Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 24, 1994 TAG: 9403240285
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Now on to the show:
Q: Why are opera singers so, shall we say, vast?
A: We want don't want to promote unfair stereotypes here. There are plenty of terrific opera singers who are not of scale-crushing dimensions. Jose Carreras weighs little more than 150 pounds and Placido Domingo is a modest 210. Kathleen Battle's certainly not a boat.
But there are also many, like Luciano ``Fat Lucy'' Pavarotti, who are compellingly large. Pavarotti vowed last year to lose 126 pounds. This immediately raised a buzz about the voice/weight connection, and whether Pavarotti would lose something if he slimmed down.
The consensus is that you don't have to be fat to be a powerful singer, but you need some size, some bone structure.
We spoke to the famous voice coach Natalie Limonick of Los Angeles, and she said, ``It depends upon the type of repertoire they sing. A big Wagnerian soprano certainly cannot look like Kathleen Battle. It's not that she needs to be fat, but she needs some body capacity, some muscles in order to get past that huge orchestra.''
Lots of room in the rib cage seems to be crucial. Also a strong diaphragm and back muscles.
``Its really not the size of the body so much as the size of the vocal mechanism. The throat area particularly,'' says Limonick. ``Look inside Jessye Norman's mouth and look at that cannon and you can just imagine she's got a grand piano in there.''
Pavarotti may actually sing better if he doesn't have so much pudge to carry around. He's not fat because he's a singer, he's fat because he likes to eat. A lot of singers say the stress, and access to rich food on the road, makes them pig out.
The stereotype of the fat opera singer may be of Germanic origins. The Germans love opera and they can surely slam down the sausages. We can't accuse them of being a spindly people.
The voice/weight connection is surely not entirely a myth, even though there's only anecdotal evidence for it. Many singers feel they lose something when they trim down too much. The most famous case was Maria Callas: She wanted to slim down to make herself sexier for Ari Onassis, but lost her voice. We are quoting directly from a story that ran in The Guardian, an English newspaper: ``Maria Callas, whose desperation to lose weight led her to swallow a tapeworm, shed much weight over a matter of months and never regained her former power.'' Jeepers!
The really sad thing is that Onassis dumped her anyway, for Jackie. (But the tapeworm was thrilled.)
The Mailbag
Eric C. of Laurel, Md., asks, ``How on earth did we ever get a military base [Guantanamo Bay] in Cuba, and why does Uncle Fidel let us keep it?''
Dear Eric: What, he's going to try to throw us out? Castro may be ugly and evil but he's not crazy. Back in 1903, when the United States was in its overt colonial phase, Cuba was forced to sign a treaty that gave the United States a permanent lease for a naval station at Guantanamo Bay. The lease was reaffirmed in 1934 as part of Roosevelt's ``Good Neighbor Policy.'' (We had nicer ways back then of saying ``We are large and powerful and you are puny, and we will crush you unless we decide we don't want to.'')
The Cubans say the base at Guantanamo Bay is illegally occupied but we still pay the Cubans $4,085 a year to lease the 45 square-mile parcel. They'd like us to leave, sure, but it's a strange world we live in, and until recently there was a Russian infantry brigade stationed in Cuba, tanks and all, apparently poised to conquer most if not all of Key West.
by CNB