Sidney Shicoff's first major cantorial engagement was for High Holiday services at the Stone Avenue Synagogue in Brooklyn. He gave concerts and officiated at services in Catskill hotels, including Grossinger's, and more notably concertised at Carnegie Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Severance Hall, and Madison Square Garden. Sidney was invited by Rudolph Bing to audition for the Met, but Shicoff père felt himself unready; no repeat invitation was ever issued. Sidney was also host of a Jewish program on New York radio station WEVD in the '50s, and also participated in the film Kol Nidre.
Neil Shicoff made his public singing debut at a wedding in his father's synagogue when he was only eight (or 12, depending on who you read). "His voice was so beautiful," his sister recalls, that his performance that brought tears to the groom's eyes. Shicoff soon abandoned his youthful singing career - despite the attraction of the $5 fee (an enormous sum for a boy his age, he recalls) - having discovered the predisposition towards severe panic attacks that plagued him well into his adult singing career and stardom.
Shicoff remembers growing up in "a rather turbulent house." At 14, already devoted to opera - and having also discovered how well his voice carried when he screamed at the umpire at a Mets game, only to have the umpire shout back at him to shut up - he began formal vocal studies with his father, with whom he studied for two years, until the elder Shicoff's death in 1965 at age 45. After this, Shicoff studied for another two years with his father's voice teacher, then for several years with Raymond Buckingham.
Shicoff admits that his own character was shaped, for better or worse, by the father with whom he had a conflicted relationship. Indeed, Shicoff sees himself as a blend of his father - a man he remembers as "an artist to the tips of his fingernails": passionate, constantly in motion, volatile, creative, demanding, with a tendency towards paranoia and even violence - and his mother, who was the opposite: a woman with her feet firmly planted on the ground, possessed of a good head for business, and able to take charge and manage things. She was also an extremely potent force in Shicoff's life, a perfectionist who made him very sensitive to and insecure about his shortcomings. It is his mother to whom he attributes his own obsession with perfection.
At 18, Shicoff applied to Juilliard, auditioning with "La donna è mobile" from Rigoletto. Having transposed the aria down a half-step, he was determined to "wow" the auditors with a huge high B flat at the end. He was rejected, the instructors warning him firmly against singing Verdi in that way at his age, fearing he would prematurely burn out his voice. Disappointed, he studied briefly in Delaware with L. Richie, then entered Hebrew Union College as a cantorial student. He held a position in a synagogue for a few years before deciding that his true vocation was to sing opera or not to sing at all. He dropped out of cantorial school after three not terribly happy years, and reapplied to Juilliard. This time, the 21-year-old tenor was not only accepted, but granted a Jennie Tourel scholarship. At the conservatory, he studied voice with Margaret Marshall, and after a year, he moved into the American Oepra Center. There he sang his first operatic roles: a small part in I Pagliacci, the role of Thompson in the world première of Virgil Thomson's Lord Byron (20 April 1972), and his Juilliard debut with orchestra in La Bohème with Leona Mitchell and James Conlon.
While at Juilliard, Shicoff was quickly recognised for his "exuberant singing and eagerness to communicate" and a voice "blessed with ringing metal and attractive plangency". Even as his voice has matured and darkened over the years, it has retained a tender, plaintive, intensely human quality that his admirers have long found irresistible. After leaving Juilliard, Shicoff was an apprentice at the Santa Fe Opera (from 1973), singing Paco in de Falla's La Vida Breve there in 1975. He had already appeared, at 19 and 20, as Don José in Carmen with New York City's Amato Opera.
In 1978, Shicoff married fellow Juilliard student, lyric soprano Judith Haddon. In summer 1983, the two adopted their daughter, Aliza Danielle. In November 1984, Shicoff lost his mother to cancer. He cancelled most of the 1984/85 season to mourn. Through the next few years, emotional despair, compounded by vocal technical difficulties, intense performance anxiety, and a punishing schedule, prompted him to cancel with increasing frequency. As a result, by the end of the 1980s he was cursed with an unfortunate reputation for unreliability.
Shicoff's grief was compounded as the 1980s drew to a close and proceedings began in what would become one of the opera world's most protracted and bitter divorce disputes. Coming as it did on top of his mother's death, the soul-ravaging divorce from Haddon - and his separation from the daughter he adored - plunged Shicoff into isolation and despair (which was alleged by the press at the time to have been exacerbated by heavy drinking, though Shicoff strongly denies this). In March 1989 (misremembered by Shicoff as 1990), the strain of the divorce triggered an onstage nervous breakdown during a performance of Werther at the Met. Shicoff was, in short, in emotional tatters.
