Music: At the Head of the Class

Last summer the girl from Portsmouth, Ohio, sang for the Pope in Rome. It was a performance of Mozart’s “Coronation” Mass conducted by Herbert von Karajan. “We were in the apse of St. Peter’s,” she recalls. “The altar is off to our right and a little in front of us. After everyone is in place, the procession begins, and John Paul II is at the end, in full vestments. It’s hard to speak of it as a musical occasion. It was a moment in life that one treasures. Oh, it was great to be there!”

Little more than a decade ago, she was teaching general music in the Cincinnati public school system to unruly fourth, fifth and sixth graders. Today her audiences range across the world’s music capitals right up to the Vatican. Kathleen Battle is the best lyric coloratura soprano in the world. Engaged regularly by the finest orchestras in the U.S. and Europe, and with a thriving recital career under way, she is so good that opera producers now call for a Kathy Battle voice when casting the roles that are her specialty.

And yet she is a reluctant diva, with a disarming practical streak. “I think I’ve accepted it now,” says Battle, 37, of her stardom. “But until quite recently, I thought one must always be prepared for other things in life. I’ve been a secretary. I’ve been a teacher. Star? Diva? Divas don’t do Despina. I do Despina, so do the two go together?”

Indeed they do. Whether she sports Despina’s serving-girl mufti in Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte, is decked out in the rococo raiment of Sophie in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, or sweeps glamorously onto a concert stage dressed in one of her custom-made Rouben Ter-Arutunian gowns, it is impossible to imagine Battle’s ever taking a letter or raising a ruler again. She is an ethereal Nannetta in Verdi’s Falstaff, a sparkling Zerbinetta in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos and a beguiling Susanna in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, which she will sing at the Metropolitan Opera later this month in a new production by French Director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle.

Battle’s range spans two and a half octaves, from a low A to a high E. Her voice has a color and flexibility that allow her to go beyond soubrette roles to encompass the death-defying coloratura declamations of Handel’s Semele, or dramatically richer lyric parts like Melisande in Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande, which she is now studying. That radiant sound emerges from a 5-ft. 3-in., 120-lb. frame like Athena leaving the head of Zeus: pure and full blown, and shimmering like celestial chimes. “Her voice is remarkably beautiful,” says Met Music Director James Levine, who has been Battle’s mentor since 1973. “All voices differ, and there are lots of beautiful voices, but hers has a unique personality and a unique timbre.” Others echo Levine’s praise. Kurt Herbert Adler, former general director of the San Francisco Opera, cast Battle as Oscar the page in Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera in 1977. Remembers Adler: “After we auditioned her, I wrote in my notes: ‘bombshell!’ “

Before an audience Battle projects a captivating, gentle beauty. She is the undisputed best-dressed concert performer in the business, appearing on stage adorned in gowns created by her friend Ter-Arutunian, who is better known as a designer of opera, ballet and theater costumes and sets. For a PBS special on Duke Ellington he fashioned a sinuous red number that suited the song Creole Love Call; for her Carnegie Hall performance of Semele, based on a mythological subject, he produced a one-shoulder dress that suggested a Grecian column. “In a live performance, who doesn’t listen with their eyes as well?” she asks.

Thirty years ago, it would have been big news that Battle is black. Today it is hardly worth mentioning, since talented black women singers are readily accepted at opera’s highest levels. The soprano rarely discusses race. Says she: “I don’t think I have an ax to grind on that issue.”

Her abilities were evident at an early age. The daughter of a steelworker who had sung with a gospel quartet, Kathleen was the youngest of seven children, a diligent student growing up in a segregated but, as she remembers it, happy Portsmouth neighborhood. Even as a child singing in her Protestant church choir, she was something special. Remembers Voice Teacher Charles % Varney, who first heard her sing when she was eight: “It was a shock to me to hear this tiny little thing singing so beautifully. I went to her later and told her God had blessed her, and she must always, always sing.”

Battle’s journey to the top was circuitous. On a scholarship at the University of Cincinnati, she enrolled as a music-education major instead of as a performer because she feared being rejected in auditions and desired the security that would come with teaching.

Her break came in 1972, when she took time from teaching to audition for the late Thomas Schippers, then conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony; he was looking for a soprano to sing Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. Battle got the job and her career snowballed. In 1976 she made her New York City Opera debut as Susanna. The following year, under Levine’s aegis, she also bowed at the Met, in the small part of the Shepherd in Wagner’s Tannhauser. By 1980 she was effortlessly hitting the high E’s as Blonde in Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio at the Met. She had arrived.

Preparing her roles, Battle applies the hard-work ethic she absorbed as a child. For her forthcoming Susanna at the Met, she has gone back to the Beaumarchais play for hints to the resourceful maid’s character. “He says that Susanna has a ready laugh, which tells worlds about her. She can laugh in the face of one complicated situation after another,” she notes. But more significant clues are to be found in the music. “Even the music laughs,” she says. “When she sings, ‘Ding, ding,’ in her duet with Figaro, the orchestra goes, ‘diddle, diddle, diddle dum,’ which it doesn’t do when Figaro sings the same phrase. To me that’s the orchestra laughing.”

In the opera world, where gossip is a way of life, Battle is said to live up to her last name. By reputation she is a temperamental prima donna who can be cold or even hostile to colleagues, a master of the brisk nod or, worse, the blank stare. Backstage, Met staffers are still talking about her dustup with Soprano Kiri Te Kanawa during the production of Strauss’s Arabella. Battle, it seems, wanted some cuts in the music restored, at which Te Kanawa balked. Heated words were exchanged. Battle claims to be mystified by her fearsome reputation. Says she: “I can’t think of an instance that I voiced an opinion that didn’t have something to do with the music.”

Her life is dominated by singing–she gives about 60 performances a year, at a fee of about $10,000 per appearance–but the unmarried Battle unwinds at her country house in Quogue, in Long Island’s chic Hamptons. In the shower her taste runs more to What’s Love Got to Do with It? than to Mozart, and occasionally she will dance the night away at a disco, although the next day she will regret having subjected her voice to the noise and smoke.

Professionally secure, she is already planning ahead to a time when she will teach again, though at the conservatory level. “Anything can happen, you know,” she says. “A manager once said to me that it’s not so important how one’s career takes off when you’re in your 20s. The important thing is to stay in it through your 30s. If you reach 40 and look around to see yourself still singing, then you’re having a career. I like to think I’m still peaking.” Look around, Kathy. You are.