Virginia Zeani has sung Violetta more than 600 times, a feat unequaled by any soprano in operatic history. Luciano Pavarotti tackled his first Alfredo alongside this “ideal Violetta.” She was considered one of the most beautiful women in the world and one of the greatest singing actresses on the lyric stage. Zeani’s career covered a repertoire from bel canto to verismo as well as contemporary operas. She created the role of Blanche in the world premiere of Poulenc’s The Dialogues of the Carmelites at La Scala in 1957.
Blessed with raw musical talent and a phenomenal instrument, Zeani manifested an innate wisdom in handling her talent. She was able to carry and mold her voice through three different Fachs, in a logical progression from lyric coloratura through lyric to lirico-spinto. This vocal evolvement is perhaps best captured by the opera that allowed her to show this transformation during the course of a performance. From the coloratura of Olympia, the lyricism of Antonia, and the seductive vocal darkness of Giulietta, Zeani always performed these three roles together, creating a metaphor for her own career out of the challenging vocalism required in Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann.
The longevity of her career was a matter of intelligence, sensibility, and good taste, says Zeani.
“I never sang anything too early! Even my debut as Violetta, at 22, was not too soon, because my voice had matured by 16, and I had studied for eight years with Lucia Anghel and Lydia Lipkowska in Romania,” she says. “Then when I came to Italy, I already knew four roles by heart. But for the first 15 years of my career, I stuck to lyric coloratura. I did not attempt roles like Aida, Tosca, Butterfly or Puccini’s Manon before the age of 37.”
Opera audiences around the world have Zeani’s inner sensible career guide to thank, as they were able to revel in her performances for more than 34 years. She lent her voice, musicality, theatrical temperament, and beautiful stage presence to 70 operatic characters, from her debut role as Violetta in Bologna, in May 1948 to her last role, Mother Marie in Poulenc’s The Dialogues of the Carmelites in San Francisco, in November of 1982.
Zeani’s marriage to the late, celebrated Italian bass Nicola Rossi-Lemeni led to a fruitful and rewarding musical partnership. The two often performed and recorded together. It also brought along the inevitable compromises a singer faces when married to a famous colleague. Married at 31, while in full swing of her ascension to stardom, Zeani became a mother at 32. She returned to the stage three months after the birth of her son. She admits it was not an easy life.
“When you marry a singer of my husband’s renown, you have to know how to give him part of your activities, your time, your energy; and when you also have a child, your career will subtly take second place. And if you want a career, you have to find that balance, to devote time to it as well.
“I am exhausted just thinking back on my life. I really don’t know how I handled it all. It was a struggle.”
Undoubtedly, part of the struggle was living in an age where certain pre-conceived notions were intrinsic to the culture and social expectations. Zeani was an exceptionally modern woman for the ‘50s, juggling family and motherhood with the increasingly challenging demands of her career.
The tumult of Zeani’s first “two lives”—childhood and adolescence in Romania, youth and career in Italy—mellowed with her move to the United States and her transformation from singer to teacher. Indiana University offered both Zeani and Rossi-Lemeni teaching positions in 1980. The arrival of the two glamorous opera stars in Bloomington was earth shattering, as some students described it.
The two threw themselves passionately and generously into shaping young voices and sculpting budding singers into accomplished artists. Results followed quickly. More and more of their students began winning the Met National Council Auditions as well as other international competitions. Sylvia McNair, Elizabeth Futral, Patricia Risley, Stephen Mark Brown, Angela Brown, and Marilyn Mims are a few among the successful singers who have been enriched by their encounter with Virginia Zeani.
“It is this encounter between the teacher and the student that determines how productive their work together is going to be,” says Zeani. “I call it ‘encounter,’ most call it ‘chemistry,’ but if it is good, it establishes trust. Many people study with teachers they don’t trust, and they end up changing teachers quickly. But I believe the more you change, the more lost you are, because you change ideas. While new ideas might be refreshing for a moment, you won’t know where you are anymore.”
