The Move to Houston

     This will be a short one, due to my father's illness.
     I didn't keep a regular journal around the time I auditioned for the Houston Grand Opera Studio; for that reason, and also because my memory has gone bye-bye, I don't exactly recall the timing of events. I know I had to do two auditions, because there was no vacancy for a new coach in the Studio when I auditioned the first time. What I can't remember is exactly how long it was between auditions.
     But I do remember that first audition quite clearly: I had to prepare the Composer's Aria, the Act II Finale of Figaro, and the whole first act of Boheme. I had to be ready to sing any of the parts while playing, show how well I followed a conductor, and also sightread. To start the audition, I had to play a solo piano piece of my choosing to demonstrate my basic technique and musicality. I chose the first two movements of the Beethoven Op. 109 Sonata.
     My flight into Houston was a bit late, and the auditions were running a bit early due to a couple of cancellations; consequently, when I got off the elevator on the sixth floor of the Wortham Center, Shauna Bowman, the Studio's administrator, was right there waiting for the next victim. Which was me.
     "We're running ahead. Are you ready to go in right now?"
     Maybe someone else would have answered, "Actually, could I just have ten minutes to warm up?" But I, knowing my nerves and not being a big warmer-upper, said, "Sure!" Better just to go in and do it before I had the chance to get nervous.
     Anyway, it went very well (by the way, my sightreading piece was an ensemble from La Rondine), and they did ask me to come back and audition again when they had a vacancy. Some months (or maybe a year?) later, I got a call from Shauna saying that one of the Studio coaches decided not to stay a third year (three years is usually the maximum a coach or singer can stay), and could I do another audition in a couple of weeks? Sure!
     The real reason for the second audition, since they already knew my playing, was so that the Music Director of HGO, John de Main, and the co-director of the Studio, Carlisle Floyd, could hear me and give final approval. And approval they gave.
     I moved to Houston in the autumn of 1989 to embark on what was to be one of the greatest and most rewarding adventures of my life.

Handel and a Turning Point

     The San Antonio Festival's production of Handel's Saul (sometime in the mid-1980's; I can't remember exactly when) was an invaluable learning experience for me. Although I had already played recitatives in performances of Mozart and Rossini operas, Handel is another animal altogether, and I had zero experience with him going into rehearsals. Nor was I well-informed at that time about the world of Baroque scholarship and performance practice, or about the musicians who specialized in these things. Nicholas McGegan, who was to conduct Saul, was simply a name to me; I had no idea that he was and is one of the world's foremost Baroque specialists. I suppose being ignorant of this was better for my nerves.
     He had no quibbles about my playing of the arias and other set pieces; Bach was one of my specialties as a solo pianist and this helped me in playing Handel. But I was playing the recitatives (recits) as I would have played Mozart recits. McGegan taught me the correct way to do Handel recits: play chords only where indicated, no adding extra chords or improvising; the chords should be short and solid, or rolled quickly, or rolled moderately slowly, depending on the text and dramatic situation. They should never be sustained for long, and your cellist sustains the bass note only as long as the you sustain the chord. I have never forgotten this teaching, which served me well when years later I played continuo for such luminaries as Christopher Hogwood, Craig Smith, Patrick Summers, and once again for McGegan himself.
     I should say that the woman who sang the role of Michal was a still unknown Lorraine Hunt (later the great Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson, whose too early death from cancer left a deep void in the music world). That production of Saul was the beginning of her long, successful collaboration with McGegan and her reputation as a specialist in Handel, though she sang anything and everything with uncommon grace. I remember being particularly impressed, even at that early "soprano" stage of her career (she became a mezzo later on), with her liquid legato and warm, unforced sound.
     It was around the same time as Saul that I began serving as coach/repetiteur for Opera Theater of San Antonio. One season, we did The Barber of Seville and our Rosina was the delightful Stella Zambalis, who at that time had recently completed two years with the prestigious Houston Grand Opera Studio. She was impressed with my playing, and told me I should consider auditioning for the Studio, which trains coaches as well as singers. Being a master procrastinator and all-around yellow-bellied chicken, I mulled over her suggestion for a few years, meanwhile continuing to freelance. Despite Stella's confidence in me, and the encouragement I received from my teachers and elder coaches at AIMS (the American Institute of Musical Studies in Graz, Austria, which I attended for three summers), I myself was still unsure about my abilities. In my own mind, I was merely a big fish in a very small pond. The thought of testing the waters of a much larger pond, i. e. the Houston Grand Opera, brought out my extreme fear of drowning. Was I a good enough swimmer?
     On a particular day in the late '80s, around tax time, I was organizing the piles of receipts and paycheck stubs from all my freelancing jobs, when I came across a note from a coach whom I considered to be a mentor. This coach, who during the regular season served on the music staff of Lyric Opera of Chicago, was one of my teachers and my sounding board during the first of my three summers at AIMS. At the end of that summer, she left a note in my box which closed with, "You should have a great career in opera, if you want it."  I read the note again, sitting on the floor that spring day, surrounded by receipts and check stubs, and thought of all the piddly little jobs I was doing in order to scrounge up some sort of living -- a living which mostly got eaten away at tax time. I thought of all the tedious hours I spent coaching voice students who had little or no talent, who certainly had no hope of ever making a career in opera. I thought of all the miles I drove from job to job, burning up tankful after tankful of gas, grabbing fast-food lunches on the way. And I said to myself, "What the hell am I doing?"
     When annual auditions for the Houston Grand Opera Studio were announced later that year, I sent off an application.

