It was in 2009 that Alexandra Deshorties decided to quit singing. Moving that summer into a production of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots at Bard College’s SummerScape festival, she had decided the role of Valentine would be her last.
“I didn’t have a support system. I didn’t know who to trust anymore,” she explains of the choice. “I wanted to just quit and disappear and find something else to do that didn’t make me feel like I was supposed to suffer in order to achieve anything.”
It doesn’t sound like the typical career move, but then Deshorties isn’t your typical singer. One of her strongest musical memories that made her want to pursue a career in opera, apart from growing up in a house brimming with Beethoven, was seeing Freddie Mercury performing at the World Cup. Even with a performing arts background, her original course of study was painting. Despite often delving into mentally unstable characters onstage, she prefers to go home to her cross-stitch or her knitting (and, yes, she makes her own yarn). She doesn’t have a Facebook account, she doesn’t do Twitter, and she recently parted ways with her American management so that she is now solely represented in Europe.
In many ways, Deshorties—who was born in Montreal and raised in Marseille—has much in common with one of her compatriots, French actress and filmmaker Julie Delpy, whose film Two Days in New York (a sequel to 2007’s Two Days in Paris) was released earlier this summer. Like Delpy, Deshorties got her start early and within the confines of the system (Hollywood and opera are not so hard to interchange here). In her early 20s, she won the 1997 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and entered the Lindemann program. At age 24, she made her Met debut singing as the High Priestess in Aida.
By the time she was in her late 20s, Deshorties’ relationship with the Met had faltered. On opening for a 2003 production of Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio, which starred Deshorties as Konstanze, a heckler in the center of the eleventh row booed Deshorties vehemently following her major arias. The audience member was ejected from the house prior to the third act on the grounds that he did not have a ticket for his orchestra seat and the story spread like wildfire across the press.
Overnight, Deshorties went from being a bright young singer who did things uniquely—a throwback to the age when every singer was different and had their own discernible quirks—to being “controversial.” She says that word with a grimace; it’s a look that indicates that she welcomes the discussion of controversial topics (Deshorties herself brought up the Met incident after I delicately mentioned it as a topic of discussion in a pre-interview e-mail), but that she balks at the idea of being considered a controversial person.
“The worst thing is that part of me goes, ‘Well, it’s his opinion, why do we need to make such a big deal of it?’” She notes that whatever residual soreness she feels toward the event, almost a decade to the month old, has to do with how it was handled, both by Deshorties and her management team. “I didn’t know how to handle it, because I thought this was just somebody’s opinion and that it would go away,” she says. “It didn’t.”
The experience changed Deshorties, but changed her in the way that Dr. Arnold Beisser describes the term in his Gestalt therapy work “The Paradoxical Theory of Change.” Change for Deshorties meant ignoring what was laid out for her on a traditional singer’s path, what most young singers—especially singers in a Met setting—want to become. Rather, change occurred when Deshorties embraced who she is. And, flashy career or not, who she is turns out to be pretty fascinating and certainly fulfilled.
“Music is something that permeates our essence so much. We keep on reinviting it in every form possible,” Deshorties says of her physiological, metaphysical relationship to her art. While painting may have been placed on the backburner for the time being (“I can always do it at 70 years old when I’m retired,” she shrugs. “But singing has a finite kind of time frame. You don’t have many sopranos who make their debut at 65; that’s not gonna happen.”), Deshorties still believes in the physical craftwork of singing. Coming out of art school and the vocal world, she has seen plenty of people who identified as artists and finds that self-declaration is a slippery slope. Amid so many self-proclaimed artists, she finds, are very few craftspeople.
“The great craftsman is someone who takes pride in the work itself for the work’s sake and is interested in substance instead of form in a way that is, I think, deeper,” she explains. “A craftsman who makes one table a year does not impose a table on the wood. If the wood wants to be a stool, he’ll make a stool. He will not impose and create something that is about form and lacks substance. . . . Because art is so incredibly intangible, it can only be nominated by a third party.”
As far as Deshorties is concerned, her role as a singer is to make the “most cohesive form of abstract craftsmanship that I can with opera.” Unlike painting or sculpture, cross-stitch or knitting, there’s no tangible final product to which she can attach her name. “It’s a moment in time that cannot be reproduced, one that is kind of an assemblage of various crafts that is thrown out there for somebody to feel at any given moment and then disappears into the common unconscious.”
