Q&A: Lise Lindstrom discusses Wagner, Strauss, Puccini, & Life
Lise Lindstrom recently took time to converse with Benjamin Torbert for OperaWire. Lindstrom sings all three Brünnhildes in “Die Walküre,” “Siegfried,” and “Götterdämmerung” in the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s very lightly staged concert presentation of Wagner’s “Der Ring Des Nibelungen,” on 13-20 October 2024. She already appeared with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra for two performances of “Walküre” in May 2024. After the Dallas “Ring Cycle,” she assays die Färberin in Strauss’ “Die Frau ohne Schatten” at the Metropolitan Opera, beginning 29 November.
OperaWire: So this is interesting because I’m interviewing you about what you’re about to do… one third of which I already got to see in the Spring.
Lise Lindstrom: So there’s not a lot of mystery, is that what you’re trying to tell me?
OW: I don’t about that — she’s mysterious in “Siegfried,” spends ninety percent of the opera sleeping. So you’ve been doing Brünnhilde since 2013. [Has] your approach to her changed or evolved, since you’ve got a decade of Brünnhilde under your belt?
LL: Of course it has. So my first was the “Walküre” Brünnhilde and I did that in a production with Graham Vick in Palermo and Pietari Inkinen conducted that. It was a fantastic group and I was so lucky. I was extremely lucky to have done my first Brünnhilde with Graham because he set the standard. He set the bar for how I could approach such a monster role. I was completely daunted. I was overwhelmed and one hundred percent sure I wasn’t worthy. I mean, I think that for singers… I don’t know if everyone feels this way… I felt like I wasn’t worthy of this material. It’s so legendary, so epic. And I thought, what is a girl from Sonora, California, doing singing Brünnhilde? How does she even deign to enter that arena? Because when you think about it, it’s quite an arena to enter.
Graham heard my insecurities, and he just politely rolled his eyes, and then he walked me through it, and helped me break it down into bite-sized chunks. And it was all about the words. It was like [coaching] a Shakespearean actor. Every day, we met at 9:00 AM for an hour with the pianist before the staging rehearsal started at 10:00 and we just sat with the pianist. We didn’t run the music. We listened to little bits and pieces, we talked about the meanings of the words and why Wagner chose that note progression, that phrasing for those words. What was the question mark about, what was the comma about? And particularly with Wotan, because those conversations are so intense and in Wotan’s monologue in the Second Act she’s a silent partner… She has to be [reacting] to him, and totally in on the words. So eventually, in 2016, when I came up to my first full Cycle, I brought all of [those concepts] of learning, integrating, personalizing with me and it was — really it was — because of Graham.
OW: From the audience, encountering the text again, you’re struck by these great moments, like the way she lawyers Wotan in “War es so schmälich,” and she takes his words, takes his music, breaks it into pieces, and builds it back into something else. It’s so good, every single time you see it…
LL: I agree. And yet, it’s also so honest because she is he and he is she. So she could be perceived as using him against himself. But the truth is, there is very, very little [in which] they are not exactly alike, which is why it’s so heartbreaking, ultimately, from a psychological point of view. The breakup of that relationship, of that entwined-ness, is heartbreaking. On the surface, it’s a father-daughter relationship, but from a philosophical point of view, it’s Wagner grappling with the Other of himself and how not to be dominated by the Other and to find his integrity. And that’s what they both do at the end of that third act.
OW: What do you love about performing Brünnhilde and her trajectory in the three music dramas?
LL: That she has the potential to be the most human character in the entire Cycle. [For] me, as a dramatic soprano, she’s the most human character that I get to portray because she has this extraordinary development from the naiveté and the innocence of youth, teenager-ness, and the idolization of her father. And just [this attitude that says,] “life is really good, come on, let’s go, you know, let’s do it.” And then she’s confronted almost immediately with his frailty, his capitulation in the face of Fricka, and the admittance, on his side, of what a major mess he’s created.
