Ellen Shade Interview with Bruce Duffie . . . . . .

Ellen Shade is one of those vital, vibrant people who, as she says, simply has to sing. For that we are fortunate because she happens to sing splendidly.

A native New Yorker, she started as a mezzo-soprano at Juilliard and wound up singing a variety of leading soprano parts in opera houses and concert halls all over the world. In Europe, she has appeared in Frankfurt, Brussels, Hamburg, and Amsterdam; with the radio orchestras of Stuttgart, the BBC Northern, and RAI in Turin; and here in America with the opera companies of San Francisco, Houston, Dallas, Santa Fe, and at the Metropolitan. Here in Chicago, she has sung several times with Lyric Opera, including creating the central role of Eve in Paradise Lost by Penderecki. [See my Interview with Krzysztof Penderecki.]

It was during one of those visits to the Windy City that Ellen Shade graciously took time to chat with me backstage between performances. She revealed much about herself and about her views on the life and times of a contemporary singer.

Bruce Duffie: Are you still confused with Nancy Shade [another opera singer of similar age and repertoire]?

Ellen Shade: All the time. In fact, last summer we worked together — not in the same opera but in the same company. I bumped into her on the street and she said she had some fan mail of mine. [Laughter]

ES: Because of a guy. I was a music student and came from a very musical family, but we weren’t particularly interested in opera. I met a fellow who was an opera singer, and he said I really should know what he was going through and suggested I take some voice lessons. In the beginning, I wasn’t exactly hooked – especially talking to other opera people because all they talked about was opera, and it was real boring. But the better I got vocally, the more interesting it became.

ES: When I’m in it, sometimes. I very rarely am happy attending an opera. By now I know the stories so it’s not a case of wanting to see it until the end. I applaud in the right places and yell and scream, but I want to be moved and I want to hear good, healthy singing. And I’m a glutton – I want them both at the same time, and that’s very rare. Also, I’m too restless. I can’t sit through a whole opera. I’m much better in the standing-room or if I can sit out an act.

BD: Ever find yourself wandering backstage during an opera just to see what’s happening?

ES: No, I would never do that and I wouldn’t want other colleagues to do that to me. It’s particularly upsetting to see faces which do not belong in that opera standing there. It’s upsetting to me and I’m sure it’s upsetting to others. There are singers who carry on when they see friends in the wings, but that’s not part of the theatrical experience.

BD: What do you do if you get upset while onstage — if you stub your toe or if something strange happens?

ES: My first Micaela in Carmen was in the Ponnelle production in Frankfurt. On opening night I came down two little steps underneath an archway. I was fine but my wig stayed up in the archway. That was very embarrassing, especially as Micaëla in that production was a blond and I have very dark hair. The audience could see the white thing which kept my own hair up under the wig. People can’t tell me jokes or play jokes onstage because I’m a giggler. We must all try very hard to make it like real life for the audience.

ES: It’s heightened life, don’t you think? If you think it’s boring life, then we’re doing a bad job. It’s not real, of course, but I try to make it as real as I can. It’s the old problem of how much do I cry in order the make the audience cry. Basically, an audience is more interested in seeing a struggle to survive rather than seeing martyrism. The more an audience sees you weep onstage, the less they will be involved. However, the times that I become weepy and ruin my makeup are often the times that are the most electric to the audience. It’s a funny line and I don’t know exactly where it is. I’m still experimenting with it.

BD: Do you ever cross that line and become the character you are supposed to be portraying?

ES: I have a tendency to refer to the character I’m playing as “me.” On the other hand, I usually play characters who are just a little touched. I mean those women get into situations that I don’t.

ES: I’ve never seen anybody die so I don’t know how believable it can be. Sopranos don’t usually get shot — it’s stabbings and poisonings and the famous TB. When I did my first Traviata, I went to a clinic in Germany and saw people in advanced stages of TB. They had bright cheeks and looked healthier than I did. So there is that dichotomy, that funny line. You can’t play Violetta or Mimì in the last act with bright red cheeks and glowing eyes because it just doesn’t work onstage.

BD: If a director insisted you play it that way because it was correct and the critics panned you for it, would you write to the critics and tell them to go to a clinic and observe the reality of the situation?

