AboutSharon Sweet's chatty, unpretentious demeanor belies the fact that she is a Golden Girl in the opera world -- and a figure of some controversy, thanks to her much-publicized scrapes with conductor Robert Bass and Houston Grand Opera general director David Gockley. Now fifty, she owns a voice that allies womanly, elegant tone to great reserves of power and technical control. Her command of the dramatic-soprano repertory has brought acclaim all over Europe and North America, and her appearances in New York are accompanied by the unmistakable buzz of diva fever. Sweet's conductors have included Giulini, Maazel, Sinopoli, Mehta, Masur and Colin Davis. Already a veteran of Aida, Il Trovatore, Tannhäuser, Don Carlo, Otello and Norma, the soprano expanded in 1993 to include Cassandre in Les Troyens, Agathe in Der Freischütz and the Forza Leonora. Her success, extraordinary by any standards, seems all the more so when one considers that she made her professional opera debut while in her thirties, in the spring of 1986. Born Sharon Abel in Gloversville, New York, Sweet started piano lessons at five. An automobile accident at sixteen, which damaged the nerves of her spine, ended her dreams of being a concert pianist, and she entered Roberts Wesleyan College hoping to become a professional accompanist. Part of the requirements for her music education degree involved voice lessons, and she credits teacher Judy Cohen with first spotting her potential, despite what she remembers as a "machine-gun vibrato." In her earliest days as a singer, Sweet thought of herself as a mezzo-soprano. While she was a master's-degree candidate at Ithaca College, she did her first Metropolitan Opera audition at the district hearings in Toronto and placed first. (At this point in her story, Sweet leans forward and says firmly, "Now, I won the districts, not the regionals. It's been misquoted before, and I hate that, because it looks like I'm blowing things out of proportion. I won the districts. I went on to the regionals and did not win those.") A judge for the district auditions recommended her to the faculty at the Curtis Institute, and Sweet moved to Philadelphia to study with Margaret Harshaw. When Harshaw left Curtis for Indiana University, Sweet could not afford to follow her and instead auditioned for the renowned Marenka Gurewich in New York. Gurewich accepted Sweet as a pupil in 1977 and became the most important influence on the shaping of the young singer's technique. "Mme. Gurewich said, 'Miss Sweet, you are either going to be a soprano or a "funny" mezzo.' And so I said, 'Well, I don't want to be a "funny" mezzo, so maybe we ought to work on becoming a soprano!' For one year she took away all public singing and all opera -- all I did were the little Italian art songs that students just hate to sing, 'Caro mio ben' and all that, and Brahms lieder and Purcell, all in the high keys. Fortunately, my teachers previous to Gurewich had never tried to manipulate the top part of my voice, so it was all virgin territory up there. Mme. Gurewich worked on the passaggio, so that the voice would become even. She felt that the top notes had always been there, that working the transitions in and out of them would be her goal. She used to pound into my head, 'Remember, Sharon, it is Verdi who has to speak.' Or Brahms, or whomever we would be working on. 'Not you. You are just the vessel.' She was wonderful. I was with her from 1977 until she died (in 1991)." The early years of study with Gurewich also saw the beginning of Sweet's other career as a wife and mother. Marriage to Philadelphia minister John Sweet was followed by the arrival of three children: Joshua, now fourteen, and twins Sarah and Zachary, now twelve. Sweet continued to study with Gurewich, commuting to New York twice a week from her home in Philadelphia. "My husband is my support shelf. He says the thing he fell in love with first was my voice, and I came along for the ride! He's extremely musical. He believed so deeply that God wanted me to sing, that he made me believe this was really going to happen." Sweet credits her husband and Gurewich with helping her survive the early 1980s, when her professional prospects looked bleak. "From 1980 to 1985, I did over 150 auditions here in New York. I couldn't get hired. I don't know why. It wasn't my time, perhaps. It seemed that every audition ended in tears. Those years of rejection haven't made me hard, but they have made me stiff-necked, determined. I look back at it now and see that it was all really part of the divine plan. If I had started younger, I would have had to progress through lighter repertory -- the Countess in Figaro, that sort of thing -- and by the time I arrived at my