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Susan Graham Creates Sister Helen Prejean (the Opera Character)

By Robert Wilder Blue

American mezzo-soprano Susan Graham is a stunning presence on stage whether she is playing the exuberant young man Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier or the anguished Sister Helen Prejean in Dead Man Walking. In a decade, she has established herself as one of the most admired singers in the world and takes a place among such honored American mezzos as Tatiana Troyanos, Marilyn Horne and Frederica Von Stade.

In the fall of 2000, Susan was able to do something operas singers don't normally have the opportunity to do: she stayed in one place for more than three months.

"I had a blast in San Francisco last fall, doing Sister Helen and then Octavian [in Der Rosenkavalier]. I can't say that Dead Man Walking was fun to do because it was so intense and so difficult on so many levels. It's not something you kick up your heels and say 'wow, this is really fun!' But, on a musical and emotional and artistic level it was extremely fulfilling. It was very exciting to be in on a new project, especially one of such human weight. I sure learned a lot.

Born in Roswell, New Mexico, Susan sang in church choirs from the time she was five and started studying piano at seven. When she was twelve she moved to Texas, "and it sort of took off for me there - you know in Texas they do everything on such a grand scale. They had lots of competitions for young, budding musicians, so I kind of got on the fast track that way. I was involved in high school musicals and my senior year I got my first big role: Maria in The Sound of Music. When I met Julie Andrews backstage at Dead Man Walking, I told her she was the first nun I ever played on stage! I told her she had been such an influence on me and that she inspired legions of opera singers, and she couldn't believe it. She said to me, "I can't imagine how you float those beautiful high notes.' I told her she couldn't imagine how it felt to have Julie Andrews say that to me. She was the first 'legitimate' singer I ever heard.

"I didn't grow up listening to opera. I fell into it accidentally when I went to Texas Tech University. I had only seen one opera before college, but I wanted to study singing and it was a requirement that we had to be in the opera productions, either in a role or in the chorus. I got pulled into it and fell in love.

"I was in the Merola program at San Francisco Opera and wanted to be an Adler Fellow but they discouraged me from pursuing that. According to the powers that made those decisions, I was ready to go out and start singing the roles that were right for me, like Cherubino [in The Marriage of Figaro] and so forth. The Adler program is designed more for people who still need to ripen into what they are going to sing. Since I wasn't a budding Amneris, I didn't need to take up their space!

"When San Francisco contacted me about the part of Sister Helen in Dead Man Walking, my reaction was mixed. To be asked to do a new opera at San Francisco Opera on such a compelling story was exciting and thrilling and flattering. The flip side was that it was such an enormous responsibility and so daunting a task to try to tell such a powerful story and to sort out my own place in that story, on and off stage. I dissolved into tears at a coffee shop at my first meeting with Jake. He was telling me how the story would unfold on the stage and what they had in mind dramatically. He quoted one of Sister Helen's lines to Joe de Rocher, 'Let my face be the face of love, let my face be the last thing you see in the world,' and I was in a puddle! I told him I couldn't do it. It was too powerful, too hard, too strong. You know, you sing Cherubino or Dorabella or Octavian and that's one thing. You're telling a story that's literary and those are characters that don't really exist in life and they are amalgamations of different kinds of personalities. But telling a story such as Dead Man Walking, which is reality and life and death and something that happens to real people in our time, in our vernacular, somehow breaks through all of the defenses that separate us from the characters we play. I knew it would get in my blood and I was scared.

"But eventually I got over that. Sister Helen is a very strong woman and it was an honor to portray her on stage. Her words and her strength, her conviction and her optimism and hope and faith sustained me through the performances. My father passed away during the run and it was a very difficult time for me. I was facing death in my personal life and having to live it out on stage at every performance. To be able to get through it, I relied heavily on that woman I was portraying. Her words comforted me as they were coming out of my mouth, even as they were meant to comfort Joe de Rocher, the convict. It was a very interesting juxtaposition of life and stage.

"I think it's interesting for people to know how one thing informs the other. I certainly don't mean to imply that I used my father's death in this performance. Actually, I used the performance to help me deal with my grief. People wondered how I was going through with the performances because of the coincidental subject matter. But it helped me through the grieving process. Sister Helen gave me strength.

