-four and being offered the role of Kundry in Parsifal in a new production. I said, “Well, thank you, but no.” And thank goodness that I said, “thank you but no.” PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Otherwise . . . JESSYE NORMAN: I could never have survived it. There was nothing in my experience at that time that would have helped me to live through that experience. My voice simply wasn’t ready for it. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: There’s this line I very much love where you say, “I wouldn’t for a moment think that singing only happens on earth.” JESSYE NORMAN: Oh, I’m certain that it doesn’t. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: “The Rumis talk about the music of the spheres. I believe in that. Why would we be the only planet that has singing? I would like to feel that there’s music on Jupiter.” JESSYE NORMAN: Everywhere. Why not? I mean, haven’t you ever been—I mean just in Central Park, you don’t have to go all the way to the rain forest to sort of hear this sort of thing, but just to be in nature and to listen to the sounds. If that isn’t music, I don’t know what it is, whether it’s squirrels moving about or the wind through the leaves in the trees or whatever, it’s music, and it’s wonderful. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: As we close slowly to arrive to this moment that many people have waited for, you say, “For my own burial, I would like the music of Fauré, the music of Bach, the one or two lesser-known songs of Schubert.” I wonder which those are. (Jessye Norman sings) JESSYE NORMAN: It has the simplicity of a hymn. (applause) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And one or two songs that I sang as a very young child, one of which is “God Will Take Care of You.” JESSYE NORMAN: I’m not certain I know the words. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But why don’t you leave us on what everybody even in Vienna after Schubert concert asks you to sing? Just leave us on one joyous melody that you feel everybody has to hear tonight. (Jessye Norman sings “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands”) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Jessye Norman! (applause) JESSYE NORMAN: Thank you very much. (audio ends here)