BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
A couple of years ago, Eva-Marie Middleton wrapped up a successful performance of Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos with OperaBox. Doing what she always did after a show, the mezzo soprano experimented with the way her voice had evolved through the experience. “After all,” Eva-Marie thought to herself, “it is constantly growing and changing, and I need some time to get to know its new possibilities.”
So when she picked up Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), it drew her in and she realised: “Wow, perhaps this is something my voice can do now.”
This is how her latest project Dream of Childhood’s End came to be. Through Mahler’s musical work along with Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, Eva-Marie explores the loss of innocence and faded dreams. She will present these pieces with a small ensemble of young musicians at the Fringe World Festival this February.
Warming up for the gig, the singer tells us about her own experiences as a child and the ways she evolves to reach “adult musicianship”.
Tell us how you came to produce Dream of Childhood’s End.
I started thinking: ‘What if I created my own show?’. The Mahler has such a strong subject matter, dealing with the literal death of a child. But it also spoke to me a lot about the brevity of childhood today in general, and all the images we see on TV of children in war zones or on refugee boats. This was something that grabbed me and made me want to explore more.
I started thinking of another piece to pair it with, and settled on the Wagner Wesendonck Lieder. While the Wagner doesn’t have a direct link to childhood, it has the sort of philosophical musing on different life experiences that I thought made a beautiful counterpoint.
At this point, I started talking to some friends about the idea, and no one said I was stupid – so I went ahead! I formed an ensemble of great young Perth musicians and brought a director on board to help me create the staging, and it’s all grown from there.
Why do you explore the loss of childhood?
Childhood – and then moving away from childhood – is a universal experience; a loss we have all suffered and one which we can all look back upon with a sense of the bittersweet. Particularly after all the upheavals of 2016, with ongoing war in Syria, the refugee crisis, Brexit, and the election of Donald Trump, I think many of us are thinking back to earlier times with a sense of longing. Every time a pop star has passed away in the last year, we have all had memories of the better world we enjoyed in our youth or childhood. I didn’t deliberately pick a subject matter to exploit those events, but I think it’s inevitable for any artist living through the last year to want to explore some sense of nostalgia and want to process our losses. The show has been designed so that on one level, my character is following a very specific path: grieving the loss of her childhood. But it’s done in a manner open enough for any audience member to read their own story into the action, and to use the performance to process their own life path.
What can these classical pieces tell us about childhood and innocence?
The Kindertotenlieder poems were written by Friedrich Rückert in the 1830s because he had actually lost two of his children to scarlet fever. Mahler didn’t actually lose a child until after he had set these to music, though some people contend that he was reflecting on the grief of losing his brother years before. For me, I tend not to look at autobiographical details as a major source of musical interpretation, but instead like to study the musical forms themselves.
In the Mahler, I hear a musical tension between very complex emotional writing, alongside some moments of child-like, nursery-rhyme music, with simple melodies and repeated phrases. Particularly in the final Mahler song, there is some very complex harmonic and rhythmic writing describing the storm which killed the children, followed by a simple lullaby made of the same words. I think the mix of the two encapsulates the two layers of emotions that I feel when I think of childhood: an indulgence in the simple joy I felt then, while at the same time feeling an undercurrent of sadness – perhaps anger, certainly loss – at the fact that that time is now distant to me. It’s a very full psychological description embedded in the music.
The Wagner is not about childhood. For me, the Wagner is about life; about wanting, about suffering, about our common experiences, and about being OK with all the above. For me, that provides the perfect balance to the Mahler. In fact, the first Mahler song has me singing, ‘The sun shines despite my misfortune’ – whereas the penultimate Wagner song acknowledges that even the sun suffers death. So there’s a feeling that the singer has journeyed from only being concerned with their own suffering to an understanding that suffering, that loss, is universal and is OK. Musically, the Wagner is also more resolved, balanced, and accessible in the resolution of its phrases than the Mahler, which I think aids the feeling of resolve by the end of the show.
What about your own childhood? When did you realise singing was something you could spend your younger years perfecting to take you through to adulthood?
When I was 7, I pleaded every day for a school term for the music teacher to let me join the choir. The choir was only for 8-year-olds and above, but I stood outside the practice room every lunchtime until she let me join. I guess from then I never left. I studied classical guitar, not singing, but I was always in every ensemble possible.
Through high school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I thought I’d be a lawyer, a politician, a nun, a chemist, a historian, and the week before university applications were due, I broke into tears in my parents’ room and said I had to change my preferences because I simply had to do music. My school hadn’t even offered university entrance level music, so I had thought it would be impossible. But my parents said, ‘OK, let’s see what we need to do’. I had my first ever singing lesson, sang in Italian for the first time in my life, auditioned for the University of Western Australia, and was so pleased to be accepted. I had a bit of self-doubt and switched to a composition major for my undergraduate, but I was in: studying music at university!
Towards the end of my undergraduate degree, I was having another crisis of confidence when the conductor of the university chamber choir asked if I knew that you could be a professional choral singer. I’d never heard of that as a profession, and immediately I knew that’s what I had always wanted to do and had just been too shy. Now, I’m not a professional choral singer, because the voice will simply be the size it is designed to be – and I’m designed to be loud. But I am a professional singer, which I still can’t believe I get to do every day!
At what point in your career did you feel you’d ‘grown up’ and were responsible for your own musical decisions? When did you break away from your musical teachers, mentors, and guides in the way that a child breaks away from her or his parents?
I think I’m probably only just coming into that stage now. I’m in my early 30s, but I am a larger voice, and I constantly try to bear in mind that dramatic voices don’t really exist until people are in their early- to mid-40s. If I were a lyric coloratura it would be a very different story, but large voices need to be very careful not to run before they can walk, lest they cause serious vocal damage. Having said that, I make my own decisions as a musician. I am incredibly blessed in my teacher, who is very keen that I only follow her advice if I agree with it. I’ve been with her for about seven years, and after each year she says something along the lines of: ‘I look forward to seeing you again next year if you still want to learn from me’. She’s very aware that I’m an adult and I would stop seeing her if I felt I wasn’t learning things. I’m sure I would drive any other teacher mad, but with her she lets me ask a million questions. So it’s not just that I’m singing something a certain way because she says so, but because I am 100 per cent convinced that that is the best approach. I think at a certain point, ‘because my teacher says so’ or ‘because that’s how it’s done’ are insufficient reasons for anything, and the point you realise that is the start of adult musicianship.
If you could give any musical advice to your childhood self, what would it be?
It’s OK, you haven’t missed out. Just because so-and-so is having voice lessons at age 12 and you’re not, doesn’t mean you can’t sing – doesn’t mean you won’t be able to sing. Just because you can’t sing those notes now doesn’t mean you won’t be able to sing them later and actually, later on, you just might retain some nostalgia for when you belted out U2 with your untrained voice (my With Or Without You is still stunning, but more Callas than Bono!).
Catch Eva-Marie Middleton perform Dream of Childhood’s End at the Fringe World Festival in Perth from February 2-4. More information online.
Image supplied. Credit: Nik Babic.
