Preparing Tomorrow’s Opera Stars: Joyce DiDonato Shows Us How It’s Done

When you search for “Master Class” videos on YouTube, you encounter unexpected instructors like Natalie Portman, Margaret Atwood, Neil DeGrasse Tyson—and even Kris Jenner. Master classes were traditionally thought of as public pedagogy where experts, usually musicians, instructed promising newcomers in front of an audience. While the term has been co-opted by the so-named streaming service offering online “lessons” in many fields, the long tradition of the best classical singers offering intense, detailed public instruction continues, and earlier this month, Joyce DiDonato once again conducted her revered annual series at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute and aptly demonstrated why she must be thought of as today’s reigning mistress of the master class.

Superstar singers from Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti to Joan Sutherland and Leontyne Price coaching young performers (often at Juilliard) has proved a popular attraction allowing eager fans to witness another facet of their favorite singers’ artistry, but these events are not without controversy. Some critics argue that due to their public nature, master classes function solely as fleeting, superficial exercises designed to feed the ego of the “master” and have little lasting value for young performers. How much can really be accomplished in the brief time allocated (often just twenty to thirty minutes) to each budding Mimi or Don Giovanni?

The great German soprano Lotte Lehmann retired to California, where she became noted for her teaching, producing notables like Marilyn Horne and Grace Bumbry. Some of her master classes have been preserved on video, including one from 1961, in which the 73-year-old Lehmann works with a young soprano on a Hugo Wolf song. In the clip, Lehmann pays more attention to addressing her audience than to instructing the singer. Her efforts consist mainly of stepping up to the piano and performing it her way.

It’s difficult to imagine what Lehmann’s student felt about the renowned diva’s methodology, but Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, another notable interpreter of German lieder, often led master classes which left her students demoralized by her barrage of harsh criticisms. Renée Fleming, whose own intensely detailed master classes have been hailed as sympathetic and helpful, has commented about how demanding and stressful Schwarzkopf’s classes had been when she participated in them in the early 1980s.

The first time I attended a master class was several decades ago at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, which hosted the legendary Swedish soprano Elisabeth Söderström. Rather than the usual strategy of having her work one-on-one with several students, she guided a group of four through a large chunk of the second act of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro. Her sharp, good-humored interaction with the singers was full of canny tips on the most effective way to interact and present their characters to an audience. I expect that, like me, those young performers never forgot her wise and gracious insights.

More typically, classes like Lehmann’s or Schwarzkopf’s will focus on the interpretation of a particular aria or song, though they can also delve into an individual’s method of producing their sound. I understand that occasionally when the visiting star makes sweeping criticisms of a performer’s technique, it can lead to conflicts between the singer and their voice teacher.

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In significant ways, the series given by Maria Callas at Juilliard in 1971 and 1972 have become iconic for operatic master classes. They were the subject of a book by John Ardoin, and pirated recordings—all forty-six hours of the twenty-three sessions—were privately released on a CD-ROM. From those recordings, EMI put together a commercial three-CD set of excerpts from which you might have erroneously assumed the semi-retired diva only coached arias she sang herself, as the company followed tracks of her sessions with recordings of the soprano singing the arias she had just coached.

Playwright Terrence Mcnally took Callas’s Juilliard stint a step further by creating his Master Class, a play dramatizing a composite of them. It opened in 1995 and ran for more than a year with Zoe Caldwell, then Dixie Carter and finally Patti LuPone playing the diva as fire-breathing stand-up comedienne.

Those familiar with the play will have gotten a very skewed impression of how master classes work. Callas worked seriously with the singers, occasionally demonstrating points herself rather than lecturing the audience on her past and philosophy of performing.

Faye Dunaway had long planned to make a movie of McNally’s Master Class, but that project failed to happen. However, Angelina Jolie succeeded in embodying the legendary Callas for Pablo Larrain’s new elegiac film Maria, which arrives on Netflix in early December.

In the two October sessions by DiDonato that I attended and which were streamed live worldwide on medici.tv, the mezzo worked intensively with just four singers. It was clear from her comments that the public afternoon sessions had been preceded by private morning ones, which were focused primarily on technical matters. However, during Saturday’s afternoon session, DiDonato worked intensively with Canadian soprano Bridget Esler less on interpretation than on how to precisely articulate challengingly fast coloratura passages in one of Dalinda’s arias from Handel’s Ariodante. Again and again, she ran Esler through the music making sure that each note sounded clearly in an attempt to avoid the smeared florid singing one often encounters in baroque music. To accomplish this, Esler initially took the lines very slowly, cleanly attacking each note of the run and then gradually increasing the tempo. DiDonato gave her (and many in the audience there and at home) a precisely detailed solution to an important problem.

One of the most thought-provoking interactions occurred during her encounters with bass Robert Ellsworth Feng. After he sang a particularly villainous aria, she suggested that as a bass, he’ll often be singing bad guys, but he must endeavor to avoid the expected, a frequent theme of her comments. She demonstrated how a singer must always go beyond obvious audience expectations and dig deeply into the text and music to find the greatest variety of colors to flesh out this villain or that anguished heroine.

This deep reading of the sung texts also came up in working with tenor Ben Reisinger who performed Pinkerton’s regretful aria “Addio fiorito asil” from the final act of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Everyone in attendance agreed that Pinkerton must be one of opera’s worst guys for his callous treatment of the young and vulnerable Cio-Cio-San.  After his ringing if bland first run-through of the aria, DiDonato probed and questioned him, and together they looked intently at the words and notes and soon uncovered a more complex and nuanced arc to the music that made all the difference when he repeated the short aria.

One imagines that those three intense days of close work with DiDonato will indeed have a lasting impact on her four recruits, who included Filipino mezzo Michelle Mariposa whose sumptuous voice holds great promise but whose interpretative skills manifestly benefited from the incremental refinement that the senior mezzo led her toward.

Throughout the two sessions that I attended at the Resnick Education Wing, DiDonato’s warmly empathetic manner cleverly balanced her comments to the singers and to the audience. While it was always clear that these classes are performances for the hundreds watching there or at home (either live or as archived online sessions), her focus was intently on the singers whose repertoire rarely intersected with DiDonato’s own.

Before DiDonato returns, Carnegie Hall will continue its commitment to developing young artists in January when the SongStudio series returns. Its history began with the activities of the Marilyn Horne Foundation, and when Horne stepped back, Fleming took over. The project hosts master classes by singers and, unusually, accompanists in Zankel Hall, culminating in a Young Artists recital. Fleming has recently given up her duties, and the 2025 edition will be led by Anthony Roth Costanzo, with participants to be announced soon.