La traviata’s Act I cabaletta “Sempre libera” is musically programmed to be sung with the full conviction on the soprano’s part that her character is dying. Coloraturas are flung with abandon while the lyrics echo a desperate will to live.
As soprano Charity Sunshine Tillemann-Dick sang Violetta’s showstopper at IBM’s centennial celebration at Lincoln Center last fall, she also knew she was dying. Just over two years prior, Tillemann-Dick had received her first double-lung transplant at the Cleveland Clinic, and now her body had reached the inevitable phase in which it was rejecting the foreign organ. She was months into the process while waiting for a suitable donor. With her weight dropping into the 90s, her fiancé had to carry her from her bed to her living room sofa before he went to work in the morning and back again before he went to his own home at night.
Ten days prior to the performance, her breathing became much more labored, and Tillemann-Dick went to the hospital in hopes that her doctor could offer her a cocktail of medications to facilitate a concert that shared the stage with Jessye Norman and Joshua Bell. “It was more likely I’d stay there until they found a match or until I died,” she recounts.
“A lot of performances are kind of a let down. You put so much work into your craft, and I think as performers we think of performing as this validation of what we are. The truth is the craft and the process [are] the validation,” she explains. “The fact that we can spend our life doing what we love is the validation, not the performance.”
In the case of this concert, however, Tillemann-Dick says that the performance was the validation. Taking a break from her oxygen mask and being wheeled onto the stage of the Rose Theatre by her younger brother, she was able to assail the Alpine highs of Verdi’s music in the original key.
She tells me this story, one mere episode within her remarkable life as a two-time double-lung transplant survivor, with a consistently and, appropriately, sunny tone with a periodic pause presumably to regain composure. Whatever cards she’s been dealt, she plays them like a pro.
Born in 1983, Tillemann-Dick was the fifth of 11 children to Timber Dick and Annette Tillemann-Dick, members of a family once referred to by a local newspaper as “Denver’s own Royal Tenenbaums.” Her grandfather on her mother’s side was Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor to have served in the United States Congress and the granddaughter of Nancy Dick, Colorado’s first female lieutenant governor.
She received what she considers to be her “first real musical education” with the Colorado Children’s Chorale, which she joined at age 7. By 14, she received her bachelor’s degree, entering Regis University after being home-schooled, like the rest of her siblings, by her mother. Without a music program at the school, Tillemann-Dick tapped into her family’s lifeblood and majored in politics and economics, which also came in handy when she petitioned Regis to reinstate its music major, collecting signatures from 92 percent of the student body and 70 percent of the faculty. (Needless to say, the school now boasts a music program.)
While working on political campaigns for a year, Tillemann-Dick would sing at senior centers in New Hampshire as a way for her candidates to come in and make their case to the prospective voters who had otherwise put the kibosh on political speeches. “When I was done, this cute little old lady took my face in her hands and she said, ‘Why is a girl with such a pretty voice like that in such a dirty business like this?’” She began to reconsider a career in music.
After applying to a small number of schools, Tillemann-Dick initially opted to stay in Colorado and study at the University of Denver rather than incur debt studying at the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University. By chance, however, she took a voice lesson at the Liszt Academy of Music while in Budapest for her grandfather’s 75th birthday. The lesson became an audition and ultimately an offer for sponsors so that the young soprano could stay and study in Hungary.
That’s when the problems started.
“Ninety percent of singing is about breathing,” she says. “If you have the right airflow and you’re supporting from the right place, the sounds you’re going to be working with are the sounds you’re supposed to be making. It’s going to be your authentic voice. When I sang, I was fine. I was totally unimpeded.”
Walking to school, however, became more and more of a challenge. Tillemann-Dick remembers collapsing one day as she caught the tram, originally writing off the incident as a fainting spell. When it happened two subsequent times, however, she began to get nervous. Doctors in Budapest told her that, despite her diet in keeping with her tenets as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (no caffeine, no alcohol), she needed to increase her salt and caffeine intake.
“They thought it was low blood pressure,” she explains. What Tillemann-Dick had, however, was idiopathic pulmonary hypertension (or PH), which masks as low blood pressure but in actuality consists of continuous high blood pressure in the pulmonary artery. Tillemann-Dick jokingly refers to it as the reverse-Grinch syndrome: where Dr. Seuss’ Christmas character’s heart was three sizes too small, hers was becoming three sizes too large, quite literally. When she received the diagnosis on a visit home in Colorado, her doctor insisted that she stop singing.
Nothing in Tillemann-Dick’s own extensive research, however, showed any links between pulmonary hypertension and singing. She settled on the East Coast near Johns Hopkins’ medical team, and her mother encouraged her to reconsider Peabody. She was readmitted as a graduate student in 2004, though she was aching to return to Europe. “My voice teacher [in Budapest] had seven students, and as far as she was concerned it was too full—she just wanted five. There was a culture of really nurturing your artists. Here we live in a capitalist society and I think our conservatories exhibit that. Here it’s every singer for themselves, and I wasn’t used to that.”