"The process from September 4 until it closed on November 10 was an enormous life-changing period. We all felt like we were on another universe while we were working on Dead Man Walking, because it required so much shedding of what we were used to. It wasn't like anything I had ever been a part of before or like anything I'd ever seen. It was so completely nonoperatic, if you will, unconventional. It required us to ask some very difficult questions of ourselves and to be very open with our emotions, and to portray a kind of honesty and simplicity. Sometimes the simplest things are the hardest to do on stage. The combination of Jake's music and Terrence McNally's words and Joe Mantello's direction made it all a lot more -- I can't say easy to access - but it certainly gave us the groundwork.

"During the rehearsal period hardly a day went by when all of us didn't break down in tears. But, there was lots of dark humor going around too. You had to have that in order to survive - gallows humor that no one would think was funny - because of the situation, being so tormented by this piece as we were. I'm sure that if anyone had walked in, they would have thought we were just awful.

"The great thing about working with Joe Mantello, which he thought was a liability, was the fact he had never directed an opera before. For us it was great because he approached things from a completely theatrical standpoint. What I got from Joe was a real furthering and growth of my sense of honesty and fearlessness, learning to put my own fears aside to be able to tell the story. It's hard to tell a difficult story, but if you do it with an honest heart and with integrity and not clouded up with a lot of operatic 'b.s.,' it carries so much more punch. Joe was not interested in our operatic stock gestures nor our need to always sing out front. The story was about the two people and about what we were saying and who we were saying it to. I always try to bring a level of honesty to my performances because that's very important to me, to be real. This was a big step on that path.

"With operas which are written in modern times, you are often playing contemporary characters and that sheds one layer of artifice. The fact that you are singing in your native language sheds another layer of artifice. Plus the fact that, certainly with Dead Man Walking, you were playing real people. Sister Helen was watching me be her on opening night. It strips away to the barest bones what you are as a person; there are fewer places to hide. In my case, I play a lot of characters that aren't even my gender! When I am playing a 18th century boy who lives in a castle and causes a lot of mischief, that is many layers removed from who I am as a person. A character like Sister Helen is not. It's the same thing with American singers singing American song. I did a lot of American songs on my recital tour last year. The experience of singing in your native tongue is like nothing else because there is an emotional immediacy that comes unconsciously between saying a word and it triggering an emotion both in the singer and the listener. An interesting phenomenon takes place. There is an immediate recognition of emotions and shared histories. That is the gift of singing in your native language.

"The device we used throughout the opera for the conversations between Sister Helen and Joe was that we were both facing forward rather than each other. In rehearsal, we did a lot of line reading without the music. With a libretto by Terrence McNally, you know it's going to work pretty well as a play. So, we did a lot of that kind of development of the scenes by just sitting there facing each other, staring at each other, talking to each other. There are certain points during a conversation like that where you just can't look at the person and you have to turn away, because the confrontation becomes so real. That was great to learn, where the exasperation comes and where the frustration comes and where the actual contact happens. Physically there was the moment where we actually turned and faced each other for the dénouement, the climax of our relationship, and that was so powerful. The music supported it with that huge, sort of Puccinian swell. It reminded me of that moment in Werther where Charlotte and Werther finally have their kiss before he dies and the music swells for 28 seconds. It was that kind of a moment in Dead Man Walking. It is a culmination of their relationship. It is where they finally meet and see eye-to-eye.

"I underestimated how difficult it was going to be to learn Dead Man Walking. I was doing another new role before it, so my preparation time kept getting pushed back, and I ended up having to learn it very fast and very intensely. But, the score made perfect sense. The thing that made it difficult was that it wasn't square - it wasn't predictable. It would have a little change here and there that kept if fresh and natural. We don't speak in 4/4 time, we speak in varied rhythms. And that is how Jake wrote the music.

"I had seen the last half of the movie on cable television some time before, but I made a point to avoid the film before we did the opera because I didn't want to be influenced by Susan Sarandon's performance. She gave a brilliant performance; it was so powerful. Well, gee whiz, she one an Academy Award for it, didn't she? I knew I didn't want to try to replicate what she had done because I couldn't. I wanted to start fresh and build it from the ground up in my own head and my own performance. After the dust had settled a bit, I watched the film and I was amazed that so much of what she had done in the film - her impulses and instincts - was very similar to what I was feeling.