bread-and-butter roles, my voice would not have been as fresh. I look back grateful that I wasn't pushed early. I've seen a lot of singers pushed, and they die an early death professionally. I am not a sprinter. I am here for the marathon." The crossroads of Sweet's career came in 1985. Finances were tight. She was at the point of cutting back lessons with Gurewich from two to one a week. Coach Helen Kupfer, with whom Sweet was studying German diction, invited the soprano to sing at a small party in her home. One of the guests, struck by 'Vissi d'arte,' sent Sweet a supportive letter and enclosed a check to cover an audition tour of Germany that yielded an engagement as a last-minute replacement in a concert version of Aida in Munich, after which Sweet returned to Philadelphia. Shortly thereafter, Sweet received a telephone call from Ilse Zellermayer, a German agent who had admired the soprano's work in Aida. At Zellermayer's urging, Sweet returned to Europe and auditioned for Wolfgang Sawallisch in Munich, for Rolf Liebermann in Hamburg, and at Dortmund and Düsseldorf. Dortmund immediately offered a contract for three performances as Elisabeth in Tannhäuser the following spring, and that was how Sweet made her European stage debut. She laughs now, "The way I started off was something out of the comics -- from nothing to Elisabeth in Tannhäuser in Dortmund! My previous experience? Well, I did Mama McCourt in Baby Doe at Central City and Inez in Trovatore in Philadelphia. That was it, until Tannhäuser!" Sweet's good luck continued; her debut as Elisabeth was reviewed on the front page of Opernwelt -- "Thank God it was a good review," she says -- and a few days later, when the touring Berlin Staatsoper needed a replacement Elisabeth for the opening engagement in Zurich, it was Sweet who was tapped. Sweet remembers those first weeks in Germany "like a dream world. I was so young professionally and so naive that I didn't have the nerves that normally would accompany a situation like that. I had sung my last two performances of Elisabeth and was getting ready to go home when Frau Zellermayer told me I was going to Berlin. Cheryl Studer had just given up her contract there with the Deutsche Oper to freelance, and there was an immediate opening for the 1986/87 season. I went, and they offered me the contract on the spot. That was in May. My husband said, 'We've had seven years at my career -- let's see what is going to happen with yours.' He gave notice at his church in June, and in July we sold everything we owned except a few things we stored at my mother's. On August 4 we arrived in Berlin with three children, twenty-two suitcases and no place to live. We've stayed based in Berlin since. My husband is doing his Ph.D. in philosophy and theology there, and my children are established in a bilingual German school." Her rapid rise through the state-supported theaters of Germany came just before the upheaval of reunification. She speculates, "If my career were to start right now on an audition tour of Europe, I'm not sure I'd have the luck I had seven years ago. There are so many singers, so many good East German singers, who are out of work. I'm not sure how good the atmosphere is now for Americans going over there. My prayer goes out to American companies to give American singers a chance. We don't have the luxury of houses here where young singers can develop their craft. If it hadn't been for Europe and the houses in Germany, I probably wouldn't have a career. We need to find a way that American houses can put on repertory that is right for young singers." Sweet's frank manner reflects her small-town upbringing. The season of her Met debut as Leonora, two other young American sopranos, Aprile Millo and Susan Dunn, also sang Il Trovatore in New York. Sweet says she was "somewhat unnerved" by the press comparison of the three. "To be compared to one another, as if we were in some sort of a contest, is more than a bit unfair. I'm an old-fashioned girl, and I come from a loving Christian home. There's enough work out there for everybody, and there is room at the top for more than one. My biggest responsibility is to God, because He gave my talent to me. Whatever one's gifts are, you must realize this isn't something one can do on one's own. Everybody has a higher being, whatever that is. My second responsibility is to myself. I will not prostitute this voice, whether by indulging in hypocrisy just because I want work, or whatever." Article extracted and adapted from OPERA NEWS, October, 1993 edition. MR. DRISCOLL is a freelance writer and stage director based in New York. Copyright ©1993 The Metropolitan Opera Guild, Inc. ML |
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