Zeani’s passion for teaching, coupled with her natural generosity and warmth, transcends the teaching experience as vocal diagnosis and remedy, encouragement and guidance within the confines of a limited time. I had the chance to observe voice lessons with three of Florida Grand Opera Studio’s young artists—Christina Pier, Chad Johnson, and Tim Kuhn—at Zeani’s home in West Palm Beach, Florida. Technical and artistic issues took precedence—but the promise of a home-cooked meal was no weak incentive to hard work.
The three hours of productive morning singing melted into an afternoon discussion over Zeani’s delicious pasta specialties. The topic? Countless variations of singers’ hopes and struggles, whys and hows, ifs and whens, mingled with gossip, frustrations, joys and Zeani’s own special brand of humor, advice and wisdom.
Christina Pier, a winner in this year’s Met National Council Auditions, has been studying with Zeani since 1999. A young, impressive, dramatic soprano, Pier refers to Zeani as a mother figure, friend and mentor.
“Studying voice with her has changed my life. First of all, she transformed me from a mezzo to a soprano, and gave me the confidence to sing all of this great repertoire.”
Tenor Chad Johnson marvels at Zeani’s wealth of knowledge and experience.
“She studied with Aureliano Pertile! Both Pavarotti and Domingo made some debuts with her! She just knows so much about the stage, about artistry!”
Tim Kuhn, a former tenor Zeani changed to a booming baritone, agrees, adding that his teacher cares not just about the technical development of her students but also about their spiritual and emotional well-being. He offers a moving tribute.
“A voice lesson with Virginia Zeani is not just a voice lesson. It is a life lesson!”
One of Zeani’s priorities in teaching is being able to “understand the psychology of a voice.” She believes it is important for teachers to mentally transpose themselves into a student’s physical structure—the head, the neck, the body—to understand and guide each individual voice. Keeping the physical characteristics in mind, Zeani then applies the same basic principles to all her students.
“You should start with the breath and the projection of the sound. I think of the breath as intracostal, which means the ribs expand, as they do when you are yawning. You need to maintain that expansion as you sing the phrase, and help it by tucking the lower abdomen in. Not forcing it in! It is all very subtle and elegant, as if you were a dancer. Whenever you feel the chest or ribs collapse on you, help them re-expand through the breath.”
This should not be misunderstood as a recommendation to take a breath during a long phrase or vocalise to maintain the expansion. I observed that by placing two hands laterally on the ribs, and creating a mental image of gently pushing the hands away with the outward movement of the ribs while singing, illustrated Zeani’s point.
“It is not a violent movement of the ribs outwards. That can create problems. It is elasticity; gymnastics of the breath, and this image of expansion prevents collapsing,” says Zeani. “I maintain the elasticity of the breath in my students through agility exercises. It doesn’t matter if you are a bass or a mezzo, or if you have a big dramatic voice, not inclined towards coloratura. I believe in agility and take all my students through fast scales and arpeggios, legato and staccato.
“That was very important for me as a singer too. I had studied as a mezzo. Lydia Lipkowska, who was a lyric soprano with high agility, made me do lots of agility vocalizes and in three months, I had a high F! Before, I could only get to a G below high C. This change opened up my life! That is why I insist on this. Of course, I won’t have a huge voice do excessive agility, but just enough to keep it flexible.
Another aspect of elasticity is economy of breath. Zeani insists on “economizing the breath and not giving too much.” She demonstrates by whistling like a bird up and down a scale, and then purposely loses the whistle by blowing too much air.
“You see what happens if I give too much air? It’s the same in singing!” Inexperienced students may have some difficulty in giving very little breath and yet avoiding the rigid physical feeling that inevitably comes with any mental command involving “hold.” In this case, the emphasis was placed on holding back on the stream of air.
“I know the word ‘hold’ is tricky, because you can get rigid” declares Zeani. “Of course you still have to remain flexible while not giving too much breath. That is one of the most difficult processes to understand. It is also a question of language. Some words may trigger the right idea into a singer’s mind while others may not. If someone studies with me longer, throughout the year, I will use different imagery to help them understand.”
Zeani believes in the methodical development of a singer’s technique. She starts her new, beginner-level students with easy vocalizes on vowels, and then adds consonants to the vowels.