Then she meets Siegmund. And the tectonic shift within her is not conscious. It is visceral. That’s what’s so powerful about the Todesverkündigung, is that it’s a visceral shift. And if we’re clever as actors, on stage, in combination with that language, it’s not about telling the audience that it’s happening. It’s having the audience experience it as she does too. So it’s not the actual Erzälung (narrative) [telling you] “ohh, this is what I’m going through now, folks, so come along with me,” which some of the opera is, [admittedly]. But the Todesverkündigung is that moment where — I can still see Graham’s face — [Siegmund’s] like, “Ohh, what’s happening to me? Oh my God.”
“Ich sehe die Noth / die das Herz dir zernagt / ich fühle des Helden heiligen Harm” (I see the distress / that gnaws at your heart / I feel the hero’s holiest grief). [And then,] “Ich sehe, ich fühle” (I see, I feel) — and she’s like, “Oh my God, what is actually happening, wait, this is way beyond my previously understood skillset. I am actually now on a totally different journey. I have no choice.”
And of course it mirrors exactly where Wotan is. That’s why his monologue is so full of despair and gut-wrenching agony, it’s because he sees it, he feels it, he hears it within himself… Then she becomes the next messenger of that entire journey, which culminates in the unseen. I love that with Brünnhilde the arc is vast, and you have “Die Walküre,” you have this coming of age story with her, her independence. She’s going to be autonomous. She’s going to go out into the world. She’s making her decision. It ends the relationship with Wotan. She doesn’t quite understand that, [or why that’s necessary,] until the end of the of the third act…
Then you have this maiden that wakes up in “Siegfried.” She’s no longer a god, she’s completely bare and she’s with Siegfried. Well, she knew she was gonna be somehow, how that was gonna work out. Or did she? Then the true heartache of “Göttedämmerung,” the euphoria of “Zu neuen Thaten,” the infiltration of her happy place by Waltraute and all of this bad news. The false Gunther, the rape by false Gunther, or whatever happens there. And then the darkness of the Gibichung Hall. Again, it’s a human journey. You know, we’re talking dark night of the soul, and how to recover from all of that. And then the euphoria of delivering the ultimate release for everybody involved in “Starke Scheite.” It’s the coolest thing ever.
OW: So while musically they’re three different roles, dramatically, it’s one big, long episodic role.
LL: One hundred percent.
OW: I’m excited to see you in Atlanta next year, where you perform in a staged “Siegfried.” But to the audience, concert opera looks easier. You don’t have to climb around on anything crazy. You don’t have to remember blocking. Maybe there’s a little semi-staging like you guys are doing in Dallas. Is anything about concert opera actually low-key harder?
LL: Yeah, there is an aspect of it that is low key-harder, because it’s more exposed. There’s nowhere to hide. You know, one of the joys of being a singing actor in a production is you’ve got a set, a costume, a concept. And we’re in our little world up there, we’re creating a scene and then inviting the audience into it. And the concert stage requires a little bit more work to do the same thing, because we have to create the spell, we have to create the environment, the feeling that this thing is percolating around us. So I think it’s also why Maestro Luisi chose people who had time in these roles, who had legacy behind them already, and could bring all of that spell or energy of all of our past experiences with the roles [onto the stage]. Otherwise… it would be really hard to make your Brünnhilde debut doing this concert version. It would just be a totally different thing.
OW: This cast is bananas. It’s incredible how much experience a lot of y’all have. And there are some younger artists in the Valkyrie stable…
LL: …and Deniz Uzun, making her Fricka debut. [It] takes some major cojones to take that on, and she nailed it.
OW: So, about career trajectory, you studied with Blanche Thebom, and part of what’s interesting about you as this specialist in big Wagner, big Strauss, is that you’ve done this in the way that we were led in the twentieth century to believe it ought to go. The voice maturing in the middle of the career and only then assuming those roles. Everybody loves talking about how younger singers are getting pushed into heavy roles too soon. What did you take from Blanche Thebom about this heaviest German repertory?