ES: Then I’d be writing them every day of my life! No, there has to be a certain theatrical license, I guess. That’s why opera is heightened life.

ES: Some of them; others are pretty sappy. I like the ladies who fight and struggle against what is happening to them. I have a certain simpatico with victims.

ES: Oh no, no! But I like victims when they are not succumbing to their fate; all these ladies who get killed off or die don’t embrace death but rather fight against it.

BD: You wouldn’t play the Nurse in Die Frau ohne Schatten? She really is the devil.

ES: I aspire to one of the other ladies in that opera, but there it’s a vocal choice. I’d rather play the Empress, but a friend of mine in Berlin says I should play the Dyer’s wife because of who I am as a human being. I haven’t made that decision yet. I’ve been asked to look at it, so we’ll have to see.

BD: Either way you’ll be competing against top singers of the world because you’re in that fach. Is that frustrating at all?

ES: Yes, it’s very hard and I haven’t really found my fach yet. I’m still searching. I get a real thrill out of singing Verdi, but my manager says I have to be more vulgar onstage.

BD: Are there any characters you play which are awfully close to the real Ellen Shade?

ES: That hasn’t happened yet, but I could very easily see how it could. It would have to be a totally nurturing atmosphere — which ones gets infrequently — where all the colleagues and the director are very close. The conductor, in that instance, would not be so important because he would not be part of the inter-personal thing that happens between the director and colleagues onstage. You can sing wonderfully and still have nothing going on onstage, but I could see where it might get sticky.

BD: You say it would need a certain kind of atmosphere that you don’t usually get. I feel a sense of frustration there.

ES: The dichotomy of being a performer is that you work to make yourself as vulnerable as possible, which is as open as possible, and that openness is not always treated with loving care. I find this more and more as I deal in the international level of performing. Americans, as a general rule, are really terrific colleagues. They’re ingenious. They’re out to have a good show. There are obvious exceptions to that, but on the international level of performing — both in Europe and when European performers come here — it’s a whole different ballgame. They are not necessarily out for the good of the show.

ES: The person and the company I’m dealing with now have turned out to be very loyal friends and supporters, so I don’t feel the conflict. The basic idea seems to be anti-art. When you get superstars who don’t perform up to the level that I expect them to, then a lot of that has to be the PR. It can’t be because they’re not intrinsically talented.

ES: I am a commodity and I have to accept that, but I don’t like being treated that way.

BD: You wouldn’t mind being on the stock exchange along with pork bellies and hog futures?

ES: As long as I’m up high! [Laughter] Of course I mind, but I have to be realistic. Life is just full of these conflicts. I have to assess my good points and bad points to bury the bad ones and bring out the good ones, and try to figure out how I can make myself better. That’s the commodity end of it. But on the other side, I’m a human being who has a heart and a soul, and I have to deal with those on a day-to-day basis. I only have to deal with the commodity when I’m working.

ES: No, not completely because it’s an integral part of me. When I first met my husband, I asked at least fourteen times a day if he wanted me to give up singing. After we were married he did say he wanted me to be home more, but he did not want me to give up singing because he loved me the way I was, and so much of that was because I was a singer.

ES:    The question is can I be content singing because it is a real burden. It’s something I have to do. Those little grey-haired ladies come up and say, “It’s such a blessing to sing,” but it isn’t. It’s hard and it takes hard work from my heart as well as just plain hard work.

BD:    But isn’t it better than being in an office from nine-to-five every day?

ES:    I don’t know. I have worked at other jobs, including being in an office from nine-to-five. I don’t think I would devote as much of me to another job as I do to singing, but it’s a moot point. It doesn’t matter. I have to sing.

BD:    Are you glad you have to sing?

ES: No. I don’t travel very well. I don’t sleep well in strange beds, I don’t drink different water that well and I don’t eat restaurant food well. I’m much happier being in an apartment even if I’m only there for two weeks because then I can cook for myself and not have to eat ancient vegetables and sad pieces of lettuce. But thanks to Ma Bell, I can talk to my husband.

ES: Basically, yes. It was a devastating rehearsal period and it was almost devastated by the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Personally, the role was very successful for me. It was the first time I came before a real international audience. It made my debut at La Scala and I’ve continued to have a very good relationship with that theater. It was the second time I’d worked with Penderecki, but the first time in a major role, and he has since asked for me and has written something with my voice in mind.