The Freelance Musician

     After five years at Trinity University, studying piano and voice, I spent the next several years freelancing in San Antonio and Austin, as coach, rehearsal pianist, and singer. I also went back to the Round Top Festival for four more summers, once as a piano student and three times as a voice student. (Their vocal program existed only a few years, unfortunately.) Because I wasn't allowed to matriculate at Trinity (due to my lack of a high school diploma), I had no undergraduate degree; so graduate school was not an option. I had to become a professional straight away.
     Freelancing is no bed of roses, let me tell you. In order to earn any decent money at all, you have to have as many jobs as possible, which means you have to drive to all these jobs, which takes both time and gas. I was lucky to land some of the best jobs a freelance pianist could have in the San Antonio area: rehearsal pianist for the Symphony Mastersingers (I also sang with them), vocal coach at UTSA and St. Mary's University, répétiteur for the San Antonio Festival (now defunct), Austin Lyric Opera, and the Opera Theater of San Antonio (also now defunct). ("Répétiteur" is a fancy name for operatic rehearsal pianist.) As a singer I was soprano soloist at a couple of the bigger churches, and also sang solos with the Texas Bach Society, the Mastersingers, and the San Antonio Choral Society.
     During these years, I was equally interested in being a coach and a singer. My youthful aspiration to be a concert pianist had fizzled out by this time, as I discovered I lacked the wherewithal (or discipline) to put in the necessary hours per day practicing. My laziness again reared its droopy head. At any rate, I really didn't think I had the technique to cover a wide enough repertoire. Playing opera meant playing piano reductions of the orchestration; as they are not true piano works, this means you don't have to play every single note on the page. However, this does not necessarily mean that reductions are easier to play; in fact, there are many, many operatic scores that would challenge the most gifted pianists, for the very reason that they are unpianistic. I grew to love playing opera, being a one-woman orchestra and seeing how the orchestral score supports and enhances the drama. I loved being part of a multi-faceted art form and watching it come together, facet by facet, in the rehearsal room, then seeing the final product of weeks of hard work come to glorious life on the stage. But I also wanted to be part of that art form as a singer; so I continued studying voice and doing auditions and competitions.
     One summer, I decided to audition as a singer for the San Antonio Festival. They were mounting a production of Handel's Saul, and they were looking for a Merab. I was already known to the General Director as one of their regular repetiteurs, and he was rather surprised when I showed up to audition for Merab. After the morning round of auditions was over, he took me into his office and asked, "So are you a pianist or a singer?"
     "I'd like to be both," I answered.
     "You can't do both. Either one would -- should -- take up all your time, concentration, and effort. You cannot do both and expect to succeed at either one of them. Frankly, it's a lot harder for us to find competent répétiteurs than it is to find good singers, so I'd rather you play for Saul."
     Maybe he was trying to find a gentle way of saying he didn't think much of me as a singer; but I knew he was dead right about it being hard to find competent répétiteurs, especially in the San Antonio area. So I chose to play rehearsals for Saul, which meant I would also play continuo in performances under the baton of Baroque specialist Nicholas McGegan. (More on that later.) 
     That decision pretty much squelched any real ambition I had to be a singer, and sealed my fate as an operatic répétiteur and coach.
    
