Two days before her successful Metropolitan Opera debut in Beethoven’s Fidelio, dramatic soprano Renate Behle, relaxing in an airy eagle’s nest of an apartment that looks down upon the entire Lincoln Center complex, freely admitted that this upcoming Leonora is the pinnacle of her career. “It’s the Met!” she said quietly, her shining eyes proclaiming her excitement. Despite her emergence in recent seasons as Germany’s hot dramatic soprano—acclaimed for her portrayals of this role and Wagner’s Senta, Isolde, the Walküre Sieglinde, both Brünnhildes, Strauss’s Salome, Chrysothemis, Ariadne and the Färberin—a Met debut still holds an incomparable thrill, even for a sophisticated, experienced artist. But in spite of her pleasure in her successfully unfolding career, Behle, a full professor at Hamburg’s University for Music and Theater, is even more excited and deeply satisfied about the progress of a very special pupil: her 25-year-old son, Daniel. She and her late husband, an oboe and English horn player, had no real inkling that Daniel would want to sing, or even that he had a voice.
“He sang around the house only with a microphone, for fun,” Behle said. “When boys are 15 or 16 they find a group of friends and form a band. Daniel did this, and he had the highest voice, and very clear. I thought it was nice and that he had good ears, that he was a musician. But he only wanted to compose. Then, in 1997 when I sang my first Isolde in Los Angeles, he was there. He visited five performances; he was so emotionally affected. Then he told me that he would like to sing Tristan once. He was 20. Later, he heard me in a recital of Wagner and Liszt in a little theatre in Germany. Afterwards, he told me, ‘Every time when I hear you singing, I have the wish to sing.’”
Like many young men seeking to “find themselves,” Daniel Behle made, then abandoned, plans to be a teacher. He studied composition and the trombone and began to pester his mother into giving him a voice lesson. “I never thought my son had a voice,” the soprano said, “but we tried a few lessons, just for fun. His voice was nothing much below the high G, the G before the high C, but he could sing without any problem the notes above without using the head voice or falsetto. The trombone playing seemed to give him the support to do this on the breath. That G sharp was the note—the tone—that I liked, the note that made me think that perhaps Daniel has a voice after all. I thought that if the color of this one note would become the whole voice, it would be very nice.”
After her performances, whenever Renate was at home, Daniel wanted to work. Since opera singers tend to stay up late to unwind, and the Behles have a soundproof music room, the lessons would take place at two a.m. After eight months, she saw definite progress. Two years ago in August, Daniel decided he was serious about becoming a singer. He began working in earnest, taking intensive voice lessons with his mother, augmented by productions at the University in Hamburg and classes in stage directing, acting and conducting. He completed his trombone studies, then set that instrument aside. “He recently started working with another voice teacher at the University,” Behle said, “because he’s a tenor and I am not. Daniel has to have many influences, but the technique is mine.”
Daniel Behle never had any hard feelings or problems with taking correction from his mother. “At first,” she said, “it was just fun. But now I work with him like any student. I am even more severe now, because I know this business. He must have a special voice, a special timbre.” Just to be certain of Daniel’s possibilities, Renate consulted a colleague to determine whether her son had serious potential as a singer, or if he should study to be a conductor instead. “He examined Daniel, then called me and said, ‘Yes, he has the fire for singing. You can’t stop him!’”
Renate Behle has been teaching for ten years; she started for fun when colleagues began approaching her informally for advice. “I enjoy teaching, because I am not jealous of young people. The roles I sing should not be undertaken by people under 30.” She felt she was in a position to help others find their voices as she had taken a slow, deliberate route to solve her own problems as a singer. She, herself, began singing cautiously, working as a mezzo for 20 years to avoid straining her instrument, even though she had been advised from the beginning that she was not a true mezzo and would eventually graduate to higher, dramatic parts. For two seasons, she sang both mezzo and soprano roles, fulfilling her existing contracts with Octavians and Carmens (she has sung 85) while singing her first Marchallins and Agathe in Die Freischütz. She never had to cancel. “I was not mature enough in my twenties to sing big parts,” she said. “I had to wait a long time for my voice to mature. I always had the high notes, but I didn’t trust myself.”
