Mrs. Seyfert and Mozart

Elsa Seyfert pushed the silver spectacles up her nose and swiveled on the piano bench to face me, an excited and nervous young student. The year was 1972 and New York City Opera had just asked me to audition.

“Whatever you sing,” Mrs. Seyfert intoned, “be sure to include Mozart. It’s the most exposing, the most telling. You must never audition without it.” I dutifully included Mozart in my book for that audition and the two that followed over the next three years. The auditioners never asked me to sing Mozart.

In 1975, after a decade of our working together, Elsa Seyfert retired from teaching in New York and, with her Jewish husband, a pianist, returned to Germany, from which they had fled decades earlier. They settled on Lake Constance in order to be available to teach two renowned singers who spent several months a year in Germany and Switzerland. I visited them there once while on an audition trip, and was given a single brief lesson. This took place in their home directly across the lake from Switzerland, the route they had originally traveled to escape from Germany in 1938.

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Then we traveled to nearby Zurich together to assist a British student of Mrs. Seyfert, a wealthy amateur, prepare for a recital. At the recital, Mrs. Seyfert sat at the back of the auditorium mouthing every word of every song being sung, intent upon her pupil. I felt left out and longed to be the one up there singing; but in those years I did not have the cash to produce an event such as that. Thinking about it now, I see that I suffered with shame at being poor in an art form which, in the post-WWII era, became a socially acceptable pursuit for daughters of the rich.

Back in New York, as I began to prepare for my fourth New York City Opera audition, I missed my teacher’s careful listening and advice; indeed, I felt musically alone and abandoned by Mrs. Seyfert. I had idealized her, never calling her “Elsa” as did some of her more famous students; I behaved as a “good girl,” so to speak. In order to make what I thought would be a fresh start, I prepared five sparkling and dramatic arias, filled with emotional expression, fluid line, florid passages and plenty of high notes—the stuff of competition. In an action meant to mark Mrs. Seyfert’s absence, I purposely did not put any Mozart into my audition book. She was not present, yet I was rebelling against her in my mind.

The day came. I stood on stage in the pale rehearsal light and announced “Stridano lassù,” a song of reminiscence and hope, from I Pagliacci. I sang well—trills, high notes, and all. Then there was silence. Maestro Julius Rudel whispered to the man sitting next to him in the house (the auditorium), then turned to me and asked, “Do you have any Mozart?”

I held my breath. Mrs. Seyfert’s face floated before me. “I don’t have any with me; but would be glad to return another day to sing some for you.” He spoke again to his colleague. “We’ll send for some from the company library.

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What will you sing?” I was embarrassed and wanted to whisper my answer, but forced myself to declaim, “Pamina’s aria from The Magic Flute.” “Go to the wings and wait. We’ll hear you after the next singer,” he said as the next singer swept past us on to the stage.

My pianist and I waited. We paced. I tapped my chest. I walked around with my arms held high above my head, using breathing stimuli I had practiced in lessons with Mrs. Seyfert. Throughout, phrases of soaring Verdi reached us backstage. The singer was well known and had just returned from a career in Europe. How could I compete with her? Although I was very talented, I felt small at that moment, and in fact had battled against those same feelings of inadequacy often when going and coming to and from Mrs. Seyfert’s studio where, it seemed to me, the famous and/or wealthy students were received with more attention and more smiles. In those days, I did not have the courage, nor the language, to discuss this with Mrs. Seyfert.

As I worried, an assistant from the musical staff rushed to the wings, score in hand. It was a leather-bound European edition we had never seen before. There was no time to look it over. We could only hope the details on the page were the same as those we had been performing. We went on stage again. Even before I could signal, my pianist began to play. I sang. Maestro Rudel dabbed his eyes. Then, a “Thank you” from his assistant gave us our cue to exit.

The next morning, the company’s business manager called and offered me a contract. I was shocked, happy and afraid all at once. I accepted, and wanted most to tell Mrs. Seyfert, to see her, to hug her, to show her that our work had paid off. I wanted her to smile at me with the fulsome pride of a teacher for her pupil, something she had rarely done. I believed I had triumphed, yet it was difficult for me to let

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that in, because I had formed a developmental attachment to her which I needed to feel was mutual, through her words or her gaze. I can say this now, yet had no way to express it then.

Elsa Seyfert was far away am Bodensee (on Lake Constance). Rather than make a transatlantic call, I sat down to write her a letter. I waited months for her reply. By the time her pro forma congratulations came, I was singing at the New York City Opera and had consciously cast off my internal image of her as my mentor, although I remained aware that her teaching and advice had helped me to get the job.

As I write this, more than 30 years later, I see that it illustrates the nature of emotional attachment (“transference” in psychoanalytic terminology) that often occurs between singing teachers and their pupils, and how their relationship “holds” the craftwork they accomplish together. This is part of a master/apprentice tradition of musical education, with roots in the Renaissance and earlier, a tradition still alive in our culture and in cultures around the world.

When I was a young and ambitious student in the early part of my career, I had felt admiration, appreciation, love for, and then disappointment and abandonment from the woman I had idealized as my brilliant teacher. A woman whom I later realized was my complex, and therefore very human, mentor.

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