James Naughtie meets…
Whether performing for an audience at a maximum-security jail or asking us to pursue our own inner peace, the American mezzosoprano is always on the look-out for classical music’s humanity
The American mezzo Joyce Didonato talks about finding peace among the noise
Picture a dark room in Sing Sing prison in upstate New York, packed with 300 or so hard-boiled inmates, most of them violent criminals – ‘the toughest of the tough’. Rival gang members are being kept apart by guards, pluguglies are everywhere and the atmosphere is electric. But they’re listening to a performance of arias by Handel and Rossini.
‘It was dark, shadowy and threatening,’ says mezzo-soprano Joyce Didonato. ‘I was thinking to myself that the guys on the stage would protect me, but it was nerve-wracking. Then I hear a big, loud voice from the back’ – she puts on a rough New York accent – ‘and it says, “Thank you for comin’ here.”’
This story is the unexpected prelude to her explanation for her latest project, In War and Peace, a disc of arias that breaks the usual mould. Soon after we meet, she’s performing the pieces at the Barbican in London. What she learned in Sing Sing confirmed for her, spectacularly, what she already knew and felt, but needed to have reinforced.
She had been invited because the prison has a music programme that provides instrumental classes and tuition in classical composition for men who want it and who show some aptitude. It’s a chink of light in the gloom and their work is performed in front of everyone.
Asked to sing for them, Didonato decided not to compromise. ‘I said, are you sure you want opera? I mean I wasn’t going to sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone”. I said that if they wanted opera, I wouldn’t do them down.’
So she sang an aria from Giulio Cesare, explaining first what Handel had tried to do. ‘Cleopatra’s a powerful woman with everything she wanted in the world. Suddenly the one man she loved has been killed, and she realises that she’s condemned to grief for the rest of her life. And you’re gonna hear me say piangerò… which means I’m gonna cry. Then in the middle section it changes. She says I may cry for the rest of my life, but when I die I’m gonna come back and I’m gonna make you pay.’
Didonato knew, of course, that they would understand, and sang Cleopatra’s Act III aria Piangerò la sorte mia. ‘I thought to myself,’ she recalls, ‘I’m not going to water this down, I’m going to do this as if I were on stage at the Barbican. And they start screaming out – “you go girl”, “you go get him”, “you make him pay!” – and it became like Shakespeare’s Globe theatre. Interactive. Then it ends. Big cadenza. Silence. You could have heard a pin drop. They got it. They got the emotion. They got the tears. Then they jumped to their feet. They went wild.’
And what did their reaction tell her?
‘That it works and it’s universal,’ she reflects. ‘If you take somebody by the hand and say “don’t be afraid, this is what I’m going to sing
‘We can see Purcell and Handel’s scenes of horror on CNN’
about”, and then you give it to them, they’ll get it.’ After Handel, she turned to Rossini, introducing him with a tra-la-la version of the Overture to William Tell. Everyone knew it.
Here’s what she said: ‘OK, you know that. Now this is written by the same guy. It comes at the end of a very long opera. There’s been war, and peace has broken out. There are three different men coming after me and I’ve chosen the one that I love.’
She warned them that they might think the song was over too early, because it sounded as if it was going to stop after a little. But there would be more.
‘I said stick with me, it’s kinda long… What you need to know is she’s happy that peace has come. She’s going to sing faster and faster, and higher and higher, to show how happy she is. That’s all I told them. Then afterwards I had these spontaneous standing ovations, because they were hearing things that they’d never heard anyone do before. And they went insane. They loved it.’
Didonato says she’s never sung for a more grateful audience, nor been more convinced about the power of music. ‘I’ve never felt more useful, I think, as a performer. I gave them something big that night. It sometimes felt a little bit scary, although I never really felt unsafe. I did think, if anything goes wrong I’m a little bit unprotected here because the only way out of the auditorium is through the crowd. They kind of rushed me and all of a sudden there were men all around me and there was only one man from Carnegie Hall to help. But their eyes were wide and they were shoving programmes in my face, asking “would you sign this for my daughter?” or “would you sign this for my girlfriend?”.
They were astonished and were so happy that I came. “You killed it,” they said. “I didn’t know any voice could do that.”’
It’s a remarkable story, one that lies at the heart of the project that she’s launched with her new recording – and the series of recitals to go with it. In War and Peace was prompted by the attacks in Paris in November 2015. She’d been becoming more obsessed by the feeling that if music really did change lives, could she say something more than might come from a traditional recital programme?
‘I was sitting at my piano going through these long operatic arias with kind of inane thoughts floating around,’ she recalls, ‘and I realised that I just couldn’t do this. At that moment in time I had to do something different, and I was looking at these other arias that I’d always wanted to record from the Baroque world, talking about war and peace.
‘It jumped off the page at me and I started to explore the idea. I thought – this is the moment to be doing this. At the same time I wanted to put out a very clear, maybe a naive message. By singing these two- or three-hundred-yearold arias, I wanted to show both sides of our humanity: the dark – your ISIS side, if you will – but only because I wanted to show the light. What does utopia look like? Both of these things are possible and both of them we’ve cycled through over and over again through human history.’