    
   

The Tunnel-Visioned Flunkie

     High school was almost a complete bust for me. If it weren't for choir, I think I would have gone mad. Fortunately our high school choir was one of the best in the state, certainly the best in the city, and our sense of competitive pride was extremely high and nurtured an already robust (perhaps too robust) musical competitiveness in me. I made it to All-State Choir three years in a row (I missed my freshman year, as I spent that year in a Catholic girls school), winning first in my voice division every year at every level (region, area, and state) except once, when I foolishly had pizza right before my audition and had to fight through major cheese phlegm while singing.

     Between choir and the increasing demands my piano study made on me, I grew lazier than ever scholastically, neglecting homework and skipping class to practice in the choir room. I even managed to skip nearly an entire semester of Latin. Every summer, I'd have to make up at least one class that I flunked due to my laziness and lack of interest. I believe it was my junior English teacher who told me I had tunnel vision -- that I could only see one thing, music, and that one thing would never carry me through life and would prevent me from ever being a well-rounded person.. Then it was that my counselor, frustrated at having to summon me to her office at least twice a month for one thing or another, told me point blank that I'd never amount to anything. When it came time for graduation and I wound up being one of only a handful of kids in my class that didn't receive a diploma, it looked as if my counselor was right. I never did graduate high school.

     My mother came to my rescue -- the first of two crucial rescues she made in my life, the second being her praying me back to the Church. The summer after my non-graduation, I won a Ewing-Halsell Foundation scholarship to the International Round Top Festival, a summer program for young pianists and string players. There I studied for six weeks with the renowned pianist James Dick and performed in several concerts. While I was there, my mother, without telling me, went to Trinity University to speak with one of the piano faculty, Andrew Mihalso; he had known me since judging me in a competition when I was small, and had wanted me to study with him ever since. He and my mother appealed to the dean, who examined my SAT scores (before I found out I would not be graduating, I had taken my SAT and applied to three colleges, including Trinity). He found my scores to be very high, high enough to justify admitting me -- provided I didn't actually matriculate for a degree.

     So the flunkie lucked out. With the help of my mother and a teacher who believed in my talent, I spent five years studying piano and voice at Trinity, earning no degree, but coming away with several competition prizes and many performances under my belt. It was also during college that I began coaching singers, mostly my fellow students; but then one weekend a Wagnerian bass named Simon Estes came to sing with the San Antonio Symphony and wanted to coach his next role while he was in town. Someone gave him my name, and I spent two hours one afternoon working with him on Handel's Saul. That was my first real professional coaching, and the start of a 25-year career.