LL: You know, Blanche was probably not the best teacher to start with. Because she was a technician, but not a technician that a 17-year-old needs. You know, 17-year-olds need to know nuts and bolts like, you put this thing here, and you take that thing off there, and… then you put this other thing over there. Blanche was such an extraordinary artist. And actually, I was just talking about this with a colleague last night. Now her wisdom is front in my head, all the time, so it’s about the journey. It’s about being completely committed to the moment, every moment, and then this moment, and then this moment. What are you creating now? What are you answering now? What are you saying to your colleague now? How is this feeling now? Not how you did it last week, or even yesterday, or even this morning. How are you doing this now? So that kind of wisdom is priceless.
But what was so crucial for me — people didn’t know what to do with my voice, even Blanche. The first aria I ever learned was “Einsam in trüben Tagen from “Lohengrin.” I sang that for two and a half years in her studio and I never got past page three. Because I could never sing it, really. And you know, even now I have, like, PTSD [with] that aria. But she was right. She heard the instrument amidst all of the underdevelopment of the technique. But it took years before everything got in alignment: my mentality about how to sing, my technique, my physicality about how to sing, and then the right repertoire.
The only thing that I did which was topsy turvy [was] I started my career with Turandot, whereas a lot of singers end their careers with Turandot. And everybody that was anybody that I coached that role with before I did my first one, told me it would ruin my voice. And I was like, well, okay, I’m coming from absolute obscurity. If I ruin my voice trying to do something, I guess that’s not such a disaster. The disaster would be not trying to do something. That would be the disaster. And lo and behold, it was the key. So through that role, I found a good teacher at the same time — that was great timing — and the combination of the teacher, the technique from that teacher, and the role really educated my mental, physical, technical self. [It taught me] how to do it.
Then after a couple hundred performances of that I thought, well, I’d really like to sing something else. So let’s try and get some German repertoire and slowly we started building Sentas and Salomes and things like that.
OW: How does your voice still sound so pliant after all those Turandots? I know part of the answer to that is technique…
LL: This is something I feel so strongly about with singers, and I think things are changing now in SingerLandia. Technique is a suggestion, but it’s not a one-way-or the-highway kind of idea. It is a road map. People can lead you to ideas about how your voice works, but at the end of the day we have to have that autonomy one hundred percent, and knowledge of the physicality. What does our body/voice need? I remember my turning point was with Turandot. I remember driving to a rehearsal, my first performance in my first production of “Turandot” and I thought, I don’t know how to sing this. I’m listening to Maria Callas, I’m listening to Birgit Nilsson, I’m listening to Inge Borkh and other recordings, and I’m like, I can’t do it like that. And I just thought, well, then you have to do it your own way. You have to figure out what your own way with this is and if it hurts, I guess that’s bad. So don’t do that.
And I was really smart/lucky. Lucky it never hurt. I could tell that I had a physical limitation, but that was an evolutionary thing that would change as I got older, and it has. I never pushed against that. I was like, well, this is the way it is now. I’m in my thirties. It shouldn’t be any different. Now I’m in my forties. It’s getting richer. It’s getting more pliant. I’m getting more colors. I’m getting more capacity. Cool. None of that is costing me my voice, my technique, my stamina.
Singers have to be so smart. But they also have to be incredibly strong. We’re being coached by lots of different people. We’re getting lots of input from other people about how we should sound, what repertoire we should sing. In the end, the buck stops here. It has to. My chemistry has to fit me. And you just have the have the balls to sing Brünnhilde how you want to sing it yourself. And not try and be anybody else.
And… I think that’s sort of the bottom line. I sing Elektra like I was a lyric soprano. There [are] times that I just blast the wall out and there are times when I’m incredibly lyric. I can do that. Not everybody can do that. But I like doing it. It saves my voice. It makes me have something to do. I like it.
OW: It makes “Elektra” prettier.
LL: It makes Elektra prettier. It makes her more me. It makes her more relatable, which I’m always much more interested in. In the end, I’m an actor who sings. I’m not a singer who acts. I like acting. I like portraying characters. I like sharing an emotional experience with the audience. I want to bring these characters to life, like the composer intended.