"So many people were asking what Dead Man Walking was like -- was it opera or theater? Dead Man Walking is definitely an opera, but it was also a very powerful theatrical event. Jake, [conductor] Patrick [Summers] and I agreed that we wanted to convey in all the interviews that it was not about the death penalty. It was about human compassion and human forgiveness and God's forgiveness and the power of the contact between two human beings.

"Everyone said that the opening sequence was as riveting as anything they had seen on film or stage and that says a lot for the impact of the piece as a whole. We could hear people sitting on the edge of their seats during the performance - we could feel that energy and that they were right with us every step of the way. The scene with Flicka [Frederica von Stade] making the appeal for son's life was so heart-breaking. She's such a maternal figure and such a powerful figure. You could hear the sniffles in the audience. And the silence. It was deafening. And that's when you know you are really saying something - when people are so into it they forget to cough! When the final curtain came down, there was a long silence before people could pick up their hands and start to applaud. On opening night there was quite a group of film and theater people - Woody Harrelson, Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Julie Andrews - and they all sprang to their feet when the curtain came down.

What did you do during intermission? "Put a sign on my door that said 'Do Not Disturb!' and tried to collect myself. Fortunately, the second act began with Joe's monologue and my first appearance was about 10 minutes in, in the scene in Sister Helen's bedroom. One of hardest technical moments in the opera was the quick change between that scene and the next - I had 20 seconds to be dressed in my suit with my hair back up for going to the prison. That required extra preparation during the intermission because everything had to be underdressed, in layers so I could rip one thing off and have another costume on underneath. That gave me something to free my mind a little during the intermission.

"I'm thrilled that Dead Man Walking is having an ongoing life. I hope San Francisco will revive it and I hope it will be done in Europe. Europeans are fascinated with the death penalty issue. While the opera doesn't come out and take an official stance, it's very clear from Sister Helen's point of view what her position is. And since Sister Helen has the most air time in the opera, I guess you could say that the opera does take a stand. But the wish for retribution and vengeance on the part of the victims' parents is also well represented and from that standpoint you understand what they are going through emotionally. Both emotional sides are represented in the piece and I think that it would be interesting for Europeans, who don't have the death penalty and who don't understand how in a civilized country we could have it either, to have to explore all of those facets of the piece. I would love to do it in Europe. I won't be doing all of the productions, partly because of the simple fact that I'm not available for most of them. And, too much of one thing would not be healthy - all things in moderation. [She laughs.] I know that as much as I love the piece, I couldn't do a steady diet of it, because it takes too much out of me. I think that it would diminish what I would be able to bring to it after a while. I was really disappointed it didn't get filmed in San Francisco. The impact of those first performances was huge. But, I'm thrilled we have the live-performance CD."

We wondered if there were any non-singing actresses whom Susan had been drawn to. "The naturalness and playfulness of Julie Roberts influences me. Certainly Katharine Hepburn. I always admired and identified with Ingrid Bergman. Her performances always appealed to me because of their elegance, but realness. There's some kind of connection to what she did on film and what I would like to do on stage.

Are opera singers better actors today? "I think that there is a dramatic integrity that we as performers are trying to accomplish. That is a product of our time and also our training. With the abundance of television and film and theater, the entertainment medium has changed completely. Opera is expected to reach those same audiences and give them the same kind of emotional experience. Audiences aren't trained in classical music and opera the way they used to be, that is plain and simple. We don't have as much music in the schools. An audience today isn't going to go to Falstaff just to thrill to the genius of Verdi's writing. They want to be entertained by the story as well. Performers have changed and audiences have changed."

"When I sing Octavian, I see him as a real flesh-and-blood person. I don't see him as just a figure. I have five nephews ranging in age from 17 to 27 and I've watched them growing up in all stages of their lives. They are five very distinct young men and they all have qualities that I've stolen for these male characters. Whether it's a physical trait or quirk or a charming mannerism or the way they walk or swagger. But, I always try to find what part of me is in those characters. For Octavian, I like to play him as the kind of boy I would like to have dated when I was that age. I try to find the appeal."

