(Gee, I thought I’d posted this yesterday, but it appears I never hit “publish”.)
“I probably would have soldiered on,” she says, and done the performances. But after the piano dress rehearsal, Zambello came into her dressing room and asked to talk. She asked, Voigt says, how Voigt was feeling. She mentioned that she needed the opening, the first of her administration, to be really, really good. And then “I burst into tears,” Voigt says, “and we had a good cry.” When she had recovered, she asked Zambello whom she had in mind to replace her.
“There’s a line in the Big Book of [Alcoholics Anonymous], of which I am a member,” she says, “that ‘the grace of God can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.’?” That, she says, is how she feels about this cancellation. One of her main emotions is “relief.”
“I am so tired,” she says, “of competing with myself” — with her younger self, that is, preserved on records and in the memories of her many fans. “I’ve done everything I wanted. It’s time to let her [in this case, Theorin] do it. I did the same thing to Jessye Norman when I was young. It’s a natural cycle.”
The honesty of the article is refreshing to me and, I think, brave.
I worry about my own little career. Will someone take me aside if I’m sounding weak enough to quit? I sort of doubt it … and maybe it’s already time and I don’t even know! But of course I’m not a famous musician and I’m not singing Isolde. (Whew! Readers and I can all be eternally grateful I’m not singing at all, really!)