ES: The piece is fantastic. It’s thirty-seven minutes long and is a Te Deum for four solo voices, chorus and orchestra. I’m a good musician, a good sight-reader, so the trials of learning that piece were not as difficult as for someone else. I had studied his works during my technical training, so it was a real thrill working as closely with him as I was. On the negative side, we had a director who just couldn’t deal with it. Toward the end of his tenure, he would just come in and sort of slouch because he was so depressed, and that bled onto all of us.

ES: It depends. If it were some crazy lady I don’t know... [Laughter] But the Te Deum is a spectacular piece and was written in somewhat of the same style as Paradise Lost. The forces of good fight the forces of evil. It was right about the beginning of the Solidarity movement, and the chorus sang an unaccompanied chorale in Polish which had been banned. At the very end of that chorale, I entered in an unrelated key to sing, “Save your people, God; Jesus died for us.” It was wonderful. Originally we were to perform Paradise Lost in 1976 but, as you know, it wasn’t staged until 1978. I’m glad for those two years because I was a more mature person and somewhat more equipped to deal with the incredible stresses of the situation. Opening nights are hard enough as it is, and I’m one who gets nervous for every performance. But opening that opera for that audience in the middle of a snowstorm… Many of them were supposed to have been at the final dress-rehearsal and could not get in, so the audience was not as knowledgeable about the piece as they could have been.

BD: I saw three performances — the final dress rehearsal, an early performance, and the last night. It was a great experience and it was interesting to see the various changes during the run. It held together very well and I was caught up in the whole thing.

ES: I think a bigger scissors could have been used. It was at least an hour too long. I think the scene where Gabriel takes Adam through all the visions of the future would be better as a separate piece. If you remember, Eve is sleeping during that whole time so it was great for me, but it’s a wonderful scene for the chorus and there were some interesting things going on in the dancing.

BD: I thought it held together very well, but I was caught up in the whole thing.

ES: Most people felt that way, but he’s not a theatrical writer. It’s a mood piece, not action, but we’re talking about the man who wrote the book on orchestration and the man who developed the theme of characterizing people through the music. Verdi did the same thing and so did Mozart, and I think Penderecki is a genius. It’s the classic American opera and I think it should be THE twentieth century piece. It won’t be, though, because it’s not theatrical enough. Had he had a theatrical person standing over him with a big red pencil, I think the whole piece would have worked out a whole lot better. But most works seem to be presented later in a more adaptable form. It’s been done again, but the cuts have been little bits and pieces. They could have cut out whole scenes. The children’s scene didn’t do anything. It explained who Eve was as a human being, but it could have been cut.

BD: If it was cut, a hundred years from now they’d find the scene and put it back in again, and probably be able to justify its re-inclusion. [Laughter] Have you heard the Violin Concerto which was written at the same time?

ES: I’ve heard it and it seem to have more theatricality than the opera does. It’s the same for the Te Deum. Maybe he’s turning over a new leaf.

ES: From who’s standpoint? Luisa Miller is the longest role I’ve ever sung and it’s somewhat longer than a normal opera. Butterfly, which I do not sing, is perhaps the longest role ever, and nobody gets bored during that. So it depends. There’s an old joke about the man who goes to a 6 PM performance of Parsifal. After three hours of music he looks at his watch and it says 6:20! [Laughter]

ES: I have sung small roles in that opera — a flower maiden, an esquire, and the voice from above. I did all those in the same performance, too!

ES: It was more interesting than sitting and watching it. I just think it’s not a terrifically exciting opera. In this particular staging I had to lie down on the floor looking up at Gurnemanz, and it was hard not to fall asleep.

ES: When I was in Germany, I was accused of being raffiniert and that’s about as close as you can come to “pixie.” I think Eva is terrific. She’s full of fun and really loves Walther. She also really loves Hans Sachs, but in a totally different way. Like any teenager, she spreads her wings and tries herself out on the nearest-loved person, who happens to be Hans Sachs.

BD: Would she have been happy to marry Sachs if Walther had not come along at that precise moment? I have a theory that Sachs would have entered the contest just so she would not have been given to Beckmesser.

