Catherine Malfitano

American soprano Catherine Malfitano has commanded the opera stage since the moment she walked onto it nearly thirty years ago. Her roles have spanned the entire history of the operatic repertory, including the well known, the unusual and brand-new. She has been a champion of American music and has sung numerous world premieres of both operas and songs. She brings passion to her art and integrity to the art form. And, she has a lot to say about music and life. Over the course of two conversations with USOperaWeb (one of which took place after she had taught for four hours, the day following the opening night of Kurt Weill's Street Scene at Lyric Opera of Chicago), she gave us some of her insight into her roles, and her feelings about her career and the music business.

Catherine Malfitano has inhabited a rich cultural environment all her life. She was born and raised in New York; her parents, ballet dancer Maria Maslova and violinist Joseph Malfitano, brought her into the world of the theater, particularly dance and music, from the earliest age. Was it a foregone conclusion that she would be a performer? "Not at all. Certainly, the theater and the arts were my life. I studied music and dance, but in fact, my parents didn't push my brother or sister or me into anything in particular. They wanted us to find our own selves. I suppose I couldn't have avoided this life if I had tried, though.

"Living in New York, I was lucky to be able to go to the theater and opera and dance performances. Dance was so much a part of my experience because of my mother. We always talked about it at home in great detail - the carriage of the head, the arch of the back, the line of the leg, the feet. Dance was my first formal training, first ballet and then modern and jazz dance. Although, my sister was the one with the natural talent for dance. I didn't really have the body type. We took time almost every day to talk about art - my mother, my brother and sister and myself - usually with the sound of my father practicing the violin in the background. He was an influence on me very early on. He was my first music teacher, and he always stressed expressiveness as much as technique in his teaching and in his own playing." Catherine and her father recorded an album together in 1973, "Music for Voice and Violin", which will be released on VAI compact disk later this year.

"In junior high school, I sang in the choir and the director, John Motley, took an interest in my voice. He ended up being very influential - he was the first person to encourage me to pursue singing seriously and suggested I audition for the High School of Music and Art. He told me to have my dad teach me an aria for the audition. So I learned 'O mio babbino caro' [from Puccini's Gianni Schicchi] with my father, auditioned and was accepted. While I was there, I was singled out to sing solos and take voice lessons, and by my senior year, I knew I wanted to make singing my career. I auditioned for The Juilliard School, was rejected and was greatly disappointed. Afterward I was able to read the comments from the five judges; three basically had said to give up all hope of having a singing career. Luckily my parents knew enough about the business and about rejection that they told me just to move on. So I auditioned for the Manhattan School and got in. It was there that the pattern was set for my career, as far as singing a wide variety of repertory. My first role was Suzel in Mascagni's L'amico Fritz. I went on to sing Pamina in [Mozart's] The Magic Flute, Abigail in Robert Ward's The Crucible, and another Manon, that of Henze's Boulevard Solitude. These performances were reviewed by all the New York newspapers, including Harold Schonberg in The New York Times." Ms. Malfitano made her professional debut in 1972 at the Central City Opera as Nannetta in Verdi's Falstaff. Her New York City Opera debut followed, as did first appearances in the major European houses.

It was on a 1978 telecast of Menotti's The Saint of Bleeker Street from NYCO that Ms. Malfitano introduced herself to most American opera-lovers. In it, she played the haunted Annina, a young Italian-American woman who experiences divine intervention through the appearance of the stigmata. "[NYCO Music Director] Julius Rudel had seen me do Annina in a production at Wolf Trap and decided he wanted to do it at City Opera. What I loved about it was that it was the most emotional role I had done up to that point, and it brought me closer to my natural self. I could identify with it - the Italian upbringing in New York and the role of religion in that. I wasn't really brought up Catholic, but it certainly was in my family background. There was a natural connection in doing a character out of my own experience. I think Saint of Bleeker Street is one of Menotti's best pieces - better than The Consul. But, it rides on having a strong soprano. If you don't start with a really fascinating, interesting diva in that role, there's no reason to do it; just as you wouldn't do Adriana Lecouvreur unless you had a soprano who was a real force.

"I think it's generally the critics who can't stomach operas like The Saint of Bleeker Street and The Consul. The public often loves them - I saw The Consul in Chicago a few seasons back and it was a big success with the audience. But, there are people in the business who can't stand Puccini either, you know, although they will admit he was one of the greatest writers for the voice."

