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H. L. Mencken declared that "the opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral." It was not meant as a compliment, but to William Murray, former New Yorker staff writer and aspiring opera singer, a bawdy house is an apt metaphor for the opera: a place of confusion, high and low drama, fleshly pleasures and raucous song.

In Fortissimo, Murray follows twelve young singers in the Lyric Opera of Chicago's training program, the prestigious Opera Center for American Artists, through the 2003--2004 season. In the course of the year, these singers attend countless coaching sessions, inspiring master classes, nerve-racking auditions and grueling rehearsals--and finally perform with some of the most celebrated names (and spectacular egos) in opera, from Samuel Ramey to José Cura and Natalie Dessay. While chronicling their progress, Murray offers an insider's look at the different aspects of the opera world that influence a young singer's success, a world filled with temperamental maestros, ambitious directors, old-world tradition and sacred monsters.

Weaving recollections of his own days training in New York, Rome and Milan in the 1950s with the personal and artistic struggles of the young singers in Chicago today, Murray lays bare the staggering ambition and relentless will required to achieve a career in the arts. As he writes, "Becoming a successful opera singer--stepping out on a huge stage to try to fill the house with your voice, to bring an audience of thirty-six hundred people to its feet--is as risky in its own peculiar way as embarking on a career as a matador. You can triumph, you can struggle to survive or you can perish from your wounds." Fortissimo is a delicious tale of rising talents, angst and heartache and small triumphs, and the music that inspires it all.

From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpts:
Chapter 1
The Cell

The studio Gianna Rolandi refers to as The Cell is a long, rectangular room with a grand piano at one end and a full-length mirror along one wall. In a corner is a large, yellow rubber ball on which Rolandi sometimes asks her young artists to sit as they sing; it forces them to adopt a correct posture--feet planted solidly on the oor, torso erect, shoulders straight--to support the tone. On a typical day early in November 2003, I stopped by The Cell to see what might be going on that morning at Lyric Opera Center for American Artists (LOCAA), in Chicago. Rolandi, with the help of one of the company's staff accompanists, was busily at work on Siébel's aria from Faust with Lauren McNeese, the young mezzo-soprano about to sing the role for the first time on the Lyric stage a few days later.

McNeese is a slender, strikingly beautiful young woman with blond hair and green eyes. Three years earlier she had been accepted into the LOCAA program for young singers, after auditioning with arias from the heavier mezzo repertory. Once in, however, she was told that she had to make changes; it was much too early in her career for her to tackle the big dramatic parts. Rolandi and her colleague Richard Pearlman, who had been running the Opera Center since 1995, put McNeese to work on arias by Rossini, especially the coloratura passages that require breath control and vocal agility. McNeese labored with Rolandi several times a week. "I'm famous for making her hoarse when we first started," McNeese told me. "She was demonstrating all these things she wanted me to do, all these difficult methods, so we worked for hours." Having been a coloratura soprano diva herself, at the Metropolitan Opera and elsewhere until her retirement fourteen years earlier, Rolandi was just the person to teach McNeese; but it wasn't easy for the young mezzo. "My voice was placed farther back and darker then and this new technique was very difficult for me. I had to place my voice forward, make it lighter." Nevertheless, by the end of that first year in the program, McNeese found herself singing not only Rossini but also Bellini and Mozart. "Gianna lets you know there are no barriers," she said.

At this session, no sooner had McNeese begun to sing the opening phrases than Rolandi stopped her. "You need to get your words smaller," she told her. "You need to think in terms of funneling the sound." After the second attack on the aria, Rolandi exclaimed, "This is good! There you go!" She then asked McNeese what she was doing onstage as she sang, which consisted mostly of gathering up flowers to make a bouquet. "It's really pretty, Lauren, but you also need to think about the words." She asked the young mezzo to speak the words of the aria in order to get the right French vocal sounds: "Lean into that word bénie." She made McNeese hold the tip of her nose while singing. "Better! Better! There it is!" she said. "You know where it is; the other won't carry." McNeese put on a nose clip before singing a soaring climactic high note on the difficult vowel sound ee. "Lauren, don't be discouraged," Rolandi said at the end of the hour- long session, "I'm being really picky here. When's your next rehearsal?" It was scheduled for one o'clock, McNeese told her. "You've been singing a lot," Rolandi said. "Be sure to mark." (Marking is the operatic term for not singing full voice.)

"I don't think that'll be possible," McNeese said, smiling as she gathered up her belongings and score, then quickly left.

The rest of that morning I sat there watching and listening to Rolandi work with three more of the young singers in...

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