ES: Perhaps, but I think that makes less of the character of Hans Sachs. He’s a great man and he loves her beyond what we can understand. He loves her not only as a man but as a father, and he realizes that it wouldn’t work. If it had come down to Beckmesser and Sachs, he would have refused the prize and said she should wait a year... or something like that. He would have won only to save Eva from Beckmesser and then figured something out. She’s going to turn up on Sachs’ doorstep one night — perhaps when her own father dies — because it’s an ongoing relationship. Sachs knows this, too, and you know there are going to be problems in the marriage between Walther and Eva.

ES: Because they are both very temperamental people and they would have flown off the handle at each other all the time. Plus, Walther tends to sulk when his feelings get hurt. They are both so human. Wagner wrote such a human piece, as opposed to all his other operas.

ES: Oh I don’t think so.

BD: Can operatic characters become too human at times?

ES: When they do things we don’t want them to do, sure. I’ve seen Beckmesser done as a characterization, as a cartoon, and he was not intended to be like that. He was intended to be a very real man. He has to be drawn that way because the rest of the characters are. The ideal Beckmesser would be someone who would be attractive in some way, but whose personality is so bookkeeperish and so nit-picking that it would be impossible.

BD: Sort of a guy who works for the IRS?

BD:    I don’t see him with a briefcase riding the train to work every day...

ES:    He wouldn't live in a city. He’d probably live in a town.

BD:    Would Eva be happy in a town, or would she go to the big city for awhile before becoming disillusioned?

ES: You could play her either way because she’s too young in the opera. She’s about seventeen, which is young even in today’s terms. Kids today who are seventeen look older than I do. Walther is nineteen and Beckmesser is twenty-five. They’re all real people. Sachs is in his forties. His wife died in childbirth. That’s why it’s important he not be an older man. You have to see that it’s possible for him to physically love a woman... not that somebody in his sixties couldn’t, but it makes it more reasonable.

* * * * *

BD:    Do you like opera in translation?

ES:    Yes and no. I think the basic idea is terrific but in practice it doesn’t work.

BD:    Whose fault is that?

ES:    Everyone’s. I don’t do a lot of comedy so maybe that’s different, but when you get a serious piece that’s done in an English translation so that the audience can understand everything, then the singers stop singing and start pronouncing. A woman’s voice is incomprehensible above an A-flat. Even with the most ideal technique, above the staff it’s hard to understand anyone. Then the audience is angry because they don’t understand. Also, when the director says you don’t have to act that much because the audience will be able to understand the words, I think that is a mistake. Traditional pieces like La Bohème work just as well in Italian because it’s so clear what is going on onstage. Plus it’s generally cast with young, attractive and interesting performers.

BD:    Do you work harder at your diction when you’re singing a German opera in Germany or an Italian opera in Italy?

ES:    Yes and no. I speak German so that doesn’t present such a big problem. I’m going to do a work in Czech, and there are words that exist without vowels! But working in Czech, I find myself doing what I do in other languages, namely finding which is the most important word in the sentence and finding where the accents go.

ES: I don’t think opera is meant to be seen so very close up. No one except the singer is interested in seeing the tongue under stress and the veins in the neck.

ES: That’s a very good question. I’ve done it where they tape it first and then we lip-sync later, and I’ve done it live, and it just doesn’t work. Lip-syncing isn’t real because you don’t make all the actual movements when you’re dubbing sound.

BD: Why can’t you sing in half-voice just to have the movements there while the film is rolling?

ES: Because then you can’t hear the sound coming from the speakers. There are so many things that could go wrong during a session. I was doing a film in Yugoslavia and we had to re-shoot a whole day’s work because the electrical current was a bit less and it didn’t match up with the current elsewhere.

BD: Your hair is thick and covers your ears, so couldn’t they give you a tiny earphone so you could hear clearly while you re-sang?

ES: I guess they could, but it hasn’t occurred to them. But it would be difficult when you’re romping around all over the place. I’m sure they will eventually come up with a solution to the problem. I must say I’m a little against recordings, too, because the whole thing about opera is that it is a spontaneous performance. By that I don’t just mean that each night the performers are different and the conductor feels slightly differently and you create something, but there is an audience and they’re part of it, too. They’re very much a part of what happens onstage. For instance, there’s coughing and there’s coughing. Four hundred people with colds is very different from people coughing in sympathy with the dying Mimì.