At the beginning of her career, Ms. Malfitano sang in the world premiere of Conrad Susa's Transformations at Minnesota Opera (1972). The opera is based on Anne Sexton's cycle of poems adapted from Grimms Brothers' fairy tales. "Transformations was the first world premiere I was involved in and it was a terrific experience. It was such a privilege to be able to savor the process of creation, to watch Conrad work and be involved as he created the work around the cast. Before a note of music had been written, we spent two weeks doing theater games and exercises and improvising the Anne Sexton's poems. They are really fractured fairy tales - updated and quite dark. We even improvised singing. Conrad observed us and got to know us before he started writing the music, which was a very unusual situation. I think that process combined with the source material itself gave Conrad great liberty to create a unique color and sound for each fairy tale. It was quite sophisticated. He incorporated a wide range of styles that encompassed traditional European and new American. It unfolded like a great fan of colors. I contacted Conrad recently to get a score (mine is in storage somewhere) with the intent of doing it again or perhaps directing it.

"There is nothing like the experience of working with a living composer. It's fascinating to be a part of the creative process. One of the first things a composer will tell you is that what is written on the page is only part of what he really wants. You realize that the score - the specific notes - has its limitations and is not what makes the magic. The composer will tell you what he is trying to express, what he wants the scene to say, what we are trying to communicate, and what is behind it all. Contrary to what many people assume, composers are very flexible. That is why I find it a little silly that so many conductors, thinking they are acting out of great respect for the composer, insist on doing something exactly as it was written, which actually creates an inflexibility the composer didn't intend. In working with a composer you can discuss possible changes; you can tell him that you can't really bring forward the words on certain pitches or at a certain tempo, for example, and usually he will be very willing to make changes.

"I love that so many American composers have their own language and have something unique to say with it. Why should they have to conform or adhere to someone else's opinions of what music should or shouldn't be. Composers like William Bolcom and some of the other current composers believe that there is no such thing as right or wrong music, only good or bad. I suppose that's very subjective. But, they have no problem incorporating as many different styles as are necessary to make a dramatic point or bring forth their message. It's really stupid to say that American music that sounds like film music or has jazz or popular influences is beneath a certain opera standard. Kurt Weill is a great example of a European composer who came to America and was able to ingest and digest the American style. His jazz influences were evident already in Mahagonny, but when he came to America he was able to soak up the American style of popular songwriting and raise it to a level of great sophistication that illuminated the drama of his shows. His melodies and his music are all in the service of dramatic intentions. Music is not meant to be decorative, it has to serve the drama.

"But, we could also argue that many of the most important American musical theater pieces have happened on Broadway. I'm not at all a snob in that way, I'm open to all styles of music. I have been influenced by blues, jazz, rock-n-roll, and by people like Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, and on and on. For me, their music isn't of any lesser value or validity than the music I've ended up singing professionally. It's music I still yearn to sing, and I do so in cabaret. What I reacted to was the way in which these singers revealed themselves through the music. It's the question of whether we are getting any sense of humanity. Are we getting heart, is someone revealing something about themselves or about all of us through the music? That is basically what an artist is here to do, to reflect humanity back to the audience and allow us to go on a journey. It's all about telling stories, whether it's opera or popular song."

American composer Thomas Pasatieri played an important role in Ms. Malfitano's early career. Though less known today than in the '60s and '70s, Pasatieri composed eleven operas between 1965 and 1976. Ms. Malfitano sang in three of them: The Black Widow (East Coast premiere, 1973); The Seagull (Houston, 1974); and the world premiere of Washington Square, based on the novel of Henry James (Detroit, 1976). "Thomas Pasatieri was a composer who was extremely hot when he first came on the scene. He was being commissioned right and left for a decade or so, and was popular with audiences and initially with critics also. And then he became very unpopular with the critics. Tom was a teacher at Manhattan School of Music when I was there and he heard me not only in the opera performances, but in performances of some of his students' pieces. He was very knowledgeable about singing. At the beginning of my career, he was a great help to me; he encouraged me in certain directions and introduced me to my manager at that time, Matthew Epstein.

Carlisle Floyd and Catherine Malfitano, Houston Grand Opera's 1976 production of Bilby's Doll.

