That day I became a singer
I have always been a dancer. Everyone knows it.
I love things very deeply, and then one day the fire burns everything down and it is as if I had never loved anything at all. That never happened with dance. Dance was a love that stayed. And yet, at the same time, it was also a love from which academia slowly began to drain my energy, until one day the pandemic forced a pause on everyone and eventually a break from the pause. In that break and the slow return of in-person things, I found myself in an ultra-advanced flamenco workshop taught by María Moreno in Marseille, at a school called Soleá — a place I had never been to, but already loved, because it carried the same name as the school where I had first begun to dance. Needless to say, registering for a workshop at that level with a body that had spent more than a year confined to a couch, dehydrated and negotiating survival with life was a disastrously stupid idea. My body held together until the last day, when I strained my calf muscle and had to return to Lyon alone jumping in one leg, on crutches. The rest is history. I drifted. I pondered what to do next, almost slipping back into some ancient version of myself, considering things like learning a Renaissance instrument or something, because I loved Jordi Savall. Then, while watching the Prix de Lausanne, one of the contemporary dance pieces — a dance I knew how to do, whoa, knew in the past tense, my body did not know anymore, that hurt — was danced to a Monteverdi piece.
Monteverdi is not just some fancy dude that wrote songs. He is also a memory cue. He wrote the songs in the soundtrack of a film that contains my only tender memory from a very fucked-up and fast love affair from my early 20’s. The man in that relationship claimed to love a film called Le Pont des Arts, set in Paris , at a time when I could never have imagined that I would end up living in France for so long. Somewhere between an insight and a very precise decision — because a love like mine for dancing does not simply end, it has to be consciously brought to an end — I decided I would become a classical singer, because I had to sing Monteverdi’s Lamento della Ninfa. The typical Nathalistic move — that almost mystical fusion with whatever becomes the object of my desire — made me live inside the video of Monica Piccinini singing that piece. In less than 24 hours, I called Sylvia Klein, a Brazilian singer based in Berlin, and Fabiola Protzner, who had fled Germany, and said: ladies, I need to sing this. The rest is history, I started the classes on-line two days later with Fab.
I think I am the kind of random person who arrives with the entire path already defined — it has to be Baroque, for a very, very, very long time until it can be maybe other repertory — but also intuitive enough not to get the decision wrong, because it came as a kind of mini-epiphany that revealed something profound about who I am and was. I never gave many fucks about opera. Lieder and cantatas, on the other hand, move me so much they’re basically an intellectual fuck. I have never regretted the Baroque choice. And I think there are very few things in my life that I have loved doing as much as taking classical singing lessons.
I don’t know what the hell was going on in the minds of those Baroque people, but it feels like with just a few words and the right melody they manage to describe the deepest human emotions of love and melancholy — and then bury you in them, making you see everything as a web of experiences where things hurt immensely and are, at the same time, incredibly enchanted.
I think I’ve always seen life that way. But instead of leaving me stuck in melancholy, music lets me pass through it and come out more invigorated, keeping only the beautiful part. I think science calls this emotional regulation. I call it the strength of allowing yourself to be vulnerable when that vulnerability lifts you somewhere instead of consuming you.
That’s probably why I’ve never liked doing anything as much as I like singing.
Recently, a friend told me she can tell from my speaking voice that my timbre resembles Cecilia Bartoli’s, and I was flattered — because it is a bit dark indeed. I could talk about a lot of technical things, like how singing in German is still a mess for me, but I think what I really wanted to write was to try to describe the process that might help me understand how this art grabbed me so completely, because I myself do not know fully. Still, I’m forever grateful to Italians, who besides worshipping coffee and pasta, they knew a thing or two about making complex beauty. Baroque, for instance.
I never get involved with anything in a superficial way, but I’m particularly intrigued by moments when the involvement is — I would say — structural. And it’s not an understanding that comes from the head; I’ve never opened a book about Baroque music in my life. It’s an understanding that, beyond being embodied, has no mediation other than my own experience of doing it. And the less mediation there is, apparently the more sacred it stays.
(Listening to: Nathalie Stutzmann singing Handel’s aria “Ah, mio cor, schernito sen”)