While she sang around the Washington, D.C. area, polishing her expertise in the coloratura arias of 19th-century Hungarian composer Ferenc Erkel (the focus of her Fulbright Scholarship study), Tillemann-Dick was fitted for PH treatment in the form of a pump that delivers medicine directly into a chest vein every 45 seconds. In 2006, she was able to return to Europe thanks to a study fellowship in Italy courtesy of Johns Hopkins. It required a negotiation of family and friends’ schedules so that the medicine for her pump—not available in Europe—was always kept in supply, brought over from the States. She began working under conductor Bruno Rigacci in Florence and ultimately commuted between Italy and Hungary, where she returned to study under dramatic soprano Éva Marton.
Amid canceled engagements brought on by the loss of her grandfather and her father within a short period of time (the stress of which had a drastic impact on her health), Tillemann-Dick signed on for Joan Dornemann’s Israel program with the International Vocal Arts Institute, eager to take advantage of the available coachings. In order to hide the fact that she was ill, she kept her pump strapped to her inner thigh and wore prim dresses.
Tillemann-Dick recounts one story from Israel in her 2010 TEDMED talk, given after her first transplant but prior to realizing the need for a second round. After one performance, she felt like she was dying and realized that she had forgotten to mix the powder—the medicine itself—with the liquids that went into her pump. She was able to prepare a fresh batch just in time, and felt herself stabilize as she lay on the bathroom floor. Her voice gets a shade darker for a moment.
“That was the first time I realized this wasn’t a game. This was my life. And it was a stark realization.”
Ultimately, as she says in her TED talk, Tillemann-Dick received a transplant (a match was found the day after she went onto the donor list). She flat-lined twice on the operating table during an extremely difficult surgery, but the road to recovery had barely begun when she woke from a month-long coma following the procedure.
“The hardest thing I’d ever had to do was relearn to breathe,” she says. Almost a year passed and she was still on a respirator when an e-mail from a former director—one who didn’t always see eye-to-eye with Tillemann-Dick—gave her some added impetus. “She told me, ‘Remember your technique. Remember to breathe from your stomach, and you’ll be able to get off the respirator.’ Once I breathed the way I was taught to breathe, I could breathe.”
Her mother booked her for her first post-surgery gig, performing for the doctors at the Cleveland Clinic who saved her life. The story went viral when the audience of her doctors turned into an audience of 1,000 people, including journalists, and Tillemann-Dick had a new career not only singing, but sharing her story and becoming a spokesperson for pulmonary hypertension research.
However, in November of 2011, an infection spelled the end of Tillemann-Dick’s donor lungs. With a full schedule of performances in which she both sang and told the story of her first transplant, like her TED talk, she notes that “I was telling my story, but it was transforming into a different story, and I didn’t know what the ending was. It was progressing in a way I would have never hoped for or anticipated.”
Newly married, she spent the end of the year bedridden. On Christmas Eve, she was rushed to the emergency room with a blood pressure peaking at 220/200 (normally she was at 90/60) and her oxygen levels plummeting. As she was air-lifted to Cleveland, one of her last memories was of singing “Silent Night” for her doctor. The pH-levels signifying the acid level in a person’s blood are usually 15-20—Tillemann-Dick’s were at 126.
“The doctors looked at it and they didn’t know how I was still alive,” she says before laughing: “That’s a look I’ve gotten used to getting from doctors.”
Come January 24, 2012, after nearly a month spent slipping in and out of consciousness, Tillemann-Dick was told that they had found a match. “I have a pretty vivid imagination,” she says, “but I couldn’t imagine getting out of that place alive.” She describes her first experience as an organ recipient as a somewhat guilty one that comes with the sadness of realizing her benefit came at the expense of another family’s loss. The second time around, however, she says there was no guilt, only gratitude. Two months after she was released from the hospital, she gave her first post-surgery performance.
“This time my voice feels so much more like my own,” she says, clarifying that it wasn’t that her first lung transplant was “bad” and the second was “good.” But realizing the number of people who have contributed to each breath she takes has also contributed to Tillemann-Dick not only as a healthy person but also as a healthy artist.
“We fight to try to be what we feel the ideal of an artist is. But if you’re an artist, there isn’t an ideal. That’s what makes artistry unique,” she says. “You create the ideal, you imagine the ideal, and you become the ideal of what you are. It’s not a competition. The only competition is to get your body, your soul, and your mind in synch so you can produce the beautiful music that’s been written.”
She pauses. “For the first time, I’m not competing anymore.”
