By Anne Midgette

The best opera voices make you feel like someone’s talking to you. Rather than manufactured grandiloquence, they have a natural freshness, like a distillation of conversation. It’s a quality that Roland Barthes termed “the grain of the voice”: a distinct, human quality that can’t help but be paired with genuine communication.
Susan Graham has got it.

It’s not a voice that impresses with its beauty alone. It’s what they call a unified line: She rises to shining highs and firm lows, tackles coloratura cleanly, and inflates or diminishes her sound from a full forte down to a gentle piano. But none of these feats are tackled like hurdles; where many singers brace themselves before such highlights, like horses gathering themselves for a jump, in Graham’s voice they become just a part of a larger plan of musical expression. The best singers, like the best prose writers, learn that drawing attention to one’s stylistic feats is ultimately a less effective means of getting your point across than finding a way to say it cleanly, clearly, sparely, memorably.

It’s paying off for Graham. Now 43, the mezzo-soprano seems to be hitting a rich prime—which is a way of saying that she’s at once doing a wide range of satisfying projects and getting a lot of (deserved) recognition for them. In 2003, she’s tackled five new roles and scored a huge success with her Carnegie Hall recital debut. The Warner Classics label released a live recording of that recital in fall 2003, followed by another recording, made jointly with the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, of the music of Charles Ives. Her selection as Musical America’s Vocalist of the Year—coming on the heels of her first Didon in Berlioz’s Les Troyens for Paris’s Châtelet in October, a role she described as “the culmination of my life’s work so far”—seems to be arriving at an appropriate time: a significant point in a thriving career, part of a positive continuum.
It’s a time of new roles and new directions. In the summer of 2003, Graham was in the middle of what she called her “Helen-ic trilogy,” three new roles in operas about characters of the Trojan War. First came Dido in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, recorded by EMI for release in the fall of 2003. There followed Offenbach’s La belle Hélène in Santa Fe, which has now become a literal as well as an artistic home for Graham; a resident of Roswell, New Mexico, for the first 13 years of her life, she’s come full circle by buying a home in Santa Fe, several hours to the north. And then, of course, there’s “my Mount Everest,” Didon.

“Didon is the biggest thing I’ve ever tackled,” Graham said in August. “It makes Octavian [in Strauss’s Rosenkavalier, one of Graham’s signature roles] seem like Cherubino [the light-hearted page in Mozart’s Nozze di Figaro]. It’s not only the musical scope, but the emotional scope. She’s very modern. She has that struggle that many of us face, the juxtaposition of a powerful professional life and then trying to figure out where love and human relationships fit into that world. Didon is my Isolde.”

Didon is also indicative of a kind of sea change that’s going on in Graham’s repertoire right now: a shift away from young boys and flittery girls (like Dorabella in Così fan tutte) toward stronger, more dramatic figures. One benchmark was Gluck’s Iphigénie, a signal success in Salzburg in 2000, a role that carried her out of mezzo territory altogether. “I had to do serious thinking about how I was going to negotiate that,” Graham said of the part’s high tessitura; the process fostered “little technical growth spurts,” she added, “that stood me in good stead later.” There are other
soprano-y roles in the works: Donna Elvira in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the title role of Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea; or, a horse of a rather different color, Hanna Glawari, Lehár’s Merry Widow, which she essayed in Houston last season and is bringing to the Met this one.

But “let’s not forget that Hanna had the odd transposition here and there,” she added with a twinkle. “I wasn’t singing high B’s in the Vilja-Lied.” Graham’s not looking to change Fachs; her interest is simply in exploring strong, interesting female roles with more drama, be that in the tessitura, the orchestration, or the libretto. “I think when you’re in your forties you start understanding these grand woman characters,” she said.

Open to new experience—to exploring, for instance,
her inner Carol Burnett in her operetta roles—Graham chooses, and learns from, the parts that come to her. “If you’re receptive to the growth that comes with each new artistic step that you take, it can only fortify the foundation of yourself as a person and as an artist,” she said.

But for all of her flexibility and willingness to experiment, for all the variety of a career that ranges from Handel’s Ariodante to Sister Helen Prejean in Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, she’s also charted a clear course, moving through music that speaks to her—particularly the French repertoire that she’s made her own—and away from some of the more conventional mezzo pathways. It’s no accident that you don’t hear her doing bel canto. “I did a Rosina [in Rossini’s Barber of Seville] once,” she said. “It was good, and once was enough.” This ability to know herself, and trust her own artistic tastes, is reflected in the distinctiveness of her artistry—and in her success.

It’s also a reason her recital work is so fine. A byproduct of increasing fame is a chance to do more concert work (because more audiences will pay to hear you sing alone), and it’s work that sits well for an artist who’s strongly drawn to composers like Berlioz, Debussy, Fauré, with the wealth of song and orchestral literature they entail.

Recitals are also the most direct means of communication with the audience. “You’re bare nekkid,” says the New Mexican. But, she adds, the experience of doing a good recital is also “like Christmas, when you’ve gotten that perfect gift for your brother or sister, and they open it and you see their face.

“I think that that love affair with the music and the audience has been my primary relationship for a long time,” she muses. “I have devoted so much of my life and my passion to my music.” It’s a kind of focus—and sacrifice—that’s been a hallmark of many of the greatest singers of our time. And at the moment, Susan Graham seems fully qualified to take her place among them.

Anne Midgette is a classical music critic for The New York Times. She is currently working with Herbert Breslin on a book about his career managing Luciano Pavarotti, due from Doubleday in the fall of 2004.