Health Care For The Poor

By DAVID LITTLEJOHN

San Francisco

Last month, eight of her old and new singing partners gathered at Herbst Theatre here to celebrate Frederica von Stade’s (semi)retirement from the opera stage, after 41 years.

As three musicians looked around, puzzled, Ms. von Stade ran breathlessly onstage and burst into her signature aria—Cherubino’s rapid, confused “Non so più” from Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro”—before the applause had died down. There was little to distinguish this larking showpiece from her performances as the same love-smitten teenage boy she played in San Francisco and New York in 1972-73. Listening to her in 1992, the critic Martin Bernheimer wrote, “Frederica von Stade remains the Cherubino of one’s dreams. She somehow manages to be impetuous, cheeky, sensitive, shy, smug, erotically combustible and self-amused, all at the same delirious time. Also, she happens to sing as one hopes angels sing.” During the rest of the Herbst Theatre show, she sang tender songs by Gustav Mahler and Maurice Ravel, a moving version of Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” and modern, semiautobiographical songs by Jake Heggie and Carol Hall.

Ms. von Stade seriously acted and beautifully sang an intimate duet from Claudio Monteverdi’s “Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria” with Richard Stilwell, with whom she had sung Mozart’s “Così fan tutte” here in 1973. She sang robust, semicomic duets with three former partners—the Gershwins’ “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” with Samuel Ramey; Jerry Herman’s ripe, mutually insulting “Bosom Buddies” with Marilyn Horne (an unannounced and delightful surprise); and Mr. Heggie’s “The Years Roll By,” which allowed Ms. von Stade, age 66, and Kiri Te Kanawa, 67, to get in a few bittersweet digs about aging gracefully. (Dame Kiri sang the Countess to Ms. von Stade’s Cherubino in 1972-3.) The next wave of great American lyric mezzos was represented by Susan Graham and Joyce DiDonato.

Singers, conductors, directors and impresarios who paid tribute to her, onstage or in print, used the same words over and over: warm, generous, radiant, selfless, humble, sweet. Tales are told of Christmas caroling, hospital visits, pushing new singers upstage, working tirelessly with students and schools from kindergartens to conservatories. The admiration of her colleagues and fans has probably depended as much on her temperament as on her voice.

Two weeks before Ms. von Stade’s celebratory gala, we talked, among other things, of the agonies that attended the end of her first marriage. How could she keep on singing under that kind of pressure? “When I was going through that, about six years, when I was onstage was the only time the lawyers couldn’t get to me.”

Happily married since 1990 to her second husband, an East Bay businessman, Ms. von Stade (universally known as Flicka) is an unusually doting mother and grandmother. One of her songs at the gala was composed by Mr. Heggie, to her own words, describing an event in the life of her daughter Lisa at age 8. For her encore, she sang Ms. Hall’s “Jenny Rebecca,” after which she had named her first daughter, now a clinical psychologist in Arlington, Va., with an infant daughter of her own. Charlotte Frederica’s worshipful grandmother tries to spend at least one day with her every month.

Now what she wants most is to get younger people singing and making music. She volunteers at St. Martin de Porres, a Catholic elementary school in Oakland, Calif., where she helps the children (mostly black and Hispanic) with their kindergarten violin class, piano lessons and a gospel choir, brings in performers and takes older students to opera rehearsals.

“I sing all the time, walking down the street. And I wonder if it’s because my mother always, always had us singing—and not opera. We never had a party where everyone didn’t sing. Now nobody sings. I bet if you asked, the only Christmas carol the kids at St. Martin’s know is ‘Feliz Navidad.’ I put on a CD of the overture to ‘Marriage of Figaro’ when the kindergarten violinists came into class, and they all went out laughing and shaking their booties to the music.”

Ms. Te Kanawa and Dolora Zajick are among other opera singers who are devoting major efforts to music for youngsters. “Kiri and I talk about it a lot—how much coddling and training we were given, and how empty our lives would have been without it. Now eighth-graders don’t know who Julie Andrews was.” (Ms. von Stade has performed and recorded “The Sound of Music,” and recorded “The King and I.” “I would have loved to have performed it.”)

What does “retirement” mean to Ms. von Stade?

“I’m sort of not out there, but I am out there, even for the next two years—recitals, charity gigs, little bits and pieces. But my answer nowadays to almost everything is ‘Yes.’”

She isn’t scheduled to do any more opera, but “If somebody asked for a ‘Belle Hélène’ . . . Sure! And if they asked me, and if they think I can do it, if I don’t have to make the decision and keep pushing, I’d say ‘Sure! Definitely.’”

Mr. Heggie’s last two operas for Ms. von Stade, “Dead Man Walking” (2000) and “Three Decembers” (2008), both had a kind of valedictory quality. In the former, she played Mrs. De Rocher, the poor, distraught mother of a Louisiana murderer on death row—a part far out of her normal dramatic range—with unforgettable poignancy and power; since then, the opera has been performed more than 150 times. In “Three Decembers,” a three-person chamber opera, Ms. von Stade sang the role of an aging Broadway star blinded by egotism and denial from understanding the needs of her own childen.

“I couldn’t play Mrs. De Rocher anymore—I’d have to be his grandmother. That Sears Roebuck outfit is worn out. Maybe something like the Grandmother in ‘A Little Night Music.’ Not Marcellina in ‘Figaro,’ not the old Countess in ‘Queen of Spades.’ I won’t take old-lady roles just to be onstage. But a handful of things . . .

“Kiri retired, then she didn’t,” Ms. von Stade notes. Ms. Te Kanawa surprised people by risking the major role of the Marschallin in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” in Germany last year.

No, Ms. von Stade hasn’t made the decision to stop playing stage roles. Performing them is “so much fun,” she says. “Look at Tony Bennett—totally retired, talked him into returning 15 years later. You’ve got something that’s given pleasure to people, use it.”

“So,” she’s asked, “you’re still . . . available?”

“Yes. I’m increasingly available,” Ms. von Stade replies. “I’m not quite as booked up as I was 30 years ago.”

Mr. Littlejohn writes about West Coast events for the Journal.