A trip to Broadway at age 11 planted the seeds of author Stephanie Cowell’s twin passions: singing and writing. After seeing Mary Martin in Peter Pan, Ms. Cowell went home and penned a sequel to the musical—complete with songs—and played Peter in a school production attended by children throughout her native New York City.
“I’m a lyric coloratura,” she explains, “but when I sang opera I found myself also longing to perform mezzo trouser parts like Cherubino, Octavian, and Sesto. I’d been wanting to play a boy since Peter Pan, and my career took off in an unexpected direction when I finally did.”
Ms. Cowell offers this tantalizing clue to her journey from singer to author on a balmy Sunday when we meet for lunch at Café Mozart, 15 blocks from her home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. We are seated beneath a portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus in the noisy Viennese-style café where Ms. Cowell conceived her acclaimed recent novel, Marrying Mozart, the story of Mozart’s relationship with the four Weber sisters. The petite author with the ready laugh is so youthful, she would make a convincing Mozart soubrette today, two decades after she shelved her singing career to raise two sons and write fiction.
“I could probably perform Zerlina or Susanna with one week of careful preparation,” she confides, “because those characters were so important to my life.”
Considering the author’s relationship with Mozart, it seems fitting that he is the composer who introduced Ms. Cowell to opera. When she was 12, her father gave her a grand-tier ticket for Le nozze di Figaro at the Old Met, and she was mesmerized by Cesare Siepi in the title role. Ms. Cowell returned to the Met again and again during her teen years, and her vocation seemed to crystallize during another “Figaro” performance, when she heard soprano Lisa della Casa as The Countess.
“I suddenly thought, ‘This is what I want to do with my life,’” she says, and although she wrote two prize-winning stories at age 19 and 20, she never stopped imagining the day she would sing the great Mozart arias. With a mother who was one of the most famous fashion artists of her day and a father who was a painter, Ms. Cowell knew her parents would support her ambitions, but she listened to her recording of “Figaro” so often her father finally begged her never to play it again.
“I just kept singing along,” she admits, chuckling at the memory.
After coffee we take a cab from Café Mozart to a quiet block of West End Avenue, and our interview continues in the book-lined parlor of the apartment Ms. Cowell shares with her husband of 10 years, poet and spiritual director Russell Clay. She shows me the computer alcove where she works and the many shelves crammed with research books for her four novels: Nicholas Cooke: Actor, Soldier, Physician, Priest (1993); The Physician of London (1995); The Players: A Novel of the Young Shakespeare (1997); and Marrying Mozart (2004). Last summer she completed a novel about Shakespeare’s travails during the year he wrote Hamlet, and she expects to finish her new novel, about Monet, in 2006.
Today, however, we’re here to discuss her salad days as a soprano, and when I ask about her training Ms. Cowell dives in with relish.
“At 22 or 23,” she says, “I made a real commitment and began to study seriously, and for 17 years singing became my entire life. I had a tiny voice that was totally unconnected to my body, and it took several teachers and a lot of performing for my lyric-coloratura voice to blossom.”
Initially, she worked with coloratura Barbara Christopher and then Ruth Lienau, who helped her instrument grow in size and range. “I also studied with Carolina Segrera Holden,” she continues, “and finally Gustava Weiss, who wondered if I was a mezzo, because my low notes were big and full down to low G. Yet I could also easily sing a top D, so I mainly focused on the lyric-coloratura repertoire.”
As Amy Cowell—Amy is her middle name—she performed leading roles throughout greater New York from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s.
“I worked in what I like to call ‘basement opera companies,’” she explains, “because most groups performed in church basements. Many wonderful people came out of those companies. My debut role was Barbarina in ‘Figaro’ at the Educational Alliance on the Lower East Side, and when I came onto that shabby little stage during Mozart’s fourth-act finale, and heard all the voices singing those incredible harmonies, I thought, ‘Now I have gone to heaven.’”
As a bride and new mother in the early ‘70s, Ms. Cowell brought her infant son, James, to rehearsals in a canvas carrier.
“When anyone hit a high note he’d make a little face, then go right back to sleep,” she says. “Alas, we had absolutely no money, but I was asked to perform at one of the most prestigious companies, the Clark Center on 53rd Street, which required a workshop fee.” In a spunky move worthy of Susanna, whom she was about to play, she took free material from the scrap bins on the Lower East Side and made a beautiful, green, patchwork skirt that she sold to one of her wealthier soprano colleagues.