OW: We talk about Puccini, and like Turandot, this dramatic German repertory is often portrayed as a cul-de-sac, a destination for a singer, as though once you’re singing it, you can’t do other things. Do you have plans to keep Puccini in the mix? Listening to you as Brünnhilde — you’re from California — one can hear you as Minnie in “La Fanciulla del West.”
LL: I just got the score out! It’s literally on the stairs right behind me because I’m actually gonna program that into my future. I’m just gonna put it in the suitcase and carry it with me because I really, really want to [do it]. I am the girl from the Golden West. I grew up in the gold country. I grew up in a town named Sonora.
OW: “Laggiù nel Soledad.”
LL: Soledad! It’s right over there, [basically neighbors]! I would love to sing that role. Isolde and Minnie are the two things I have yet to do that I would love to do. I’m sure there are other things, I don’t know. “The Makropulos Affair” would probably be great for me. I’ve never done Czech, so it would be a real stretch for me. But easily “La Fanciulla del West,” you nailed it.
OW: When you talk about Elektra and dialing the voice back a bit and singing more lyrically, even though there are also all of those blowout moments: that’s Minnie [too].
LL: Do you have the recording of Eleanor Steber, the live one? Yeah. It’s just so… I mean, actually, it’s gonna make me cry. It’s so beautiful. The orchestra is so cool — Puccini gets such a bad rap. I mean, he is so diminished in so many people’s minds, and yet he is a genius. He was on a trajectory. I wish he hadn’t died when he did, or I wish he had finished “Turandot” sooner. Because the architecture of his composition is completely unique. Leoncavallo didn’t have it. Mascagni didn’t have it. They had their own versions, but at that time he just had his finger on a pulse, on a thread of energy, that I wish [he] had… expanded more, lived in [more].
OW: Let’s talk about Strauss — it’s exciting that you’ll be in New York in November, doing “Die Frau ohne Schatten,” and for my money, you’ve got the best of the three female roles in that opera.
LL: I agree.
OW: What’s your relationship to that opera and how does fit in with all these other roles you’ve done?
LL: “Die Frau ohne Schatten” is such a strange amalgamation of Straussian styles. I mean [my] role in particular: Färberin. She’s sort of a heroic Zerbinetta in a weird way. Those lines in the second act — the singer has to be able to be somewhat gymnastic in singing those lines, and yet have the force of an Elektra. You have to have the ability to get through the orchestra. Again, it’s a great challenge as an actor because it’s very easy to hate Färberin. Because she can be perceived as one-dimensional from the very beginning: but actually there’s an awful lot going on beneath the surface. Otherwise she wouldn’t be with Barak, there wouldn’t be any kind of relationship there, and she wouldn’t be as conflicted.
I did my first one in Hamburg with Linda Watson singing her first Amme and with the absolutely stunning, unforgettable, unparalleled Emily McGee singing the Kaiserin. And it was my first Färberin! And with those two powerhouses on stage, I was scared to death. But again, I just found my way: to do it my way, with my voice, perhaps more of a lyric sound than people [were] expecting, but still with enough power to get through the orchestra.
I remember saying to a very good friend, when I was learning it, how jealous I was of the Kaiserin… She has all this beautiful music, all night long, and the Färberin has to wait for those first three pages of the third act to have the beautiful soaring line. And I don’t feel jealous anymore — I wouldn’t ever want to sing any other role except the Färberin. I don’t imagine I will ever sing Amme. It wouldn’t be in my wheelhouse. Those aren’t my gifts. She’s more zwischy and she’s got to have real balls in the lower part of her register. And I mean, maybe in ten years I’ll have more of that, but my gift is still the top, and that’s why Färberin really suits me.
Now I love it and I love the journey. I’m still puzzled by the story. I still get confused. It’s so Hofmannsthal, it’s so mythological, it’s so fairy-tale. It’s so ‘swimmy’ in that third act, intentionally so. And I know the parallels between [it and] “The Magic Flute” are there. The journeys, the dark, the light, the redemption [arc], all of that, and I get it from that aspect. But as an actor, I just have to give myself completely over to it rather than… with all the other Strauss roles, I know the journey. There’s no prediction here. I’m not pre-programming anything for the audience. They have to take from it what they take. I’m just delivering the information.