"It was wonderful to be a witness to his great popularity and be part of that creativity - to see those creative juices bringing forth those tremendous music dramas to the stage. And it was very sad to witness the kind of attack he had to experience from the critics at a certain point when he became, for them, less viable. He was no less viable for the audiences or the singers though, at least that was my experience. They still loved his work. But the critics grew tired of his style. They called it overly romantic, among other things, and said he wrote awful melodies. Tom took a very stoic view and could joke about it. When I would call him and ask what he was doing, he'd say, 'Oh, I'm writing one of those awful melodies today.' Eventually, he went to Hollywood where he became highly successful writing and orchestrating scores for movies. I know his heart is still in the classical world, but in terms of his success in Hollywood, it couldn't be greater. It's a sad commentary on the world of classical music. I don't know if Thomas Pasatieri's works will come back into vogue again. I wish some of them would be revisited; I think The Seagull is terrific and I loved Washington Square as well."

In 1976, Ms. Malfitano created the title role in the world premiere of Carlisle Floyd's Bilby's Doll in Houston. The opera comes from an obscure 1928 novel, A Mirror for Witches by Esther Forbes. It tells the story of a young woman, Doll Bilby, who embraced witch-hood as something beautiful and romantic, and presents a view of 17th century Salem, Massachusetts at wide variance with the accepted or popular concept of that period. "I loved this piece. It was very different from Susannah (which I should have done at some point, but never got to); it had a much broader mix of musical styles. Carlisle was great for incorporating folk tunes, of course, and he did that in Bilby's Doll. But he also wrote these huge soliloquies that had long, extended vocal lines with much more disjunct intervals, that soared over a huge orchestral sound. It was highly dramatic. The part of Doll was an extraordinary vehicle; it contained all the dramatic possibilities I could have wished for in a role. I love to explore that particular period of time in a female character's development - the age of 15 or 16 when she is verging on womanhood, which is a very exciting time in a woman's life. Doll was similar to Butterfly and Salome in that regard. There were some very sexy scenes with Jack Trussel that we played in body stockings. While this worked well from distance, I remember a rather silly photo of us in one of the major magazines in which could see the painted nipples and so forth. Bilby's Doll was revised and done again in Omaha shortly thereafter and then not again to my knowledge.

"There are so many pieces I haven't heard since I did them in the mid-70s and I would love to hear and see them again. My impression was that every one of them were viable and exciting pieces as theater and music. You know, the problem is that so many companies are not willing to redo pieces. They want to have a premiere because of all the glory and hoopla. It takes a savvy company, one that is willing to take risks, to do a revival of a new opera. The recent development of Dead Man Walking being presented in so many theaters is unusual. I'm sure a lot of that has to do with the film and the fact that it was an important subject, although, that's not to denigrate the music."

Catherine Malfitano as Cleopatra in Lyric Opera of Chicago's 1991 production of Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra. Photo by Tony Romano, courtesy of Lyric Opera of Chicago.

In the 1990s, Lyric Opera of Chicago embarked on a mission to present an American opera every season, either new or a revival. Among them, was the first major revival of Samuel Barber's opera Antony and Cleopatra since its premiere in 1966. Commissioned for the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera house, it was cast luxuriously, produced opulently, and anticipated as few new Americans operas have ever been. But, the opening was fraught with production difficulties and the press treated the event as a resounding failure. It was a blow for Barber and for American opera in general. He revised the work later for productions at Spoletto and The Juilliard School, but it failed to catch on; the accumulated negative baggage tended to detract from the musical and dramatic merits of the piece. Chicago Lyric turned its attention to the opera in 1991 and invited Ms. Malfitano to assay the role of Cleopatra. The production was televised throughout the U.S. "Antony and Cleopatra might not have gotten the best judgment the first time around because of circumstances that are well documented. There were so many elements that distracted people from the piece. The production was rather heavy-handed and it overwhelmed the opera. Leontyne Price had these outrageously huge costumes to deal with that were obviously not comfortable for her and were a big distraction. There were some disasters on opening night, including the turntable breaking down and that kind of thing. What a great disappointment that premiere must have been for Samuel Barber. It is a sad story. No major company picked it up until Chicago Lyric. By the time we did it there enough time had passed for a fresh look at it. Unfortunately, though, the curse was still very much in evidence. While it was generally a big audience success, there was still a kind of residue that remained. I don't think the critics gave it its due even the second time around, which is a shame because it's a fabulous piece.

"The text is very difficult in Antony and Cleopatra. I think that was another problem the first time - very little of the text got through. When we did it in Chicago there were surtitles which helped the audience enormously to connect with this difficult text. Also, in the first version there was no love duet, which was a miscalculation on Barber's part. He took care of this when he revised it later, and it enhanced the piece and the relationship of the two main characters.