What comes part and parcel with self-declaration, Deshorties adds, is often an excess of mediocrity. Which, she also notes, isn’t necessarily unavoidable. “This is not about the art, this is about the ego. This is about the form that they project to the world, and there is very little other,” she says, hitting upon the idea that the parodies that many outsiders have of opera singers are the result of a point where form becomes “so superlative” to substance that it enters a debauched territory, “a kind of parody of itself.”
In retrospect, she admits that it was no wonder that she alienated many of opera’s most vociferous fans and practitioners. Deshorties would leave the stage door in street clothes with no makeup, head down, rushing to the subway with MetroCard in hand. It didn’t occur to her that the substance of opera, for many audience members, extends beyond the stage into the days of diva worship in which Chanel-clad sopranos cascaded out of their dressing room ready to play another part: the diva among their adoring fans. Like the shock that audiences first experienced seeing grand operas done in minimal, inopulent fashion, she realized such a shocking alternative to the expectation bred resentment.
“For me, I made some enemies just by being young and by being really honest and earnest,” she admits. “Everybody would go, ‘Oh my [gosh], who’s this Pollyanna? I hate her. Who’s this person who talks to the assistant of somebody? What kind of singer is that? Who’s this person who bakes for everybody?’” Having, like Delpy, a very French sense of humor—droll, witty, with an understated audacity—also proved to be a challenge for Deshorties who found that things she said in jest often looped around back to her as statements made in all sincerity, regardless of how outrageous or satirical they seemed.
In fact, it took Deshorties up through her 30s to learn (and she freely admits that she is still learning), often the hard way, how to control her sense of humor, her temper, and her assumption that others understood her overall process. A self-described “analog” person with a circular, “dyslexic, very ADHD” mind, Deshorties often finds herself a square peg in a round hole constructed for a digital, linear personality.
Deshorties’ process of preparing a role speaks to her singular temperament—adding to her list of mental quirks the fact that she’s a synesthete, seeing color when she hears sound, makes it all the more complicated. “I go for guts first,” she explains. She’ll write the entire libretto for a work into a booklet and highlight the text using a specific color code, starting to work on the language and amalgamating words with research. “If at some point she mentions a fabric, I go to look for that fabric: What does the fabric look like to me? What does it feel like on her skin? How does that inform the way she moves?”
She considers the role as a stage director would, imagining how costumes—period or contemporary—would inform or impede her movement and how that, in turn, would affect attitude and personality. Architecturally, she brings the whole together “and then I go into rehearsal and I let it all go and I sink my teeth into someone else’s version.”
Sticking with the idea of color, Deshorties considers her own shades of the character to be like a Pantone book: to a director, she contains various options for painting a role, and work goes into putting those swatches into the book. She supplements the mental side of the music with an intense amount of physical training, including martial arts and swordplay.
“I think people should be healthy of body to be healthy of mind,” she says. “If you only have one outfit physically, how are you going to represent 20 characters who are different people, different races, different ages, different backgrounds? It all just helps. I don’t think of myself as so brilliant that I’m not going to use a tool in the box.” (Again with the craftsmanship.)
But she admits that she’s human and, like other singers, some tools will never be available to her. Finding creative alternatives has been what keeps her going, especially when it came to developing a pedagogical methodology in spite of her learning disabilities, a method so effective that others have asked her to share it with them.
And yet the craftsmanship, the pride, the art, all led Deshorties to a time roughly three-and-a-half years ago in which she was ready to table it all and move on to another challenge. Not having a reliable circle of advisors who were able to guide Deshorties through the political world of classical music and help her make the right decisions for her career—rather than, as Deshorties suspects, making the right decisions for their own careers—left Deshorties feeling somewhat disheartened.
“You do what you can with the experience that you have. I mean, I don’t regret it, because that’s what my path was and I did the best that I could,” she says of her early days when she was hungry for work. “You take what comes your way, what you think you can handle.”
But when it’s something that she couldn’t handle, the ability for Deshorties to speak up for herself and look for alternatives to doing something uncomfortable onstage was a hard one to discover. Part of this she finds is due to the practice of booking singers years in advance, as had happened with her run of “Seraglio” at the Met. Stepping into the revival, she instinctively felt that the direction would leave her without much opportunity to move, to keep her voice warmed as she was singing.
Hindsight being 20/20, Deshorties wishes in retrospect that she had been more vocal. “I wish I had insisted more of other people and slammed my first on the table and said, ‘Listen, I need to perform this in a smaller house first, just so that I know the role inside out.’ Or ‘Listen, I’m not going to just plant myself downstage and not move for my aria. It’s not good for you to do this when your body’s cold and you’re starting a show. It’s bad direction.’”
