Proud of the Diva Within

The word “diva” comes from the Latin term for “goddess.” We’ve come to think of her merely as a prima donna in the negative sense. But she is actually a glorious being with the power to stir our deepest emotions, a consummate artist with a larger-than-life persona to match. Such a creature is Carol Vaness, a Southern California native who also happens to be one of the leading American sopranos of her generation. She is in town to sing Magda, the female lead in Puccini’s “La Rondine,” which opens at Los Angeles Opera on Saturday, directed by Marta Domingo.

In true diva fashion, Vaness embraces the label and all it suggests. To her, it is an honorific. Indeed, one of the most recent additions to her extensive discography is an album of “Diva Scenes” for RCA Victor.

Sitting in a boardroom at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, holding forth with the outgoing grace and ease of a seasoned pro, the tall and attractive singer happily admits that she’s no wallflower. “I can be very, very strong,” says Vaness. “I can be headstrong, prideful. I can be very warm and loving. I can also be very vain. And very passionate about my man.

Vaness has sung principal roles in opera houses far and wide, from the Metropolitan Opera to La Scala to the Bastille Opera. Her impressively broad repertory includes a good deal of Mozart and Verdi, as well as Puccini, Handel, Barber, Gluck and more.

At Los Angeles Opera, where she made her company debut in 1988 as Fiordiligi in “Cosi fan tutte,” she has assayed such daunting assignments as the title role in “Tosca” in 1996, Leonora in “Il Trovatore” in 1998 and Violetta in last season’s “La Traviata.”

“She is very eclectic in her repertoire,” says Domingo, who also directed Vaness in “La Traviata” at Los Angeles Opera last season and has known her less formally for years, due to Vaness’ numerous onstage partnerings with Domingo’s husband, Los Angeles Opera artistic director designate Placido Domingo. “She has the potential to do many roles. Vocally, she’s very gifted. She has a lot of personality, a lot of temperament. She is very professional. And on top of that she has the looks, which is very important these days.”

Yet for all Vaness’ versatility, there’s little denying that she has a special affinity for a particular kind of strong dramatic role--the diva parts, if you will. “Tosca is absolutely me, 100%: an opera singer playing an opera singer,” says Vaness, referring to the Puccini heroine, a singer who not only fights for her boyfriend’s freedom, but also stabs the powerful bad guy who’s imprisoned him, even as he tries to have his way with her. “I’m very much like her personality.” Indeed, if you’ve seen Vaness in the role of this Puccini leading lady, it’s not hard to believe.

Yet in conversation, the soprano is so down to earth as to be almost the anti-diva, interrupting her narrative now and then to tell tales of herself, exchange gossip or offer a girl-to-girl tidbit. Nonetheless, there’s enough sense of a tempest brewing beneath the calm that you can take what she tells you about the other aspects of her personality as an article of faith. Vaness is a woman who can be tender, but she doesn’t care to let people walk all over her, in life or on stage.

“I love ‘La Traviata’ and ‘Il Trovatore,’ ” she says. “I love Donna Elvira in ‘Don Giovanni.’ That part is a joy to sing and a joy to act. I love Desdemona, but it’s very hard for me not to fight back. If Otello was the man I was living with and loving, and he started yelling at me, I’d go, ‘Look, what is your problem? Let’s work this out!’

“I’m not good with victims,” she adds. “This [“La Rondine”] is as close to a victim as I can take.”

Vaness, now 47, definitely does not come across as a victim. But she does call to mind another legendary soprano who also made “Tosca” a signature role. Indeed, with her sleek brunet hair, large dark eyes and regal presence--not to mention a dramatic weight loss at one point, and a personal life with its own share of drama--the resemblance to Maria Callas is hard to miss. But then again, it may just be that true divas come along only so often.

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The L.A. Opera “Rondine,” a lavish production of a comparatively short and lesser-known 1917 work by Puccini, was first conceived and directed by Marta Domingo at Bonn’s Oper der Stadt in 1995. Remounted in the 1997-98 season at the Washington Opera, which Placido Domingo heads, it was also recently broadcast on public television.

The plight of Magda, the not-quite-victim heroine of “La Rondine,” bears a certain resemblance to that of Violetta in “La Traviata.” The mistress of a wealthy man, she decides on a lark to go out one evening disguised as a poor girl. In disguise, she meets and falls in love with a handsome young man named Ruggero (tenor Marcus Haddock). But when the romance leads to a proposal of marriage, Magda’s past returns to haunt her, threatening to destroy the couple’s future together.