The Young Poet

     When I was in the fifth grade, my teacher asked each of us to write a poem. Whether or not she told us the real reason, I don't remember (I probably wasn't paying attention, as usual), but it was that she planned to enter one of them in the Young Pegasus Poetry Contest, a city-wide contest sponsored by the San Antonio Public Library for budding poets grades 1-12. I wrote a concrete poem (a poem that has a significant shape on the page) in the shape of a diamond called "Sun and Moon" which was chosen as one of the winners in the fifth grade division. The results for being a winner were publication in that year's Young Pegasus anthology, a luncheon at which all the winners met and shared their poems, and a taped television appearance in which the older winners read their own poems and the younger had their poems read by one of the judges.
     The only person I remember at that winners' luncheon was the then 17-year-old Naomi Shihab (Nye), who is today one of this country's most respected and prolific poets. I remember her, not for her poetry, but for her appearance that day -- she looked like a poet to me: loose, flowing clothes, waist-long hair in a braid, very sort of bohemian.
     The television appearance was rather embarrassing for me and, I imagine, for the rest of the younger winners who weren't allowed to read our own pieces. Instead, each of us had to perch on a stool doing absolutely nothing except look straight at the camera, goofy and uncomfortable, while listening to his or her poem being read. What on earth were they thinking, putting us through such embarrassment?!
     This did not put me off writing poetry, however. Through middle school, I wrote quite a lot of it, compiling my work into a collection called Poems of a Childhood Romance. Except for drafts of a few of the poems, it has since disappeared. (Judging from those extant drafts, it's no great loss!) I wrote a few more in high school, but by then I was more interested in writing songs in the style of Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, John Denver, etc., and I dreamt of wandering round the country with my guitar and a knapsack, earning my weekly bread by singing my ballads in smoky, dimly lit coffee houses. Eventually, of course, I intended to meet a fellow balladeer, preferably a James Taylor type, build a cabin with him in the mountains, have twenty children, and live off the land.
     On the other hand, I was still the aspiring concert pianist, giving performances and entering (but hardly ever winning) competitions. This persona dressed more neatly than the balladeer, enjoyed meals at stylish restaurants (Ms. von's treat), and dreamt of dwelling in marble halls, single, but with a string of wealthy and powerful lovers.
     In both these fantasies, I never stopped writing in one form or another.
     When I was in the eighth grade I followed my sister Alice's example and started to keep a journal. Being an aspiring writer, I never meant my journal to be private, but passed it round among my friends (is it any wonder I eventually decided to blog?). I also wrote short stories, which were really my own original episodes of The Partridge Family, all of which were centered around Keith (David Cassidy). There was even a rough outline and one chapter of a novel entitled Sisters and Lovers, a tale of two orphaned sisters in early 20th-century San Francisco; the elder was prudent and practical, the younger impulsive and romantic. If this sounds suspiciously like an American Sense and Sensibility, let me hasten to say I hadn't even heard of that novel at that time, much less read it. However, I had read Little Women and was very much influenced by Alcott's style -- in fact, that was the start of my love affair with the semi-colon.
     The novel, poetry, and song writing all fizzled out (temporarily) by my senior year in high school, but I continued to keep a journal and my dreams of becoming a concert pianist.

The Anxiety-Ridden Chorus Master

     It is one of the greatest ironies of my life that I spent so much of it working with choruses, given that I've always had a deep-rooted aversion toward that job. I wrote before that I was enlisted at a very early age (third grade) into accompanying for school choir concerts; by the time I was in middle school, I was official accompanist and rehearsal pianist for our mixed choir and madrigal group. (It wasn't until seventh grade that my choir director discovered I also had a good voice and had me sing in all the a cappella pieces.) Had I known that being rehearsal pianist also meant actually taking over in the absence of the choir director, I would have turned tail and run.

     There was one particularly painful day in the eighth grade when Miss E. had to be absent and she asked me to take the class, with one of my classmates at the piano. My pianist belonged to that elite group of pretty, popular girls that lived in the richer neighborhood; they were already under the impression (thanks to the veneer of cool aloofness behind which I hid my social anxiety disorder) that I thought my musical gifts made me superior to everyone else. In truth, she and her group, many of whom were in the choir, intimidated me to the point that I was certain my nervous shaking was visible to all as I took my place that day behind the director's music stand. I had to stand there in front of all those "prove yourself to us" faces and the ill-concealed smirk of my pianist, push my anxiety as far down into my shoes as I could, and just give it my best. I got through that agonizing hour, but not without witnessing, after the bell rang, my pianist and her friends giggling and mimicking my nervously rigid conducting gestures. Perhaps anyone would have been hurt by this, but I was a hyper-sensitive child with low self-esteem; a more confident child would probably have shaken off the dust from her shoes and moved on. As it was, the wound they inflicted that day, perhaps unconsciously, rankled deep in me through my year as student director for our high school choir, and much later throughout my fifteen years as Assistant Chorus Master at the Houston Grand Opera. Not even the genuine affection and respect the HGO Chorus and I had for each other could quite cure my aversion for running rehearsals and sectionals.

     Behind it also were the high expectations of my teachers and elders, my own high standards (which grew more and more impossible with each passing year), an enormous fear of failure, and the equally enormous if irrational fear of being found out as a sham. For all my talent and training, and all my bravado, I was still at the core that awkward, inept, and insecure child.

