Horne and Fleming Instruct A Master Class
Better than watching a master do what she does best is watching a master teach what she does best. Twin master classes led by divas Marilyn Horne and Renée Fleming under Carnegie Hall’s “The Song Continues…” series illuminated the potential that is unleashed when knowledge is given with love.
Marilyn Horne
Horne, a passionate educator as well as a world-famous opera star, turned her attention to nurturing the art song and the young musicians who perform them; to do just that, she launched “The Song Continues” series under the auspices of the Marilyn Horne Foundation in 1997. Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute now presents the series each January, sponsoring recitals and master classes with young professionals hand-picked by Horne. For this year’s run, from January 16-18, Horne invited luminous soprano Renée Fleming and keyboard great Graham Johnson to lead their own master classes.
For the uninitiated, an art song is a poem set to music and performed by a trained singer and pianist, while a master class is a private lesson held in public, wherein a student performs before an audience under the (hopefully kind) scrutiny of an artist considered to be one of the greats in his or her field. The student has the enormous opportunity to learn from the best, while the public gets an unparalleled chance to participate in a level of learning normally done behind closed doors.
Renée Fleming
From the audience, Horne’s and Fleming’s master classes felt like magic shows. As a master painter transforms an inferior portrait into a living, breathing work with one or two deft brushstrokes in Mizoguchi’s film Five Women Around Utamaro, a simple instruction from Horne and Fleming to “open up here” or “resonate there” had their students singing on a qualitatively different level after only a half hour of instruction.
Horne focused mainly on how to interpret the text. “You need to change color when you come to ‘Helas adieu!’” she would say. “Paint the picture with your words.” She waved her arms, signifying a more upbeat tempo as she conducted from her chair, revealing that what makes a singer great is not her voice or her technique but her ability to hear the music in ways the rest of us cannot.
Fleming believes that American singers don’t focus enough on how to support the voice. To that end, she turned her attention to breathing technique—how to harness the involuntary muscles that make up the voice. “Expand your rib cage. Engage these muscles here,” she said, instructing her student to press her belly against the piano to experience the sensation of engagement.
Both divas stressed the impact of the mind on performance. “The way we think of things affects how we sing them,” advises Horne, while Fleming counsels, “It’s not a technical thing; it’s about how you’re perceiving the sound.” But above all, both instructed their students to love what they’re doing. “Enjoy the ride!” says Fleming. Horne says, quite simply, “Let’s have fun!” And everyone did—especially the lucky victims onstage.
