Illustration by Alex Siklos
The first time I heard opera, I was eight or nine years old. I remember standing at the top of my grandmother’s basement stairs when her soprano voice rose up to meet me from where she was practising below. I was transfixed.
Hearing her sing opened up a fascination with opera that lasted for decades before it dissolved into the backdrop of family life. Now, I find myself reconnecting with an early love.
Opera is designed to help us interpret art as life, life as art. We need this 400-year-old art form. We crave the human voice, the musicianship of the orchestra members, the theatre of it all. Not so fast, Timothée Chalamet.
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As a school child, I took up violin lessons. Being an extroverted, friendly child, I found practising my stringed instrument alone incredibly lonely. I was attracted to the human voice.
There are clear influences that guided my musicality. I held the body memory of my grandmother’s vibrato – of my head against my mother’s chest, hearing her clear, pure singing voice, the sound of my bow against the strings of my violin. They forged my vocal sound and appreciation of the classical form.
As I matured, my voice preferred company. I yearned to join other voices, to blend, to make harmonies. So began years of voice lessons, a recording of my choir with Virgin Records, singing in an opera chorus. The surround sound of voices connected me to the full-body power of music. On occasion I secured a solo part, ventured out into singing indie rock in college bars and even imagined a future as a jazz crooner. But I always returned to my preferred musical space in the company of the classical choir.
I studied repertoire that I remember note for note to this day. I recall my fellow choristers and I holding our breath long after our voices echoed through performance halls, sharing a mutual acknowledgment that the beauty of our shared sound would sustain us for days.
Within a few years of graduating from university, my commitment to my family meant that I rarely had an opportunity to perform. Singing became something I did with and for my children.
On a rare occasion, I was asked to sing a solo at a friend’s wedding. I held my then-10-month-old daughter on my hip as I ran through my warm up exercises, repeating sections, practising where to take the required breaths. I stopped to rest and take a sip of water. And that’s when I heard her, my baby daughter. She was singing, mimicking my sound with her small voice and open lips. Oh, how my heart grew and how I held her close!
Then one day my singing stopped. My voice disappeared into the busyness of parenting and work.
I didn’t realize how much I missed it until years later when I watched my daughter discover her own voice as a teen. We shared the skinny piano bench after school and belted out all manner of musical-theatre favourites.
Our voices were expressive, free, unself-conscious. Where I was drawn to the safety of the chorus, she sought out centre stage. She landed lead roles in high-school musicals. Then our songbird grew up and moved to a new city, her voice and mine absent from the house.
In my current chapter of work and life, I’ve committed to working in opera, to nourishing my soul. In my role as director of development for the Vancouver Opera, I’ve discovered that the talent of Canadian singers, the spectacle of the sets, the costumes, the lighting, the musicianship, connect us to our own human stories of deep longing, blistering revenge, murderous rage and ravenous lust.
This return to working in opera has made me want to fill up my life with music again. I was curious to take a voice lesson after years of putting my own instrument on silent. And so last month I took my first one in years. I had nothing prepared. I tried to, but every piece I sang alone in the empty house made me melancholy.
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The lesson was a release to the point of tears. My wonderful teacher understood. We started slowly. She helped me to connect with my breath, visualize the expansion of my diaphragm, the opening up of my upper palate, my throat. From there I began to relax into my own voice. The sound is different, still clear and strong, with a brightness to it I did not expect.
I will value these lessons, and realign with what once brought me so much joy and connection, maybe audition for a choir. I will learn new repertoire and technique. I have dived into reading memoirs of the great divas and see a faint through-line between their stories and my own, that the voice is both deeply private and painfully public, sacred and performative. By learning about this art form I am slowly, breath by breath, welcoming back my own voice.
I understand now how much my body missed making sound and how my grandmother, mother and daughter have guided me back to singing. I find energy from my heart and lungs, through my larynx and vocal chords, up into the roof of my mouth, over my tongue, my teeth, and out into the world to you.
Suzanne Scott lives in Vancouver.