Marilyn Horne: The Song Continues (review)

When veteran performers or celebrities are interviewed in their twilight years, they are often asked, "If you had your life to live over again, what would you do differently?" The rosiest answer is, "Nothing! I wouldn't change a thing." Marilyn Horne, who turned seventy in 2004, didn't get to rewind her entire existence and replay it in the manner of Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, of course. But she does make some changes to her story in Marilyn Horne: The Song Continues, the updated 2004 version of her 1983 memoir,¹ and also fills us in on what she has been up to in the last two decades.

Horne does not indulge in much expurgation or image polishing in this revision, though. Well known for her plain speaking, she readily confesses her struggles, failures (both onstage and off-), and regrets. She makes no secret of her lifelong battle with excess poundage. The reader feels as though he is eavesdropping on a private session with a therapist or marriage counselor when reading the conflicted passages in which Horne discusses the difficulty of trying to build and maintain a superstar singing career crammed with rehearsals, performances, exhaustion, accidents, and absence while doubling (tripling?) as a wife and mother. Most tellingly, coauthor Jane Scovell talked Horne out of excising the most notorious instance of the singer's fabled down-to-earthiness: the report of her stinging battle with crab lice on Christmas Eve 1958, during the soprano-turned-mezzo's galley years as a hard-working company member in Gelsenkirchen, Germany.

Even so, Horne permits herself to add an additional splash of vinegar to an anecdote about a bad experience with a deceased conductor and (pardon the expression) pulls in her horns when dealing with somebody who is both alive and in a powerful position in the music world. Thus she now takes a few extra swipes at Herbert von Karajan's apparently too-noisy conducting of the 1979 Salzburg Aida, in which, she feels, the chorus and orchestra tended to swamp her Amneris. And, in deference to the peace they made long ago (and, dare I suggest it, to Beverly Sills's clout in New York musical and financial circles?), there is not a word in the new book about the heated battle Horne waged to make sure that Bubbles didn't hog all the U.S. publicity when the two all-American songbirds costarred in Rossini's L'assedio di Corinto at La Scala in 1969.

In most other respects, The Song Continues remains faithful to Horne's 1983 narrative of her progress from precocious childhood canary and college music major determined to master the mechanics of singing, to Roger Wagner chorale chorister and movie-soundtrack stand-in singer, to provincial Haussopran, whipsawed wife and mother, bel canto headliner, and international recitalist. In new chapters she recounts the death in 1996 of her former husband, the conductor Henry Lewis, whom she continued to love, respect, and be friends with long after their painful divorce; the end in 1989 of her nearly fifteen-year relationship with Greek bass Nicola Zaccaria, with whom she likewise remained on friendly terms afterward; her daughter Angela's development into a happy and successful career woman, wife, and mother who gave Horne two grandchildren; her "golden years" careers as a teacher of master classes and pop music performer opposite the likes of Barbara Cook; and the formation in 1994 of the Marilyn Horne Foundation "to support, encourage, and preserve the art of singing through the presentation of vocal recitals and related educational activities."

As anyone who has caught her act on the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast intermission features or heard her Tonight Show on-the-couch repartee can testify, Horne is a delightful storyteller. She spins an entertaining yarn in The Song Continues, one full of hearty humor, much of it decidedly not in keeping with the airs and grandeur customarily attributed to divas. Opera devotees will not glean much insight...