"For me, it is an American opera written in the tradition of Puccini and Strauss. As far as music that supports the drama, there are many fantastic moments that capture the dramatic fervor of the characters and situations. There are great scenes for Cleopatra - the love duet and Antony's death scene, both of which contain extraordinary music and vocal writing, and her last monologue, which is amazing. I thought the production we did in Chicago was much more in keeping with the intimate feel of the piece. It was not overblown, and it was a much sexier affair. The costumes lent themselves to the artists having greater freedom to move, which made the characters more convincing. Those costumes were designed almost on the spot in the rehearsal process. We took pieces of fabric and draped them on my body, improvising them with great creativity. Those are important elements that go into making a piece successful. It's not only the music and the direction, but how the artists move and how they inhabit the characters. I'm sorry that the televised performance is not available on video. It should be, because it is an extraordinary piece. People who saw it were deeply moved by it. I can't speak highly enough about it. Samuel Barber is one of the greatest American composers ever and his vocal writing is peerless."

Catherine Malfitano as Trina in William Bolcom's McTeague, Lyric Opera of Chicago, 1992 (world premiere). Photo by Tony Romano, courtesy of Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Ms. Malfitano has enjoyed a rewarding and productive artistic relationship with composer William Bolcom. He has written songs for her and they have performed often in recital together. Chicago Lyric commissioned two operas from Mr. Bolcom during the '90s, both of which featured Ms. Malfitano. The first, McTeague (1992), is based on Frank Norris's novel about an unlicensed dentist in early 20th century San Francisco. Ms. Malfitano played his wife Trina. "McTeague is filled with surprising moments as well as great dramatic punches. Bolcom ran the gamut of styles, from Trina's aria 'Love Me Big,' a kind of bluesy number, to her duet with McTeague that was straight out of Lulu. Her aria, 'My Little Golden Babies," which she sings in bed with her $5,000 in gold coins, is one of the most unbelievable, crazy, outrageous, curiously sexy scenes in opera. It's a strange moment in the opera and the music is unforgettable. It was written in a very beautiful, melodic style that hearkens back to Verdi's way of writing, where sometimes even when the moment is horrific dramatically, the melody is as sweet as it can be. The aria brought out the eerie qualities of that scene, with the dissonance in the music reflecting the dissonance we encounter in life as we seek after things that have no sense of harmony in terms of life values. It's a gorgeous aria, ending with this floating high 'A' reminiscent of the one at the end of 'Senza mamma' in [Puccini's] Suor Angelica. It was a real coup de théâtre.

"McTeague is a fabulous opera and should be done again. San Francisco was considering it but dropped it. Part of it had to do with Lotfi Mansouri wanting Bill to write a 'proper' aria for the tenor at the end. I don't know what that meant; Ben Heppner had a terrific final soliloquy and then it ended with a duet, which is, after all, the way the story goes. McTeague and Schouller end up in the desert together, so there was really no way for there to be a final aria. I thought that soliloquy was terrific; it wasn't a typical aria - it wasn't something you could hum - but it certainly made dramatic sense. The music reflected McTeague's hallucinatory state in the desert, so it didn't have a melodic, songlike feel to it. I don't think that would have been the right style for that moment dramatically speaking. I don't know what else happened with San Francisco, but it got dropped and that was a shame.

"It's difficult for an audience hearing a new opera for the first time, having nothing familiar to latch onto. It's really never a good idea to judge something the first time you hear it, because many pieces need repeated hearings to grow on you. So many people loved [John Corigliano's] The Ghosts of Versailles because it contained melodies that were reminiscent of other opera composers; it was easier listening for them.

"It's the same with William Bolcom. He always writes tunes that stay with you when you walk away. In View From The Bridge, the audience went wild over the aria, 'The New York Lights.' Bill doesn't make any apologies for writing melodies and that's one of the reasons I adore him. I love melody, whether by Kurt Weill, William Bolcom, Harold Arlen, Cole Porter or George Gershwin. After having experienced the entire range of composition as a performer and a listener, I still want melody. I have to say I prefer opera and music with melodies. If I go away from a performance feeling as though I haven't latched onto one bit of music, I am tremendously dissatisfied. It's in the melody that our hearts respond and where the magic happens. Words set well to a melody is an unbeatable combination. And, I mean all sorts of melodies. I love Berg's melodies, which are not always easy to hear, but they are there. I remember when I saw Lulu for the first time I had trouble hearing the melodic lines and the full sweep of the romanticism. There are so many layers to get through; one can be easily distracted by Berg's contrapuntal writing and not hear those melodies. On repeated hearings the melodies begin to come through, but at first it may seem like cacophony because they are buried deep within the complex texture. When you hear that piece repeatedly you marvel in the counterpoint and the compositional techniques he used and the way he brought lines back as motives and how they relate to the drama and the characters. He really is the same as Wagner in that way."