“That was how I managed to do my first ‘Figaro,’” she remembers proudly.
Ingenuity and determination became the hallmarks of Ms. Cowell’s career, as another anecdote illustrates. When North Bergen Opera asked her to sing Gretel, a role she didn’t know, she bought a recording and learned it in a single week while caring for toddler James and his new brother, Jesse.
“Gretel is enormously hard to sing, almost like a Wagner heroine,” she says. “But there I was, this light soprano, singing high Cs while running around in my little braids.” Her fearlessness paid off: The company asked her to sing Gilda in Rigoletto, an experience that was “exciting and vocally intense.”
Another company, Stuyvesant Opera, invited Ms. Cowell to sing the Queen of the Night. “I did only one performance before retiring my crown,” she says with amusement. “My absolute top note was an F, and as all sopranos know, you should be able to sing a G at home if you want to sing an F in public. Well, I was a total wreck! The woman doing the lights that night said she heard me sigh with relief when I hit my last F.”
Nonetheless, she impressed the Stuyvesant musical director, who quickly cast her as Lucia. “One evening during the run,” she says, “I hurried home to cook dinner for my children and burned my hand on the pork chops. Then I dashed to the Episcopalian Church at 81st and West End Avenue to sing. I can’t recall if I made the high E-flat that night or not.”
To supplement her family’s income while accepting unpaid operatic roles, Ms. Cowell accompanied herself on guitar and sang traditional songs in several languages at women’s clubs, colleges, and other venues. She also formed a chamber group, The Lyric Quartet, with pianist Judith Nietzsche, bass-baritone Tom Caltabellotta, and three successive tenors: Max Ramirez, Kevin Carlson, and R. Mack Miller. The quartet gave more than 300 performances, traveling throughout the boroughs to share excerpts from opera and operetta at schools, clubs, and private parties.
“I wish that Classical Singer had been around then,” Ms. Cowell says wistfully. “There were rumors about how performers made it, but my colleagues and I were doing all sorts of things, and those of us in opera were constantly talking about the day we’d be ready to sing at the Met or at the major houses in Europe. Yet we had no idea how to get there! I felt that one day we’d walk into the Met or a major management company and our lives would forever change. I did have some friends who made it into City Opera, but I never auditioned, because I was waiting until my technique was ready.”
Ms. Cowell was forced to reassess her goals when she got divorced in the early 1980s and became the sole support of James and Jesse, then 13 and 10.
“I no longer had the luxury of worrying about my technique or where I might audition,” she says, “but for a while I moved bravely forward. One day I’d sing Jewish songs for a Jewish organization, and the next day I’d be the Irish singer at the Harvard Club. Then I’d sing French songs for Bloomingdale’s as part of their French promotion. I can’t tell you all the places I sang; I was everywhere.” But the pressures of becoming a breadwinner made her longtime dream of moving to Europe and performing in the regional houses “impossible,” a word that had never before entered her vocabulary.
Mozart inspired her anew when Ms. Cowell, a perpetual optimist, watched one of her idols, mezzo Tatiana Troyanos, in a televised Met production of La clemenza di Tito.
“I fell in love with the music,” she says, “and the story moved me to pieces.” A while later, she sang a concert with friends, including the young Dominican tenor, Francisco Casanova. When she told Mr. Casanova about her response to “Tito,” he exclaimed, “That’s my dream role!”
Ms. Cowell decided to translate the libretto from Italian into English, marshalling the writing talent she had mentally placed in storage when she committed herself to singing. Then she, Mr. Casanova, and several colleagues formed their own company, Strawberry Opera, which rehearsed in Ms. Cowell’s parlor.
“Some of my neighbors slammed their windows shut,” she quips, “but most opened them wide!” Her sons groused that they would go deaf from the noise.
“We chose to sing in English so we could communicate more easily with our audience,” she explains, “and we had a wonderful director who gave the story a truly human dimension. We gave 10 performances of La clemenza di Tito with piano accompaniment, taking the production to churches in Brooklyn, a classical garden in New Rochelle, and various community centers. Francisco was superb in the title role, and today he’s an international tenor who made his Met debut in 2001. I played Sesto, the boy who betrays Tito, the person he loves most.”
One night before the show, Mr. Casanova told Ms. Cowell, “Your words are wonderful! You really are a writer.” By this point the soprano had sung a thousand performances as a classical soprano and balladeer, and she’d played Pamina, Papagena, Despina, and the First Spirit in Die Zauberflöte, as well as the roles mentioned here. But to ensure her family’s financial stability, she had just taken a full-time job.
