Opera: Growth to Grandeur

In the vocal typecasting that prevails in opera, sopranos play the heroines, winning the glory as often as they win the tenor. Lower-voiced mezzo-sopranos, on the other hand, usually end up on the limelight’s fringes, portraying a disappointed rival or a sister—and wishing they were sopranos. As a result, the soprano field tends to be overcrowded. Two decades ago, Bronx-born Regina Resnik, a dramatic soprano with a rich lower range, found the field so overcrowded that even her widely recognized abilities were not taking her to the top. “I was just a talented youngster compared with the great divas of the time,” she says. “I sang the second Elsa to Flagstad, the second Sieglinde to Traubel, and the second everything to Milanov.”

Against all advice, she reversed the usual pattern and switched from soprano to mezzo in 1957. Making the most of her big, warm voice, mature musicianship and canny flair for stagecraft, she was discovered all over again in the character roles of the mezzo repertory. Today, at 45, she has arrived at the point where she can not only steal the show from high-flying prima donnas but also carry an entire production herself. In recent seasons she has frequently done both, demonstrating the versatility as well as the power of her portrayals by encompassing the quirky pathos of the aged countess in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, the bawdy wit of Mistress Quickly in Verdi’s Falstaff, the blood-crazed wrath of Klytemnestra in Strauss’s Elektra.

No Prancing. Last week in Manhattan, Resnik returned to what is by all odds the finest of her 77 roles, stepping into the title part of the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Carmen. Her Carmen is far from the flippant vixen so often projected by younger singers. “Carmen,” she says, “is not a hip-swinging, tawdry, gutsy tart. I’ll be damned if I’ll prance around in the role.” Instead, using dozens of shrewdly modulated gestures and inflections—a taunting yet soulful stare, a rippling laugh, an unexpectedly quiet and silken musical phrase—she builds a commanding portrait of a creature who is as vulnerable as she is passionate. Vocally and dramatically restrained as her performance is, everything in it has stunning impact because it is carefully fitted into a conception that gives Carmen a rare dignity and emotional depth. “In the first act,” explains Resnik, “Carmen is playful, in the second, seductive, in the third, melancholy—and in the fourth, she reaches a state of grandeur. The opera is the story of the growth of a stupendous mind in three hours.”

Such a rounded grasp of character is the foundation of Resnik’s approach, and to convey it compellingly she concentrates on acting with her body as well as her voice. “In opera, where everything is in slow motion, acting is more difficult than in the straight theater,” she says. “Most young singers don’t know their left foot from their right. Even a cowboy takes the trouble to learn how to tie a lasso before he climbs on a horse, but will opera singers take the trouble to learn how to walk, sit, get up? No.” Thus, if she ever finds time to teach operatic neophytes, she will teach them stagecraft, not singing. After all, as she proves once again in Carmen, “to be a success, you have to have a fantastic love for the stage.”