     You might be asking why, then, I consented to be HGO's Assistant Chorus Master. Deep down, I knew I could do it, and do it well. I had all the necessary tools for what that job entailed, including, by that time, good conducting skills (thanks to lessons from two gifted and generous conductors, Ward Holmquist and Patrick Summers). And I had the unflagging support and confidence of the Chorus Master, Richard Bado, for whom I had, and will always have, tremendous respect. So I forced myself to ignore the sickening churning in my stomach before every rehearsal and sectional I had to run, and told myself (to quote my fellow S. A. D. sufferer, Mr. Darcy) "I will conquer this!" And conquer it I did. That terrified young girl who was mocked by her peers grew up to be a good Assistant Chorus Master (and, for some shows, Chorus Master) -- even if she never really liked being one.

    

Enter "Ms. von"

     When Peter Martinez moved away to graduate school, I had been studying with him for two years. It was now time for me to study with his teacher, one of the best piano teachers in the city, Myrna von Nimitz. I was then 11 years old.

     "Ms. von," a native Texan, had just moved into a large, newly built colonial style house on the north side of town. She and her Russian husband Igor filled their home with Louis XV furniture; valuable period paintings covered the walls and bronze statuary perched on every table. A Steinway concert grand dominated the front room. These surroundings were a bit overwhelming for me, as was the person of Myrna von Nimitz herself: I remember her as tall, though she might not actually have been; her slenderness and the white-blond hair sculpted smoothly into a high upsweep made her seem so to me. Large, expressive, almond-shaped brown eyes framed by precise, dark brows were the only things that lent color to her ivory face; the surprisingly small, pale mouth beneath the narrow nose was a mere textural element. Elegantly dressed, shoulders fashionably stooped, she would sit in a low Louis XV chair by the piano, one poodle in her lap and another lounging at her feet, a cigarette dangling from her long, languid hand. She was in her early- to mid-thirties at that time, though she could have been almost any age from any era. A true original.

     Peter Martinez's youthful maleness had exacerbated my social anxiety disorder, but Ms. von's flamboyant elegance and refined tastes fascinated me. Perhaps that was the beginning of my own Niles Crane-like fondness for the finer things in life; in fact, I know it was. Still, I remained mostly silent in my lessons, and Ms. von tried her best to draw me out those first few months, to no avail. Then one day, as I was playing the Bach G minor Concerto, I was suddenly and profoundly moved by the music; so much so, tears began streaming down my face. This was not the first time music affected me to the point of weeping, but I had always kept my tears to myself. Ms. von, perplexed and concerned, took me out to her wooded back yard and proceeded to ask me if I was having trouble at home or at school. When I didn't answer, she then began to talk of random things to put me at ease, until finally I stammered out, "It -- it's just the music. It's so -- so beautiful."

     Ms. von was not only relieved by my confession, she was delighted that I had a genuine love for music, and, as she told me afterward, a deep soul. From that moment on, I regarded her as a friend and mentor.

     The summer after my freshman year in high school, Ms. von took her piano students and a few college students to Europe -- a two-week tour of the continent, then a month in London taking music courses at Goldsmiths College. It was not only my first time abroad, but my first time flying. I might have known I'd be a bad flyer. To this day I cannot board a plane without first taking something for motion sickness. However, the half pack of cigarettes I smoked before boarding that day probably didn't help! I was only fourteen at the time, but my attire and bearing made me seem at least four years older -- and I don't exaggerate. People were always mistaking me then for a college student. My mother frowned on jeans and insisted that her children dress neatly at all times; Ms. von further influenced my taste in clothes. My social anxiety disorder, still very much with me, was the true reason behind my cool, seemingly composed and confident exterior. If I couldn't speak to anyone with ease, then I could at least give the impression that I didn't want to speak to them.

     My outer composure and mature appearance backfired, however, when one of my London professors began to have a personal interest in me. I was completely unaware of this until Ms. von told me she had had a word with him, telling him I was only fourteen. In my total innocence, I thought he took time to play duets with me just because he found it fun. I still saw myself as ugly and stiff, though Ms. von often told me I was growing up to be an attractive and poised young lady.

     Throughout my high school years, I competed in many competitions, always placing near the top, but never capturing a top prize until my senior year, when I finally won the San Antonio Symphony Young Artist Competition. Performing, too, became a frequent thing. I revelled in being onstage, though I did always suffer considerable nerves before walking out. Once I was behind the keyboard, however, the audience became a faceless, harmless presence, and I could lose myself, my feelings of awkwardness and inadequacy, in the music. For that short precious time, I felt accepted.