Shicoff attributes his recovery from these devastating losses in large part to seeing the film Ordinary People, which he considers a huge influence on him at the time. The film helped renew his faith in his ability to succeed as a performer, at a time when he might otherwise have driven himself mad with depression.
In 1991, despite a continuing demand for him at the Met and other major U.S. houses, the elusiveness of an acceptable divorce settlement, complicated by Haddon's exhorbitant alimony demands and threats from her lawyers of serious legal action, drove Shicoff - after a final performance of Faust at the Met - into self-imposed European exile. He lived for three years in Berlin, then moved to Zürich, to which he had been invited by Zürich Opera artistic director Alexander Pereira. Over the next seven years, he stayed away from America, performing throughout the Continent and in London, with a handful appearances in Buenos Aires, and developing into a major European star.
By 1997, Shicoff and Haddon finally reached a mutually-acceptable divorce settlement. Their final decree left Shicoff free to marry his fiancée, leggero soprano Dawn Kotoski, with whom he had lived since the birth of their son, Alexander, in 1993. Shicoff was 37 when he met the 21-year old budding soprano, at the studio of their shared voice teacher, in 1988; the two soon became inseparable. During his years in Europe, Dawn had become - and remains - his emotional anchorage and artistic helpmate. The settlement with Haddon also allowed Shicoff to renew his relationship with Aliza, already a teenager.
1997 also saw Shicoff's triumphant return to the Met, as Lensky in Eugene Onegin. Shicoff's performance as Lensky was universally acclaimed as the one saving grace of an otherwise controversial production which, Shicoff's stunning performance excepted, was disparaged by audiences and critics alike. His return to the Met was even more appreciated for being so long overdue. Three years later, he returned to the Met again in his #1 signature role, Offenbach's Hoffmann; he is now scheduled to return to his favourite American opera house for a number of productions in the next several years.
Shicoff is something of a self-confessed introvert. He eschews parties and the other glittering social trappings of stardom, preferring small gatherings with a few friends, or with his family, or simply to be alone, to read, and above all to listen to music...but not vocal music. He seldom listens to opera these days. Instead, his passion is for piano music (Glenn Gould is one of his favourite pianists; his favourite composers: Beethoven, Mozart, and above all, Mahler). Indeed, after draining himself physically and emotionally in performance (his standard modus operandi), his preferred method of recovery is to sit quietly at home and listen to a piano concerto on the stereo.
Shicoff, his wife Dawn, and their son Alexander lived for a few years in Berlin when they first moved to Europe, then for several years in Zürich, and now they have just relocated to Vienna. They often spend August with relatives in Connecticut. Aside from listening to music and reading, Shicoff's hobbies have, at various times, included gardening, fishing, Secession art, and the stock market. His current passions include collecting Chinese porcelains, scuba diving, and riding his motorcycle (and he's threatening to take up skydiving). He's also a wine afficionado. Shicoff keeps trim by jogging, playing tennis, and working with a personal trainer. Shicoff's elder sister is artist Rochelle Shicoff. (more info on Rochelle Shicoff's work)
With Corelli, he concentrated on strengthening his middle register, but soon came to realise that his attempts to imitate Corelli's dramatic voice (imitation appears to have been part of Corelli's teaching method, implicitly if not explicitly) were damaging his essentially lyrical instrument. As a result, he had to work for some time to recover from that damage - rediscovering his own true voice, and rebuilding his vocal technique accordingly. More recently Shicoff has studied with Raymond Buckingham.
In a 1990 article in Grammophone, Shicoff admitted: "There was a period a few years ago when I went through a bad patch technically. I got lazy...thought I knew what I was doing, and I didn't....This was simply a question of easing up of the technical work and you can never afford to do that....I always hoped that I would be Pavarotti in technique, not in style. Luciano is for me the great technician of tenors, and I thought I would be that kind of technician. That never happened with me." He went on to describe how he had begun working like fiend on technique, to be able to "express all that is inside of me." In his memoir, Foreign Parts, Thomas Allen evokes the delightful image of Shicoff warming up before a performance, giving "a passable imitation of a budgerigar trilling away".
Earlier in his career, Shicoff's personality was considered by some to be "difficult". Certain colleagues could not warm to a young singer who was brazenly ambitious. ("What really turned me on was the idea of becoming famous," he recalls.) And Shicoff himself has admitted that he can be difficult, at least in so far as his reluctance and occasional refusal to consider other people's artistic conceptions, particularly those that pertain to his roles, when these conceptions conflict with his own.