Rehearsing the Act 2 ballroom scene in which Magda meets Ruggero, Vaness and Haddock sit at a cafe table. They are dressed in casual rehearsal clothes; beer mugs pose as champagne glasses; and there is nothing in the otherwise bare room to suggest the sumptuous sets that will surround them onstage. The soprano has been in town only a few days, and this is the first time they’ve worked through this part of the opera.

Yet none of these quotidian realities affect Vaness, who performs with conviction. Singing to Haddock or listening as he sings, her body expresses the emotions of a woman on the brink of falling in love.

If an upper torso can convey yearning and desire, Vaness’ does. Looking into Haddock’s eyes, she curves her shoulders toward him, twisting her body with a sensuousness that speaks volumes. Her hands are dancerly and gentle as they reach for his. She tilts her chin as if to pose the question of romance, and her face radiates the hope of new infatuation. She is utterly convincing.

Although this is her debut in the role, Vaness brings a great deal of experience to the challenge--which, after all, is not as great as many she has undertaken before. “This part has a couple of difficult parts, but it’s not long,” says Vaness. “The stuff that’s hard is plenty hard but it’s beautiful, and a lot of it isn’t hard.

“I [usually] sing slightly more dramatic repertoire than this,” she says. “This is actually, in the first act, a little light for me. But the rest of the opera sits perfectly on my voice. It’s like that for a lot of things. You can sing one opera that’s way too dramatic in one moment, but the rest fits perfectly. So what are you going to do? You just find the way that your personality works with the character.”

More so than some operas, there is a necessary emphasis on acting. “ ‘La Rondine’ is a piece that for me is pure theater,” says director Domingo. “So [it requires] acting the part from beginning to end. There are two arias, the rest is conversation. This piece has to be acted, played--like something on Broadway or the West End.”

Indeed, colleagues praise Vaness’ thespian skills. “She looks right in your eyes and gives you everything that you need,” says tenor Greg Fedderly, who sang Alfredo opposite Vaness’ Violetta in last season’s “La Traviata” and who sings Prunier in “La Rondine.” “She’s so easy to work with. She’s always so relaxed, and she makes you feel relaxed. She doesn’t have any of the stereotypical diva qualities.

“She’ll say things like, ‘Why don’t you try this?’ ” he says. “She has so much experience and she’s really free with helping other singers. I know all the young artists at the [Los Angeles Opera] would say that too.”

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Vaness was born in San Diego, but reared in Pomona. She comes from a music-loving family. “Everyone in my family has a voice,” she says. “We’ve always sung Christmas carols and in church.”

She began taking piano lessons as a teenager and eventually enrolled to study piano at Cal Poly Pomona. While there, however, she became interested in voice. After graduation, she continued vocal studies with David Scott at Cal State Northridge.

Vaness took part in the inaugural year of San Francisco Opera’s summer training institute, the Merola Opera Program, during one summer while she was still in college. Then, as her time at Northridge drew to a close, she began to survey her options.

She had received an invitation from Houston Grand Opera to be part of their young artists’ program, but she didn’t feel it was right for her. “They were offering me a couple of things that I didn’t think I was ready to sing,” she says. “To tell you the truth, I was nervous about moving to Houston.”

However, San Francisco, where she had enjoyed the Merola program, did appeal to her. Vaness got in touch with Kurt Adler, then general director of San Francisco Opera. “I called Mr. Adler,” she says. “And he called Beverly Sills and said, ‘I have a very fine young singer that I want to protect, and I know that Atlantic Richfield has paid for a number of your telecasts. Do you have pull with them?’ And she made one call to Atlantic Richfield Co. and called Mr. Adler back and I was sponsored for two years.”

Which made Vaness one of the first participants in an apprenticeship program whose members are now known as Adler Fellows. After a year of singing small parts in the company’s productions, the fellows have outreach duties.

“We were responsible for 40 ‘informances’--a performance where you go out and talk and tell every one about what you do,” says Vaness. “I was actually based in Los Angeles [after the first year]. So I came down here and I would go to rest homes and schools and meet all kinds of organizations. I sang outside, inside, on my head--in an attempt to get opera out to the public.”