Juliana Rambaldi as Catherine, Catherine Malfitano as Beatrice and Kim Josephson as Eddie in William Bolcom's A View From the Bridge, Lyric Opera of Chicago, 1999 (world premiere). Photo by Robert Kusel, courtesy of Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Bolcom's second opera for Chicago was A View From the Bridge (1999), from Arthur Miller's classic 1955 play involving Brooklyn longshoreman Eddie Carbone, his wife Beatrice (played by Ms. Malfitano) and her young niece Catherine who lives with them. Eddie invites two illegal immigrants to live with the family, and when one of them, Rodolfo, falls in love with Catherine, it exposes Eddie's latent attraction for her. "I would say that dramatically A View From the Bridge is a tighter piece than McTeague. There are no wasted moments. The piece has a dramatic propulsion which comes partly from the play, but which is even more intense in the opera. The music is savage - almost frightening - and drives the drama inexorably through this tragic universe.

"The role of Beatrice was a departure from many of the roles I have played. It is not a glamour role. Bea is an ordinary person. I suppose you could call it a sister role to Giorgetta in Il Tabarro [Puccini] and Anna Maurrant in Street Scene, although Bea is not looking for love outside her marriage as those two characters are. It was interesting to work on Bea during the same season I was doing Lady Macbeth [in Verdi's Macbeth] in Chicago. What a fascinating juxtaposition of two marriages and two dysfunctional families - Bolcom's and Verdi's.

"With characters such as Mimi, Violetta, Salome, Madame Butterfly, there are bits of myself I put into those roles, but the inspiration for playing them came almost completely from my imagination. For Bea, I could look to my own life and family. She is a character that is very close to my Italian aunts, women who retained great strength and goodness, that came from their religious convictions and their sense of family values and from standing by your man no matter what. I thought of the character Sophia Loren had played in Una Giornata Particolare [A Special Day]. She was a middle-aged woman who was weary and a little worn down by the circumstances in her life, but who had retained a vibrancy and possessed great warmth. Bea is a solid person; there is nothing complicated about her. She finds herself in a complicated situation and it is interesting to see how she deals with it. Bea is the one who brings into the open the implication of Eddie's inappropriate love or lust for his niece, and the fact that it represents an extension of the troubles between Bea and Eddie. Their marriage has grown tired, but Bea still longs for the love they felt for each other at an earlier time. In Il Tabarro, Giorgetta and Michele's problems stem from the loss of a child. It's not spelled out in A View From The Bridge, but perhaps Bea and Eddie's problems are caused by not having a child of their own.

"Musically, the role is written with a lot of extreme intervals in the melodic line. When I was first learning it, I wanted a more linear style. There were times when I thought she should sing a blues number - if anyone has a right to sing the blues, it's Bea. When Bill and I were discussing the character, I asked him to write her a more lyrical number. He took my feelings into account, but he wasn't convinced. He felt the vocal writing needed to reflect Bea's sense of hysteria. In the end, I think what was interesting was to bring my concept of the role to what Bill had written. The music reflected Bea's inner turmoil and the dramatic urgency of the situation, and the lyricism I tried to bring to the role conveyed her strength in dealing with it.

"I think A View From the Bridge should be done all over the world. Opera Pacific has been talking about it but they haven't committed yet. I have been trying to convince English National Opera to do it. They are a very forward-looking company and they do exciting productions, and they are the right type of theater for it. The Met will be doing it in December 2002, and perhaps after that, other theaters will follow. It's great that there is a CD of A View From The Bridge now, although I wish it had been videotaped. For me, something is lost without seeing it. The reviews I've seen have been good, although some of them didn't like the Greek chorus. I liked it because they became a silent witness to the drama. Some reviewers also thought Eddie should have had an aria, which he will get for the Met production. I will also have a new aria, although I didn't ask for one [she laughs].