Graham's numerous recordings are favorites of opera fans and are within arms' reach on USOperaWeb's shelves. In addition to definitive recordings of the works of Hector Berlioz and Reynaldo Hahn, she made an album of songs by American composer Ned Rorem, which didn't leave our CD player for several days after we acquired it. Graham's renditions are at once powerful and moving, and the poetry is made all the more immediate by the fact that you can understand the words when she sings them. "Actually, I don't work very hard at diction per se. I sing the words with the emotional weight that I think they deserve. It's all very instinctive. I sing the words like I mean them and I think that's what makes them understood. That goes back to what we were talking about earlier, the emotional immediacy of singing in your own language. People will believe you if you believe yourself. And people will understand you if you are committed to what you are saying. If there is an appropriate weight behind what I'm saying, I think that comes across and makes clear what I'm trying to say, both the literal clarity and the implied message. I suppose it's probably easier for mezzos - we live in a more understandable range."

Speaking of all the wonderful mezzos singing today, do you feel as though you are in competition with them? "I'm not really geared in that direction. I believe that there is something different about all of us. And, because there are so many of us a lot of new repertoire has opened up. It's supply and demand. It's the same for Vessilina [Kasarova] with the bel canto roles, Cecilia [Bartoli] for the early roles, Anne Sofie von Otter and her incredible lieder recordings, Olga Borodina and her Carmens and Dalilas. There is something so different about all of us - we all have our special niche that each of us excels in.

"I like Cecilia a lot. She's immensely gifted and her voice is a diamond, a perfect diamond. Her voice shimmers and her personality sparkles; her enormous success doesn't surprise me at all. She knows what she does well and sticks to it. She doesn't try to do what she can't do well and I think that is true of all the greatest artists. I'm not saying we can't stretch ourselves, but you have to know what you are good at. You have to know what your strengths are and what they aren't. That's key to having a long-lasting career.

"Seven or eight years ago, I did my first and only Rosina in The Barber in Seville. It was fine - I can sing coloratura. It was right around the time when Cecilia's career was starting to explode. A lot of people, including managers, were wanting me to sing Rossini. But it didn't appeal to me and I didn't love it in the way that you have to in order to make a career of singing that. I said no because there were people who could do it better and who loved it more. I love my Massenet and Strauss and Mozart and Berlioz. I love the meaty stuff - that's where I live.

"Singing Charlotte in Werther at the Met was one of the greatest pleasure of my career. I loved doing that with Tom [Thomas Hampson]. A lot of people didn't like a baritone in the part of Werther, but I liked it. I thought he was great. My next engagement is Mignon in Toulouse, which no one has thought of for years. But because I have a French affiliation, if you will, and they think I have the right kind of voice to sing Mignon, they are mounting this production for me."

Were you prepared for the pressures and stress that come with having a successful career? "It is fairly easy for me to deal with it - in fact I am thrilled by it. I feel very lucky and very happy. Although, there was a certain freedom before. I guess I experienced it backward - many people feel the freedom after they have arrived. I felt it more when there was nothing to prove: 'Susan who?' Ten years ago, when I did Minerva [in Monteverdi's Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria] in San Francisco, I was having a good time - I didn't have to prove anything, there was no record sales riding on it. I have a new Mozart record out now and I'm aware that how well I sing Dorabella [in Mozart's Così fan tutte] at the Met and on the radio broadcast determines whether someone will want to go out and buy my record. If sing a crummy Dorabella, why would anybody want to buy my Mozart record? That's a new twist to the business. I mean it doesn't keep me up at night, but we want the most gratification for the effort we put into a project. When I do a recital, I don't want to sing to an empty hall. If I put the effort that is required to make a recording, of course I want people to buy it. And I also have an intense desire to share what is important to me with audience. I want to share my ideas about 'Voi che sapete' [from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro]. I want people to know how I feel about it and so I want people to buy the record.

"But for the most part, I am very happy to be here. I think I've got the greatest job ever - I feel like I get paid for playing! I meet great people and I get to do what I do on a level that is very satisfying and stimulating, and this is a good thing!"

See also related conversations with:
Jake Heggie
Kristine Jepson
Frederica von Stade
John Packard
Teddy Tahu Rhodes