“The consonant has to be hooked up high, and it leads the way for the vowel into this resonance space we call the mask. The mask position is vital for the projection of the sound. This position must be the same throughout all of your registers.”
To demonstrate, Zeani proceeds to hum randomly ascending arpeggios to a high D, and back down—to the second A below middle C!
“I can do that so easily because every note is in that same position, in the mask!”
This position is the secret behind Zeani’s fearless approach to her rich chest voice. A matter of debate among teachers, the indulgence in the chest voice, when it comes to high voices, can become a subject of endless disagreement. Some teachers believe in avoiding the occasional temptation to bask in the chest voice when the singer has to linger mostly in high tessituras. Others believe the lower voice to be an anchor to the rest of the voice. so they allow their soprano students to plant their vocal feet firmly on chest soil, in proportion to their Fach.
Zeani, however, presents it differently.
“I don’t see it as a question of chest. That is a big mistake people make, thinking that the chest voice is somehow different or that you have to avoid it or not avoid it,” she says. “Every vocalise has the mask position, whether you start low or high. When you go low, you still have to maintain this position. But the resonance will move from the head to the chest by itself. You don’t have to do anything other than maintain the position, and the voice will resonate in the chest naturally, as much or as little as your physical structure allows it to.”
She exemplifies by singing a five note scale ascending and descending from G below middle C, on “ah.” Then she sings the same scale attempting to avoid the chest resonance. The sound loses color and strength.
“You see what happens. It is a mistake to avoid that resonance I just found for fear of not being able to sing high. Avoiding the resonance will misplace your position, and then you truly won’t be able to sing high correctly! If you maintain the position, and go high,” [she demonstrates by ascending to a high D], “the resonance will move more and more into the head. That’s just normal.”
Zeani could not be more emphatic about keeping the position of the sound in the mask. Yet she accentuates the difference between position and resonance, as confusion between the two may lead to trouble.
For those unfamiliar with the term, the mask refers to the resonating chambers above the upper teeth, behind the nose, in the sinus cavities, extending up to the forehead, and including the dome created by the hard palate. Zeani helps singers to locate the mask by emphasizing the complete relaxation of the lower jaw, which she uses only to accompany the articulation of the words. She creates a mental image of the upper teeth as a boundary, above which a singer should sing and articulate. The sensation of inhalation through open, flaring nostrils further helps in locating the resonating space behind the nose; the space which is the core of the mask.
Yet one should be leery of too-vivid, behind-the nose imagery. Observing several beginning students, I found that too much emphasis on the opening of the nose could lead to a nasal sound, while persistent wiggling attempts to relax the jaw might create more tension or pain. Zeani herself warns against excessive zeal.
“In teaching, as in life, it is a question of balance, sometimes, very delicate balance!”
She agrees that you should not go overboard with any teacher’s suggestions. They are only means to help illustrate principles, but technique is the sum of all its great and small parts.
“Technique is everything together. The artistic and the technical. You should never ignore one for the other.”
With her more advanced students, Zeani simply becomes the characters her students bring to her, transforming herself from Germont to Edgardo to Leonora to Rosina in the span of four hours. To illustrate her points, she sings the phrases being studied, in the right key. Breaking the student’s awed silence, she jokingly declares: “I would make a great tenor! And an acceptable bass, but only in the morning!”
The emotion, phrasing, messa di voce, accents, and characterizations pour out of her—and she can switch from demanding technical perfection to offering moments of intensely emotional artistry that leave her students, and her master class audiences spellbound.
A beautiful, warm, intelligent, humorous woman, complete artist and generous teacher, Virginia Zeani was a phenomenon on the stage and is a force of nature in real life. Former, current, and prospective students from all over the world come to her door. She is a tireless worker in helping those who touch her with their talent and devotion to singing, and she also finds the time and energy to travel and give master classes. She will return to Indiana University in January 2004, resuming her teaching after a sabbatical year.
The break gave Zeani a chance to reflect on her life and work on her biography. Her dream is to celebrate her 80th birthday, in 2005, with the publication of this book. My dream was to interview this veritable treasure of the opera world. The experience became an unforgettable encounter!