She thinks that over for a minute and says, “Or I could say that more diplomatically, say, ‘This is not working for me—could I please maybe have some more movement so I’m not so stuck?’” Either way, the experience of mitigating other people’s artistic visions (not to mention egos) wasn’t in Deshorties’ toolkit at the time. “I’d say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure about this,’ and they’d all say, ‘Don’t worry. You’ll be fabulous. You’ll be great.’ That’s how they handle you. And when things don’t go right, suddenly the room is empty and you’re standing alone and nobody comes to your rescue and it’s all your fault. And I wholeheartedly took responsibility: my voice was changing immensely.”
Working on Huguenots, however, changed Deshorties’ perspective on the industry and her place within it. Her relationship with her career became a little less complicated, and her support system got a major bolster, when she met assistant conductor Christian Capocaccia. By the end of the summer, they had become an item. Capocaccia convinced Deshorties to continue her career past what she had intended as her last hurrah.
“He said, ‘I can see what your problems are with this and that; I understand. But I think this is fixable. There is a market for you out there. It’s not going to be in huge houses that only want to create some image that is more corporate. It may be smaller; it may be more intimate. It may be you eventually financing your own projects. But I think it would be really shameful if you stopped,’” Deshorties recounts.
And so, Deshorties didn’t say “no” when a phone call came from the Dallas Opera inviting her to step in at the last minute as Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello. Deshorties credits the positive work environment in Texas, the trust of artistic director Jonathan Pell, and the support of music director Graeme Jenkins as a turning point. “I felt maybe I am worth something, maybe I have something to say.” Deshorties returns to Dallas, where Capocaccia has been an assistant conductor since 2008, this spring. Replacing an ailing Carol Vaness, she will sing the pivotal Juliana Bordereau in Dominick Argento’s The Aspern Papers opposite Susan Graham and Nathan Gunn.
“Alexandra is an artist of singular intelligence and beauty,” said Pell in a statement issued by the company when the cast change was announced. “However, despite an appearance so glamorous that she’s been the subject of a fashion magazine spread, this soprano is utterly fearless and without vanity in pursuit of the truth of the characters she portrays.”
“It’s my kind of work,” Deshorties (who has indeed been photographed for a visually striking W magazine spread) says of the upcoming work. “You get to dive into something unique. It’s all that opera should be: you have a musical challenge, you have a vocal challenge, you have an acting challenge—and it’s your job to make something, to interpret it in a way that’s meaningful to someone, anyone, just one person.”
Performing in recital and in smaller festivals has also become a source of joy for Deshorties. A recital at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall in 2010 was one of her career highlights. Working on the program of Haydn, Debussy, Wolf, Poulenc, Weill, and Édith Piaf from all aspects with pianist Howard Watkins gave her the sense of artistic fulfillment and control. Deshorties saw that similar work in action when singing in Luleå, Sweden, with baritone Peter Mattei’s synonymous Mattei Festival.
“Peter is a good friend and a wonderful person and an extraordinary mind—an extraordinary artist. It’s very special. He’s trying to do something so positive for people he met along the way that he liked and thought had something to say,” says Deshorties. “You get so many false positives in life, and once in a while it’s all just good. It’s not a false positive; it’s not anything that’s false. It’s something real and it’s got value and it’s something that enriches you in the most simple and gratifying way.”
Given the experience working with the likes of Mattei and Watkins, not to mention her partner’s onetime suggestion that her place may be in producing her own work, is that an area that Deshorties is exploring?
“There are some pieces I really want to do and there are some people I really want to do them with. I can pursue at least the dream of doing it with them in a certain way in an environment that allows us to, say, have a screaming match about something without either of us being fired because one higher-up takes it poorly,” she says. “I think that difficult times breed really furious art. The constraints themselves force people toward creativity to save themselves. When there is an economical downturn and a big company gets rid of 15 percent of their staff, what do people do? Sit on their couch and wait for something to happen?”
Deshorties also concedes that the fact that her other half is a conductor is highly useful for producing her own work— though the pair’s most recent, and most important collaboration, however, is their son, born earlier this year. While others told her that her priorities should be to lose the baby weight quickly, to hire a good nanny, and to stay far away when her child was sick, Deshorties has become nothing if not adept at cutting out extraneous noise and finds that going into motherhood with as much energy and commitment as she approached her singing career has benefitted both her personal and professional life.
“I love to be onstage and do my work,” she says. “And with a baby, now I also have something bigger to take care of. It puts the world in perspective. It proves my theory about adaptation and confirmed my theory . . . that we’re not that important. We just need to take good care of each other and be kind and respectful to each other.”