Her purpose wasn’t to go back and forth between light and darkness, in confusion, but to try to show the ideal that might be captured by music. ‘Everybody asks whether opera is still relevant in the world today. It’s the most boring question in the world, but I understand why they ask it. Part of that is our fault in the industry. We present it as “aren’t you lucky to be here and witness this spectacle”. Well, I’m sitting here looking at the words that Purcell and Handel have set, scenes of horror and woe rising from the depths, and that’s what we see on CNN. It’s as relevant today as it was back then. It’s getting into the guts of opera and showing how it affects us today.’
We are talking in London before the climax of the US presidential election which Didonato’s following with some trepidation. ‘I sit at my computer screen and suddenly I see ISIS, Donald Trump and everything else and I start to feel the heaviness,’ she says. ‘I’m a real optimist, but I start to feel weighted down. I really don’t want that. I want to remind myself
‘Jenkins was trying to make us cry and feel something’
that we can choose a different path, and we don’t have to join a merry-go-round of despair.’
If this sounds a little simplistic, as well as high-minded, that’s because she happily acknowledges that it is. ‘Music is the platform where we can open the heart a little bit,’ says Didonato. ‘So, if you believe that, you have to do something about it.’
If you look at her website, you’ll find her own account of having asked audience a simple question, one that is deliberately bald, even childlike: ‘In the midst of chaos, how do you find peace?’ One prisoner in Sing Sing gave a long, dense answer, in which he spoke about light and darkness: ‘As our hands rise up we see other people in chaos, and find our peace in being models of brokenness.’ He was serving a long sentence for murder, and in the composition class had written a duet about the two bullets that had killed his victim.
In putting together the responses to that question, Didonato places Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s answer after his – a prisoner followed by a Justice of the US Supreme Court. ‘In print,’ says Didonato, ‘they become equal.’
So In War and Peace is a means of pursuing that quest, as if she’s trying to demonstrate that many more people can be persuaded that inspired music will give you so much more than a few minutes of high emotion at a concert.
‘You can recall that experience,’ she suggests. ‘They might not remember the name of the song but they’ll remember the sound, and the suspension of their lives for five minutes. I’ve taken them somewhere else.’
The repertoire which has brought Didonato such success in recent years – with that glorious voice that suggests so much more to come – springs, above all, from her love of the Baroque. ‘There’s a purity about that period of music, a very clear structure,’ she says. ‘And when you have a perfect structure, in a building or great musical work, you can look at it and know where you are. Handel is like home to me.
‘The melody is transcending. There’s also the artistic freedom for a singer. I’m expected to embellish it. It is expected. And I know that what I’m doing is original. It hasn’t been done exactly like this in three or four hundred years and I get to do something new. Such a privilege and a responsibility. And artistically it’s so rewarding – I get to add my voice to the quality of the piece, and that’s fulfilling for me as an artist, but I think for the audience it means that even if it’s an aria they’ve heard sung many times before, they’re hearing me do it. They’re getting to know me, and they know they’re hearing something new. The phrasing and ornamentation is mine; and it somehow feels contemporary and modern. There’s a sense of discovery in a performance of music like this – where’s she gonna take this?’
As with her In War and Peace project, Didonato’s always on the look out for ways of creating new kinds of excitement. This month a drama-documentary is released about Florence Foster Jenkins – yet another film, you might be thinking – exploring the life of the singer who couldn’t quite do it, but had a bizarrely successful career. And this treatment is rather different from Meryl Streep’s portrait.
‘How did she get there?’ reflects Didonato. ‘We try to fill in some of the gaps. Not presenting her as the world saw her, but going inside her head and presenting her as she saw herself. She thought she was wonderful and sang like a goddess. The only time she realised otherwise was when she couldn’t prevent the press coming to that last Carnegie Hall concert – and she read the reviews. That broke her heart and she died five weeks later. But up until then she was quite sheltered.’
Singing unmusically in the style of Jenkins, after a lifetime of training that started in Kansas and then New York many years ago, was obviously difficult for Didonato. It did, however, bring her an insight from a strange angle into the humanity in music that we’ve been talking about throughout our conversation, interrupted by beautiful notes, because it’s obvious that she can’t stop singing, wherever she is and in whoever’s company.
‘I fell in love with her,’ says Didonato. ‘She didn’t succumb to any expectations, she broke the rules and she was a feminist, leading her own life. I think – good on you, Florence. In the film we’ve honoured her. At the end, I broke into tears because I recognised that we’d been laughing at her, but that she wasn’t trying to make us laugh. She was trying to make us cry and feel something. With this film I hope we’ve honoured the love that she had for this. It’s more than laughing at somebody. It’s deeper than that, and absolutely humane.’
From Sing Sing to Jenkins’s famous last concert at Carnegie Hall and the In War and Peace recitals, Didonato is on a musical journey that will recruit many fellow-travellers – and it’s a personal quest that she’s following with determination and beautiful verve.
‘In War and Peace’ is out now on Warner Classics