BD: But on the TV, most of the audience noises and coughing and shuffling are eliminated, aren’t they?

ES: Yes, but the cameras catch the singers reacting to that commotion. However, on recordings and films you get a false sense of what the performers can do. It’s like listening to an orchestra on earphones — it never sounds like that in a concert hall to the audience. I know that as a performer because when I sing with an orchestra I have to readjust to hearing only the violins because the soprano always stands right next to them. It’s different, and a person who is uninitiated to live theater will listen to the recording and be disappointed in the live theater because it isn’t as immediate as the record, nor is it as perfect.

BD: For the recording you can do a section or a phrase maybe ten times and one of them is bound to be pretty good, so you can choose that one to be issued or even splice pieces from among several takes. But in the theater, you’re stuck with the one shot, no matter what happens.

ES: Start them when they’re young, and if you miss that, then there’s the Affiliate Artist Program, of which I’m an ardent supporter. I was an Affiliate Artist and it was a very important experience for me.

ES: Both. It’s for any of the performing arts — singing, dancing, acting, theater, instrumental music. It takes an individual and gets that individual together with a sponsoring organization. There are lots of schools that do it and there are clubs in towns, women’s organizations, the park systems in New York City. There is a variety of organizations which sponsor Affiliate Artists. They get publicity, and the object of it is to bring that performing art to an audience which either has never seen it before or has seen it and rejected it. I sang for day-care centers and old-age homes and lots of churches on Sundays. Lots of churches were in the ghettoes and I sang for lots of black organizations.

ES: Absolutely. It scared me to death, though. Most people are not willing to accept you by what you do. They’re much more interested in who you are. So once you present your personality and grab them with that, then they’ll be willing to listen to you sing. My life was threatened once in a music class, but it became one of the most stunning experiences of my life. Those children who are now young adults still come to my performances when I’m in Pittsburgh. They don’t come because of opera, unfortunately, but they come because of me. They’re a rough bunch; they closed the box office down rather than buy a ticket, but they came to see me. I got them to stand backstage once, and even though they couldn’t see much of what was going on, it was more interesting. They had a ball giving out props to everyone and just being there. I know that they are still making music in their own ways.

ES: Yes it did, and that’s the whole point of the program. Most of them may not go on to spend any time at the opera, but most will go to live spectacle — theater or rock concerts even — and those were people who would never come downtown. They were locked into their ghettoes, but the Affiliate Artists send people to these places, and they say if you get one person committed to your art form, you’ve won.

ES: No, disco is beat. And that is said as the daughter of a drummer! It’s 120 beats per minute and it doesn’t matter what the chord structure is. So that’s offensive to me.

BD: So let’s go the other direction. Do early works such as Monteverdi and Cavalli belong on the stage today?

ES: Yes!!! They must be done with a great deal of thought and insight because they, too, can fall into that vast category of being boring. They deal with real life, particularly Cavalli.

ES: Me too. I think it has the best acoustics of the big three because it doesn’t seem to favor one voice-type or another. San Francisco has poor acoustics and the Met favors men’s voices. I’ve heard women with rich, beautiful high notes who sound a bit thin there. Chicago is not a very intimate house, though. It’s a big house but it’s a great place to work. A lot of the stagehands here are into opera, surprisingly enough!

BD: Ken Recu [Captain of the supers] says we’re all opera junkies. [See my Interview with Ken Recu.]

ES: There are no temperamental singers, only mistreated singers. By the way, there is someone who is now giving a course for singers on how to give interviews. I would think it would be very important. There is no formula, no one way, but it sure is helpful to find out what other people do.

Bruce Duffie is an announcer/producer with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago, and now can also be heard on the Classical Collection program aboard United Airlines. Next time, a conversation with Producer/Director Robert Gay in honor of his 75^th birthday. [To read that interview, click here.]

This interview was recorded in a dressing room of the Civic Opera House in Chicago on December 11, 1982. It was transcribed and a portion was published in The Opera Journal in September, 1988. The full transcript was re-edited, photos and links were added, and it was posted on this website in 2013.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.

Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001. His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.