Von Stade: Forget the Magic

There are moments of self-indulgence on the stage, she confesses, when an opera singer wants to begin crying silently to the audience, "Love me. Save me." Such occasions do not occur often, but when they do, it is invariably because the singer is worrying about the effect she is making. "Always looking for the magic traps you," she says. "When you've done your homework and understand every nuance of the characterization and music, it somehow frees you. Ironically, when you forget about putting out magic, it happens."

It happened, for instance, in Santa Fe, when she was not even thinking about her role as Melisande. As she recalls it: "At the point where Pelleas was coming toward me singing 'Je t'aime. je t'aime,' I was trying to decide whether or not to go to a certain pizza parlor after the show."

One way or another the magic happens often these days for the speaker --a radiantly pretty mezzo-soprano from New Jersey who did not attend her first opera until she was 16, could not read music until 20 and probably would never have entered music school if a friend had not dared her. Her pals call her "Flicka," but to the world of music, she is Frederica von Stade of the Metropolitan Opera and a clamoring chorus of other companies in the U.S. and Europe.

Last week, for example, her stage was the San Francisco Opera, where to cheers and sustained applause Von Stade wound up a two-week stand as the young-but-savvy Rosina in Rossini's The Barber of Seville. Then she headed for Italy, where next week she will sing the same role at La Scala. When not in the opera house, she is in the recording studios. Two new albums, French Opera Arias (Columbia) and Frederica von Stade Sings Mozart-Rossini Opera Arias (Philips), display what the fuss is about --a lustrous amber mezzo-soprano voice with an unusually high, sweet crystalline top and seemingly effortless agility.

Laser Beam. Her voice is only part of her appeal. At 31, Flicka is a trim size 8, with a modest but becoming bosom, rich brown tresses and a stage presence that somehow combines innocence and the poise of a pro. Says she, with disarming modesty: "I find solace in the fact that because of the ephemeral nature of the art, my performance, no matter how bad, cannot do permanent damage to Rossini."

Flicka loves applause, yet takes the shortest curtain calls possible. She is perhaps the least career-hungry diva in opera, yet few singers have gone so far so fast. It was Rudolf Bing who plucked her out of the Met opera studio when she was 24 and gave her a contract. Three years later she surprised everybody by taking a season off to broaden her experience in Europe. There, in the spring of 1973, she scored a smashing success as Mozart's Cherubino in a new production of The Marriage of Figaro at the Paris Opera, with Sir Georg Solti conducting. Suddenly, she found herself an international star, and made a triumphant return to the Met--as Rosina in The Barber.

Flicka's current range of roles is in some ways limited. Her voice carries like a laser beam into the farthest reaches of an opera house, but because it is not large she shies away from the heavy Verdi and Puccini, not to mention Wagner. She may be ready for some of that music in five to ten years, although she herself doubts it. For now it is enough that she sings Mozart (Cherubino in Figaro, Dorabella in Cost fan Tutte) with exquisite taste, control and sheen. Or that she can blend the impetuous and the spiritual so deftly as Nina in Thomas Pasatieri's The Seagull, or the childlike and the vulnerable so magically as the heroine of Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande. Starring in Rossini's La Cenerentola with La Scala in Washington, D.C., last September, she displayed enough bravura vocal fireworks to suggest that Flicka also has a bit of the hellcat in her.

That she does. Growing up in Somerville, N.J., Flicka was a tomboy. Horses were a special passion, and her nickname came from her fondness for the popular novel about a horse, My Friend Flicka. Her father, who was killed in action in World War II, came from a family of polo players. Her mother traces her ancestry back to Jonathan Trumbull, an early governor of Connecticut. At one point after she was widowed, her mother ran a combination restaurant and catering service with the help of Flicka and her brother. Flicka now easily throws together an impromptu meal for dozens of friends, but winces when she remembers a predawn preparation for a wedding feast for 400.

Real Bitch. Still a devout Catholic. Flicka went to convent schools. At 18 she hired on as a nanny in Paris to learn French, later worked as a salesgirl at Tiffany. In those days, and even when she attended the Mannes College of Music, she was more interested in the theater than in opera. "Give me Broadway any day," she said after her first visit to the Met, and she still appreciates the artistry of Barbra Streisand, Billie Holiday and Peggy Lee.

Flicka has said that she will take off the season of 1978-79, a lucrative period at this stage in her career. She plans to spend more time with her husband of three years, Peter Elkus, a baritone who is just getting his own career going. She wants to have children and do more lieder singing, where, she says, "you paint everything with your voice."

As against those who like her just the way she is ("She really is an angel," says Sebastian Engleberg, her voice teacher for ten years), there are others who feel that Flicka's full potential has yet to be tapped. One of those is veteran Stage Director Frank Corsaro, who worked with her at the Houston premiere of The Seagull. Corsaro senses a certain turbulence, even aggressiveness inside Flicka. "I would love to see her play a real bitch," he says. The most immediate possibility is the neurotic, highly sexed Fennimore in Delius' Fennimore and Gerda, which Corsaro is discussing for next season with the New York City Opera. Says he: "We have yet to see the darker aspect of Flicka's talent emerge."

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