“I suppose my defining moment came,” she says, “when our ‘Tito’ director tried to mount an off-Broadway production. When I realized I couldn’t perform at night and get up the next morning for work, I finally had to admit that my singing career was over.”
Ironically, though, she had rekindled her early passion for writing when she’d translated Caterino Mazzola’s “Tito” libretto.
“Singing Sesto had also reminded me of my time as Peter Pan,” she remembers. “I felt there was a boy inside me who wanted to come out, and he finally emerged when I began my first novel, Nicholas Cooke. I was suddenly not constrained by being a five-foot-two soprano. Writing let me play any Fach.”
In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Cowell retreated into “the silence of writing”—no more articles in The New York Times about her concert work, no more admiring letters from fans. She felt ambivalent: She was channeling her creativity into fiction, but she was also mourning the loss of performing.
“I went back and forth for a while, but eventually I sold my piano and gave away my music,” she says. “My singer friends didn’t understand. They were concerned about who was singing at the Met, whereas I was focused on a fictional protagonist who was making his way in 16th century England.” She smiles ruefully. “It was an adjustment.”
Yet Ms. Cowell never doubted that she had made the right choice for her family, and she cheerfully reports that James and Jesse, now in their 30s, are both doing well.
Literary success didn’t happen overnight, but after developing her craft for several years and searching for the right agent, Ms. Cowell sold Nicholas Cooke to W.W. Norton. Reviews were excellent, and the Oct. 25, 1993 issue of People ran a glowing article about her. This was heady stuff after her performing struggles, and each of her novels has reinforced her reputation for brilliance.
“It’s quite amazing to me,” she says, “but a lot of the places where I once wanted to sing—Vienna, Milan, Salzburg—now carry my books. I got what I wanted, but in a different way.”
Ms. Cowell proudly mentions that her vocal training and experience illuminate her stories. Indeed, one of her most cherished reviews declares that only a singer could have written Marrying Mozart.
“The other night I was listening to a rehearsal tape of a Schumann cycle I worked on with a coach,” she says. “I was reminded of the incredible focus you have as a singer. Well, focusing on the emotion of every word and creating a world is the same thing you do as a writer. You have to take the same care with your phrases and your scenes. In my work every line has a cadence, and I hear it.”
Whatever subjects Ms. Cowell writes about in the future, Mozart will always have a special place in her heart.
“Marrying Mozart is like a Mozart opera,” she declares. “All the characters come on stage at different times, and they all have their own problems and goals. There are misunderstandings, and it seems as though it’s going to be a tragedy, but in the end, everyone comes together singing! He gets the girl and starts to sell his music.” She laughs. “Mozart’s very strong in my book. His real manliness and strength are not present in the movie Amadeus, but if you read his letters you can see what a proud and principled person he was and how much he really did love his wife, Constanze.”
Since Jan. 27, 2006 marked the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth—celebrations will continue throughout this year—Ms. Cowell is in great demand as a lecturer. She will also serve as a special guest on a Mozart anniversary tour to Salzburg and Vienna, where she will share her vast knowledge about the composer with her fellow travelers.
Mozart’s latest gift to Ms. Cowell? He has inspired her to sing again. She has begun to vocalize each week and her voice is “surprisingly fresh.” She now ponders the idea of doing a recital for friends.
“What I want to tell young singers,” she says, “is that if circumstances prevent you from having the ideal opera career you’ve envisioned—‘Mimì at the Met’ as I always say—there are plenty of other wonderful opportunities awaiting you. But you must seize them and make your own luck!”
She took her own advice at her first Barnes and Noble reading for Nicholas Cooke, when she hired a lute player and sang English songs, to the delight of her astonished fans.
As we conclude our chat over tea and pumpkin pie, the author asks if I would like to hear an aria from one of her performances. I was hoping for this glimpse of her operatic past, and as I listen to Ms. Cowell’s finely nuanced rendition of “Caro Nome,” I am disarmed by the silvery timbre of a voice that reminds me of the young Beverly Sills.
Afterward, as I reflect on my visit with Stephanie Cowell, I conclude that the former opera soprano must have moved audiences with her singing the way she now moves readers with her luminous prose. And somehow, I hope I’ll hear her voice again.
I hope we all do.
For further information about Ms. Cowell’s work, please visit www.marryingmozart.com.