The issue of finding one’s true fach is a burning one for young singers. “I think the important thing is not to get out of the bed of the voice,” she said. “Your body is your bed. You can feel where your voice is soft and round and easy. This is the bed. And if the bed is deeper, you shouldn’t sing the Queen of the Night, even if you have the high notes. I believe the key is not the color, because you can work on your color. You can work on your timbre, too. Even somebody who seems not to have any voice… It’s like a flower that is not yet open. You can open it gradually with the right vocalizes, exercises and resonance work.”
Even a singer as intelligent, as practical and pragmatic as Renate Behle is occasionally dealt a hand that is difficult to play. These supreme tests either make or break an artist, and her trial was the loss of her husband nearly five years ago. “I now think I should have taken time off, but I couldn’t.” she said. “I was singing my first Senta. He came to Cologne to hear my premiere and one week later, he died. At the same time, I had to sing Ariadne and Fidelio, all works about husbands and death. My husband told me once that he was jealous of my success because the first thing in my life is singing, the second is my son, and the third is him. I think it was true. But we tried to connect the family and the profession. We thought that if you are established in your position you would have more time for yourself. But it was an error; we learned that this is not true. It is like a spiral. You are going and going and you cannot find yourself, your center. It was dangerous for me to lose my center, because I didn’t want to think too much on my husband’s sickness, on his death.”
Eventually, this led to an emotional and vocal crisis. “Yes, they are always both together. I tried to stay home, where I lived with my husband. I didn’t sing, I only walked, slept and thought about my life. I had to find it again, and I think I did. After about ten days, I had to sing in a benefit concert in Hamburg. My son sang in the same concert. It was his first performance in public and with orchestra. He sang “Il mio tesoro,” and arias from Die Zauberflöte, Die Lustigen Weiber von Windsor and Barbiere. He has wonderful coloratura!”
When asked for advice for young singers, Behle replied without any hesitation, offering several helpful suggestions. For American singers, going to Germany and getting regular work in a small house is invaluable. It is still possible to do this, even though many of the opportunities of recent years have dried up to some extent. “But it is a problem if they don’t speak German,” she warned. “It is best to learn your basic languages before you go to Europe, otherwise you are at a disadvantage. It is very hard to pull all of it together in this short time. In the big houses where I work, we speak Italian, English, French, and German… in one sentence there are four languages. But we understand one another.”
The rest of the basic advice is the same she would give to her own son or any young singer. “I would tell him not to stay too long in the university. The longer they stay in school, the worse they get! Once he knows how to sing, the rest he will learn at the theater. That way, people will hear you as a professional singer, and not as a student. I think he should work for two years in a German house. In these two years, he will absorb everything like a sponge. But first, he should go to Italy to be coached for the Italian roles. Not for technique, but for these special things: how to pronounce, how to sing Italian vocalise. He could do this on a vacation. I think a singer should try to find a position for two years to start. Then be free and go from there. But don’t stay too long in one house!
“I talked with a colleague of mine, a friend, and she told me she was studying in Hamburg. She was not one of the favorite students there. She left school and went out to get a job. She was soon engaged to sing very good roles, and she came back to visit the school. One of her teachers told her, ‘But you didn’t finish yet! You have to learn so much!’ She made a very big career anyway. Staying in school is boring. And it doesn’t help build the self-confidence.”
Self-confidence is clearly an important factor in success at any level. “It is a wonderful surprise to hear a voice that is maybe not so special. Then comes the careful training, the confidence. Then, after a few years, you can’t imagine. The voice is beautiful! And other people may start with a nice voice, then they get worse.”
Daniel Behle clearly has the confidence and the voice to back it up. His mother, fond but clear-eyed and unsentimental, knows that she can only help her son so much. “He shouldn’t be in my shadow; he should be his own person. I have the connections to help him, but he has to do the singing. If he had no voice, nobody would engage him. The most beautiful thing was that in the beginning, the people thought only that he is my son and he would like to sing. But after his last performance in September, all these people came to me and they were so kind to my son. ‘He has a voice,’ they said. ‘He can sing! He is a wonderful Mozart tenor!’ I couldn’t believe it because a few months ago, they thought he was only my son.”
When it works, when the lessons are well-learned and the healthy voice is responding, it all seems so easy, so inevitable. “A teacher of mine, Dietgaer Jacae, told me, ‘Renate, if everybody would understand, there would be too many good singers.’ I think he was right. So you have to trust in yourself.”
