Deborah Voigt: 'When I walked onstage, you saw addiction'

One of the world’s great sopranos, Deborah Voigt was notoriously fired from Covent Garden for being too fat. Now she’s back with a book detailing her struggles with addiction – and her recovery

In 1996, when Deborah Voigt was starting to build her international reputation as a dramatic soprano, she was summoned by the revered conductor Sir Georg Solti to audition for the female lead in Wagner’s opera, Tristan und Isolde. She sang for the maestro in a rehearsal room in London and at the end of the session he told her he was delighted by what he had heard.

“That was beautiful. You’d be a great Isolde,” he said.

Voigt assumed the part was hers. But then Solti rose from his desk and walked over to her.

“Why are you so fat?” he said in a matter-of-fact voice. “Is it the food?” Before Voigt could recover her composure, he added: “If you lose weight by the time I see you for Beethoven’s Ninth, you can have the job.”

Here’s the rub: the audition was for a CD recording of the opera. There was never any intention that Voigt would present herself on stage. “I was so completely stunned that he said it, having so clearly liked the audition,” she tells me when we meet at her agent’s office near New York’s Carnegie Hall.

If anything, the Solti saga is even more egregious than the famous incident that brought Voigt to the attention of a global public in 2004. That’s when the Royal Opera House (why do these outrages always happen in London?) sacked her for being too fat to fit into “the little black dress” to be worn by Ariadne in Richard Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos.

Voigt was recognised as one of the world’s greatest Ariadnes at the time. But as a result of the Covent Garden fiasco, outside the bubble of opera aficionados – who know her as a soprano of great depth and range, who triumphed in the Italian repertoire and then went on to break her way into the select club of Wagnerians – she is known as the diva sacked for being too fat. I suggest that she must be bugged by that, but she seems remarkably sanguine.

“You’re never going to be remembered by the general public for being the world’s greatest Isolde,” she says. “Though I do regret that when the history books are written there’ll be a picture of the little black dress with my face next to it.”

Voigt recalls her ignominious treatment at the hands of Solti and Covent Garden in her new book Call Me Debbie, an account of her musical career and her long struggle with overeating, alcoholism and unhappy and abusive relationships. And it is a long struggle. She relates that she had her first bout of bingeing – in this case a jar of green olives and their juice – in 1965 when she was just five, and it was not until 2012 when she went into rehab for drinking.

By my reckoning, that’s 47 years of misery. Combined with secrecy. I wonder whether any of this self-destructive behaviour was visible to the opera houses, directors and producers she worked with over so many years.

“No, I don’t believe so,” she says. “They may look at the book now and go, ‘Oh, now I get it, now I understand why she did that.’ But no, I never drank on the day of a performance, I never turned up for a rehearsal intoxicated. Nobody knew.”

What was visible to everybody was the unhappiness that expressed itself in excessive eating. As the book progresses, so does her weight. By 16 she weighed 175lb; by the end of high school 190lb; by 30, 290lb and at her heaviest she pushed the scales at 333lb.

Reading the book, it’s not hard to conclude that the roots of her obesity lay firmly in her upbringing in Chicago. Her parents were conservative southern Baptists who had a very restrictive view of life.

As a child Debbie revelled in the simple pleasures including her innate skill and passion: singing. But that didn’t chime with the austerity of her parents. “I don’t think they knew what to make of me for quite some time, even when I had my career and was making my living from singing,” she says.

Her father tried to spank the exuberance out of her, and his words were even more bruising. One of the most chilling episodes of the book has a 13-year-old Debbie sitting at the family piano. Assuming that the house is empty, she lets herself be transcended by playing and singing a lilting Broadway tune. Unexpectedly, her father walks in and says: “Who do you think you are?” with such force that she felt humiliated and ashamed.

It is one of several paradoxes in the Voigt story that she overcame the religious straitjacket her parents imposed on her through her own spiritual resilience. When she was about 14 or 15 she was laying in bed early one morning when she heard a male voice speaking out clearly to her. “You are here to sing,” the voice said.

Voigt says that 40 years later she’s squeamish about discussing what she believes to have been a literal visitation from God, but she says that the moment has been an enormous influence on her life. “It has stayed with me ever since. I’ve leaned on it over the years.”

It gave her the strength to persist with her singing and develop it, first at church (her parents didn’t disapprove of that) and then through structured lessons.

With the help of an inspirational teacher, Jane Paul, she developed her upper range, began learning the repertoire and was soon brought to the attention of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, her lifelong patron. She started to embrace the great soprano roles, making them her own.

