Lucine Amara

I have never stood next to an opera singer who was producing tone at full throttle, so I can't say what it's like to be the party of the second part during a passionate love duet. But I once sat beside a diva who illustrated a technical term for me in a delicate mezza voce far removed from her fortissimo, and the educational experience was better than a year of voice lessons or a stack of singing manuals.

The diva was Metropolitan Opera star Lucine Amara, a singer I have admired for years on the basis of her recordings, Met radio broadcasts, and Texas performances in Le nozze di Figaro and Il trovatore. The venue was her apartment on New York's Upper West Side, following a convivial soprano-cooked repast in the 1970s. The other members of the quartet breaking bread that unforgettable evening were Amara's manager, Bobbi Tillander, and baritone Bruce Burroughs.

At the end of the main meal, our delightfully down-to-earth and unprepossessing hostess refused all offers of help in clearing away or washing the dishes. Her chores finished, she returned to the table to chat over coffee and dessert. We had been talking about singing all night, but the conversation got up close and personal when Amara gave an impromptu demonstration.

The topic at the moment in question was the term "head voice" as it pertained to both male and female singers and how, like so many components of technically proficient singing, that particular aspect of tone production was rapidly becoming as rare as black diamonds (or a genuine trill). As everyone else at the table was either an accomplished singer or vocal pedagogue (or both), they began swapping war stories about learning how to produce head voice themselves or how to get somebody else to understand and master "sending the voice to the head," never producing a tone wider than the bridge of your nose, placing a note on the brain side of your forehead, and other abstract concepts.

To Lucine Amara—who was and, amazingly, at age seventy-nine still is a mistress of head voice—the concept wasn't abstract at all. It was a basic part of a singer's skill set, something every singer—and especially every soprano—should grasp and have perfected before commencing a career. After all, stentorian high notes pack a wonderful wallop and can ensure, if not operatic immortality, at least steady work, but expertly floated pianissimos can be the stuff of legend.

To my delight and everlasting gratitude, Amara made the concept concrete right there at the dinner table by simply taking a breath and singing the first two phrases of Pamina's great Zauberflöte lament, "Ach, ich fühl's." The second phrase contains an octave leap to a soft upper-voice G, and Amara's off-the-cuff, ten-second recital was a definitive exhibition of head voice. I prompted knowing chuckles from her colleagues when I couldn't help shifting my awestruck gaze from my hostess's mouth to a spot in the air about a foot above her eyebrows. It was as though the sound's source or focal point was outside her skull and the notes suspended over her, like words in the dialogue balloon of a comic strip.

As the other observers of this mealtime master class—which was revelatory to me but old hat to them—said with a smile, "That's why it's called head voice."