OW: How do you pace yourself, singing a few roles that aren’t considered killer roles? How does one recover between Brünnhildes and Turandots?
LL: Well, it’s funny because I was just talking to Max Potter over at Money Studio. Max and I work on planning… my digital content on Instagram and Facebook, and I am an incredibly hesitant social media user, but I also am a very enthusiastic communicator. So with her help, we try to develop things that I feel okay about sharing. And she just said to me, “listen, some good ideas are how-to videos, or process videos, or day-in-the-life-of videos.” And I was like, “yeah, yeah, I’m terrible at getting that content up, but there’s probably interest in it and I should do that.” And [she said], “what do you do with your down time? You just disappear off social media during your downtime.” It’s like, well, yeah, because I’ve disappeared. I mean, in my mind, I’m no longer Lise Lindstrom the opera singer. I’m Lise Lindstrom, the girl from Sonora, who’s just trying to figure out what to cook for dinner, or I should really do the laundry today. Downtime is tricky. But what I’ve had to try and do is realize that downtime means that I put all these people that live in me, sort of in a cryogenic chamber, and they’re all just percolating, ready to come awake at any moment. And I feed myself, literally and figuratively, all the things that become resources for when I get to bring them out of their stasis again.
And by feeding myself, I keep my mind active, and when my mind’s not active, that’s the danger zone. That’s usually when I plummet into the depths of despair. “Oh, I’ll never sing again. No one’s ever gonna hire me, maybe it wasn’t all real after all.” You know that’s when all the ghoulies come out of the closet. And it’s all about momentum. So [I am] feeding myself, going for a walk, going to the museum, reading a book, having a conversation, learning a new role, reading some letters between Hofmannsthal and Strauss, or, you know, finally reading that great Wagner book. Because otherwise the momentum goes from light speed to zero, and that difference can be devastating.
I think we all have been conditioned to think that if we’re not at warp speed one hundred percent of the time we’re failing, which is utter BS. Honestly, it’s very American, and it’s so completely misaligned to the biological system that we live within, which actually needs time to digest and recover and resurface. So if we’re going full speed ahead all the time we’re, [first and foremost,] adrenaline junkies, and [also] never in a pose of recovery and rejuvenation.
So the ultimate thing is when you sing a Brünnhilde, after you’re done singing Brünnhilde, you need to put Brünnhilde to bed for a few days or weeks. And really, the best possible thing I know I need is two or three days where I don’t have to really get out of bed. And it may feel like being lazy, it may feel like I’ve dropped out of the human race, but that kind of deep level recovery is mandatory. Because if I don’t go that deep [into] recovery then I cannot resurface and be epic again or what I expect myself to be. So that’s the easy answer. It [is almost never] possible because of scheduling or travel. You know, the cruelest thing an opera singer has to do after an epic performance is get up the next morning, pack their suitcase and get on a plane. I mean, it is brutal and we’re all walking around airports, glassy eyed, and we’re like, how did I get here? Wasn’t I just doing [this]? Yeah, you were. But you still have to figure out where you’re going, how to get there. Rental car, hotel. I mean, it’s brutal to be ripped out of that deeply creative space and then function like a normal human being.
I’ll come back here [to California], change the suitcase, I’ll be here for about four days and then I’m going to fly to London to work with my Strauss coach for a week before we start rehearsals [for “Die Frau ohne Schatten”] in New York. So it’s insanity. But I also — this is getting back to the earlier part of the conversation — I need to be sure that I have given myself every possible chance of doing the job I expect myself to do, which means working with the people that I need to work with to prepare for the job that I want to do. Because if I don’t, then I’ll get to the job and that’s where the impostor syndrome will take you down. Because you have nothing to dilute it with. You cannot combat it. It’s like “you’re not really prepared for this.” Well, yes, I am, actually. I have just done this, this, this, and this to prepare. So I have learned that. Stack the deck as far as I possibly can in my own favor before I even get there.