She says her favourite characters include Minnie in Puccini’s La fanciulla del West. “Maybe it’s the Bible teaching and the way she wants to care for these men, and the whole thing about saving her first kiss. She’s so rich and so much fun to play.”

The other great character whose skin she has easily inhabited is Sieglinde from Wagner’s Die Walküre, not surprisingly given that Wotan’s daughter had a traumatic family background and is in an unhappy forced marriage. “I think there’s something about her I can identify with. I think it’s the resilience: she’s in this horrific place and yet she hopes and she wants.”

As her prominence grew on opera stages in the US and across Europe, Voigt kept her feet planted firmly on the ground. She refused to become a histrionic ego in the stereotype of sopranos – the subtitle of her book is True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva.

“I think people have enough preconceived ideas about opera without giving them more fodder. They think opera singers sit on clouds all day and eat bon bons before they float down to the stage to sing.”

She has also insisted on remaining a thoroughly American singer, immune to the status and occasional preening of European stars and producers. “I am 100% American-made. I didn’t go the European Fach system, I got all my training in the United States.”

That is not to say that she hasn’t been a hit in Europe. In 2003, at the age of 42, she became the first American soprano to have a new production created for her rendition of Isolde at the Vienna state opera. “Her sound sliced through Wagner’s thick orchestration,” wrote the New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini.

That high came just a year before an extraordinary low: her unceremonious dumping by Covent Garden over “the little black dress”. Voigt’s feelings now about what happened then, more than 10 years ago, are revealing and instructive.

She remains angry about the double standards in the opera world. When she sang Wagner’s Lohengrin with the Canadian tenor Ben Heppner, he was described as having the “shoulders of a linebacker” while people noted that her performance was “impeded by her girth”. Luciano Pavarotti, she notes in the book, was often lauded for his “huggable, teddy-bear roundness”.

She continues to think that the Royal Opera House was wrong to have sacked her. “They knew who I was when they gave me the contract. That’s when the problem came in. They had chosen me for this production.”

And she remains angry that society views women of a certain weight as, in her words, “the last area where you feel you can say something, the last area of discrimination. ‘Why don’t you eat a little less?’ Well, if it was that simple, there would be fewer obese people out there. To me that’s such an uneducated response.”

On the other hand, she is also sympathetic to the argument that art relies upon suspension of disbelief, and to ask the audience to embrace a 333lb Tosca is asking quite a lot. “I understand that I was ginormous. The way that I was walking out on stage, you saw addiction – there was no getting around it.”

Here’s where the paradoxes really kick in. First, by creating a hole in Voigt’s diary schedule, and by giving her a payoff for the Ariadne role, Covent Garden unwittingly gave her the time and the money to have gastric surgery that in turn led her to reduce her weight.

Second, that weight-loss might, in the longer run, have had an impact on her voice. Voigt says she remains unsure about the precise relationship between her body mass and voice, though what she does know is that “learning to sing in this instrument”, as she puts it – pointing to her chest and throat area – took longer than she anticipated.

“Every 20 pounds or so I lost I would start to feel less connected to my body. As a singer, we use our entire body as a mechanism and when you are carrying 150 extra pounds as girth, you take a breath and all that weight goes zoom and the sound just goes flying over the orchestra.”

And the ultimate irony: by the time that she came to sing her first Brünnhilde at the Metropolitan Opera in 2011 – the role that gave rise to the colloquialism “it ain’t over till the fat lady sings” – she had already lost a significant amount of weight and critics were asking whether her voice had been diminished as a result.

“‘Her voice is more silver than gold, her voice has more steel in it,’” she says, quoting a critic. “Well, guess what, if you are going to sing Brünnhilde, you have to have more silver than gold, and more steel.”

As she looks to the future, Voigt says she’s not sure how many more of the big Germanic parts – the Brünnhildes and the Isoldes – she will perform. Besides, she has new ambitions these days. She still hankers after playing Elektra in the Richard Strauss opera of the same name, and would love to sing more American songbook repertoire, cabaret, musicals. “I’m a frustrated American who wants to sing American music in her own language,” she says.

She has also put together a scripted version of her life story, Voigt Lessons, which she will take to the stage at New York City’s 92nd Street Y on 26 February.

Has she put her struggles and her demons behind her? Can she allow herself to think that way?

“I can today. The good thing now is I’m able to see that if I do something, this is going to happen and it’s not going to be pretty. I can see myself. I know how it works.”

She pauses for a moment, and then she says: “But I still want cookies tonight.”

• Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva is published in the USA by Harper
  
• This piece was amended on 17 February 2015 to correct the spelling of straitjacket.

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