La Nilsson

"Yes, she was one of the most important singers of the 1900s. She was a Swedish dramatic soprano and sang all the Wagner and Strauss lead roles. She takes the reader through her professional and personal life. She comes across as down-to-earth and humorous and also very frank about what the profession is all about, which a lot of singers aren’t. And I think that is because she came from the Calvinistic/Lutheran tradition in Sweden which taught her not to think of herself as above others. No, no the opposite. She came from a rural background where she worked on the farm. She was a very physical person. She was also quite simple in many ways – not in the sense that she was stupid, just that she was straightforward in her outlook on life. She worked with the greatest and the most legendary artists, composers and singers of our time. Her book is full of funny stories about how she communicated with these people that are so full of themselves because they are legends in their own lifetime. But she was able to get through to them in a way many others weren’t because she was unpretentious and this appealed to them. So she was able to puncture the balloon that they often had around them. The main thing you need is patience and that is required due to the vast amount of training that you need to go through. The training takes many years. You have to have the ability to concentrate on many different things, just as a fighter pilot does. You have to train very small muscles in your throat, your lungs and your rib cage to do things on a complex level, contrary in dynamic to the rest of your body. You are usually doing at least two very different things while you are pretending to act normally. It takes many years to develop that technical skill. And then at the same time you have to be an artistic musician. You need to understand the composer’s meaning of the lines and the words. You have to be an actor, today even more so than before. And you have to be a linguist, so you have to be able to handle all the different vocal expressions and underlying meanings of each language. And finally you have to study the special types of movement that are done on stage. Nowadays you have to be able to fight and dance and lie down on the floor while you are singing. Essentially, you are screaming at the top of your lungs but it has to be controlled. The energy is the same, so imagine doing that while walking very carefully with a candle or a lantern! And at the same time you have to watch what the conductor is doing and relate to fellow singers on stage."