All was not easy going. Vaness suffered an injury that threatened to derail her then-young career. “I hemorrhaged a vocal chord so severely that they didn’t know if I would sing again,” she says. “But it was one of the greatest things that could happen, because it happened early on. It was terrible--the desolation and loneliness of not being able to speak to anyone. But it taught me how to make it, to hang on to emotions.”

And San Francisco also provided a chance break that would propel Vaness solidly into the professional world. One of her assignments was to sing a small mezzo part in a staging of “I Puritani,” in which Beverly Sills was also singing.

“In this opera, you have to be the same height as the soprano because someone has to mistake you for her, and they used me for that,” explains Vaness. “And while we were in rehearsals, there was a bizarre circumstance where a soprano from another opera canceled rehearsal and Mr. Adler, knowing that I knew that part, asked me if I would please come and [fill in].

“Beverly came early,” Vaness continues. “She doesn’t have good vision, and she said, ‘Oh, so-and-so sounds a lot better.’ And [someone] said, ‘That’s not so-and-so, that’s Carol Vaness, the girl that’s singing with you in ‘I Puritani.’ ”

One thing led to another, and Sills arranged for Vaness to sing for conductor Julius Rudel of the New York City Opera, who offered her her first professional contract, to sing Vitellia in “La Clemenza di Tito” in 1979. “It all overlapped in the most unusual way,” says Vaness. “It was an amazing set of dominoes. I do feel lucky. In the end, I did the singing, but they really did great things for me.”

Vaness moved to New York and made her debut with the City Opera. She continued singing fairly regularly with the company for about four years. During this time, she also made her European debut (again as Vitellia, in Bordeaux, France), sang such major roles as Mimi in “La Boheme” with City Opera and debuted with a number of other American and European houses.

It was as Armida in a 1984 production of Handel’s “Rinaldo” that Vaness made her Metropolitan Opera debut. Thereafter, she returned to the Met with some regularity, in such roles as the Countess in “The Marriage of Figaro,” Elettra in “Idomeneo” and her beloved diva in “Tosca.”

In the early 1990s, she drew as much attention for her weight loss as her singing. “My dad’s Lithuanian, so we had meat and potatoes at every meal,” the singer explains. “So I learned right at the beginning how to eat like an opera singer. It took me many years to get ahold of my weight. But about seven years ago, I lost about 55 pounds.

“When I lost that weight and I realized how much freer I felt onstage, how much more I was able to throw myself into a part, it freed me so much. I don’t think I would ever want to give that up again,” she says. “Besides, I just couldn’t re-buy all those clothes.”

It takes discipline to lose that much weight and keep it off. But then again, surviving and thriving in the world of opera takes a great deal of grit. “It’s a painful profession, it really is,” Vaness says. “It’s constant work to get better, to even stay where you are. Our entire careers are spent alone. What we do, we do alone. We can have the greatest conductor in the world, and they still can’t sing for you.”

And as if the craft itself weren’t difficult enough, the profession has other exigencies. “It’s a career about travel,” says Vaness, who is twice-divorced and now lives with her singer boyfriend, primarily in New York. She also maintains an apartment near her parents’ home in Rancho Cucamonga. “I packed, night before last, in New York City, and I’m not going back until August. So what do you take? I’m coming here, San Francisco, Santa Fe. I have two suitcases for four months, and a case of gala gowns.”

Learning to cope--with the mundane and not-so-mundane--has contributed to Vaness’ notable professional longevity. “I’ve been very consistent,” she says. “ My voice has changed a little bit here or gotten a little heavier there. And I’ve been willing to move where my voice has gone. Not having a big enough voice was one of my phobias in school. But I’m here to tell you that I think the reason I’ve been singing so long is that I didn’t subscribe to singing as big as I could all the time.

“I really haven’t had a lot of downtime,” adds Vaness, in a tone that suggests she’s aware of her own good fortune but not falsely modest about it. “I think I’ve been unbelievably lucky in my career. I think to be truly lucky, you have to be prepared. You can’t just be talented.”

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“La Rondine,” Los Angeles Opera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown. Saturday, April 18, 25, 29 and May 2 and 5, 7:30 p.m.; April 22, 1 p.m. $27-$146. Ends May 5. (213) 365-3500.