Shicoff has always been as intensely serious about his acting as about his singing. One critic described him (rather unkindly but sowing seeds of truth) as "method-acting his way across the stage, skulking like an operatic Al Pacino." Anyone who sees Shicoff onstage (live or on video) will notice how hard it can seem for him to shed the skin of his onstage persona after the curtain falls, particularly when that persona bears the hallmarks of his favourite characters: psychologically complex, conflicted, and tormented. Combine this total absorption in his roles with his tendency towards keen critical (even hypercritical) artistic self-analysis, and it's not hard to guess why he sometimes appears less than happy in curtain calls.
Impulsive and high-strung, Shicoff has never been blind to his own failings. If anything, the opposite is true. He has described himself repeatedly as possessive, jealous, self-destructive, extremely insecure, and an obsessive perfectionist. Add to these other people's characterisations: introverted, antisocial, irrascible, pig-headed, an enfant terrible, erratic, too intense, extreme, excessive, wild, "over the top", manic, unstable, hypersensitive, paranoid, neurotic (quite a catalogue! And Shicoff very reluctantly admitted in a recent interview that he had gone to a psychiatrist to help him understand and release some of his "blockages", the result being that he was able to become even more expressive in his performances)... One thing you can say for Neil Shicoff - man or artist - he cannot be fairly accused of blandness, boringness, or predictability.
In close proximity, Shicoff exudes a physically palpable aura of dynamism - a barely-reined-in animation that is electrified no doubt, at least in part, by the nervous energy that earlier in his career often blossomed into full-fledged panic attacks, nervous exhaustion and even collapse. Shicoff was notorious in the 1970s and 1980s for his crippling stage-fright and the many last-minute cancellations it precipitated. Wise impresarios knew to always have a cover in the house when Shicoff was scheduled to perform. His idol Franco Corelli may have suffered more, but Corelli's stage fright did not make him physically ill as it did Shicoff. (The adrenal gland can be the Iago of the performing artist's endocrine system, an invidious saboteur indeed.)
Shicoff is an artist in whom raw, naked, often gut-wrenching emotion is tempered by a prodigious intellect and an inspired musicality informed by solid musicianship. His plaintive vocal poignancy can be heartrending, but it remains firmly under the control of an impressive, unwavering vocal technique. Add to this his exquisitely refined stagecraft and natural physical grace: Shicoff moves about the stage with the eloquent loose-limbed grace of a premier danseur or a lithe jungle cat.
Neil Shicoff's dramatic portrayals are always deeply considered and, above all, deeply felt. Shicoff's characters are, without exception, touchingly vulnerable and intensely human. His heart beats within each one of them, and their blood flows in his veins. While he is devoted to research to help him prepare his roles, scouring background literature and poring over musical and dramatic analyses to increase his understanding of the character sketched out in the opera's libretto, at the core of his portrayals remains, first and foremost, his unalloyed emotional response.
Shicoff's incarnations of character almost always challenge one's preconceptions and expectations. One might disagree at times with his dramatic choices, but one can never doubt his profound commitment to those choices, or the emotional and intellectual honesty that underpin them. He never plays a role for glamour or surface effect. He violently rejects stereotypes. Not surprisingly, his characters are always uniquely drawn and believably - yea, disturbingly - human. Shicoff's characters are men you could easily imagine approaching you on the street (though, given the psychological profiles his favourites, you'd probably be wise to cross to the other side before they reach you).
Like the method actors he has been compared to, Shicoff takes great pride in channeling his personal foibles (and, he recently recognised, a not insignificant amount of sexual energy) with potent effect into his roles. He has been known to submerge himself in some characterisations so completely that he has felt actually physically transformed. He is particularly susceptible when playing one of the "tormented" characters he most strongly identifies with: Hoffmann, Werther, Lensky, Éléazar and, perhaps most drastically, Peter Grimes.
This "physicalisation" has been known to have unsettling and undesired side-effects on Shicoff. He felt compelled to abandon Werther, then his premiere signature role, after a Met performance in March 1989. The emotional intensity of the role, and the extreme physical manifestation of same, so destabilised him during the first act that his imagination began to blur the boundaries between his own tragic personal circumstances (he was at the nadir of his combative divorce proceedings) and those of the doomed poet. The result: an unstoppable crying jag onstage...a nervous breakdown that was unsettling enough to make him consider letting his cover take over for him. Remarkably - and a great testimonial to Shicoff the professional and the artist - despite pressure from management, Shicoff steeled himself during intermission and finished the performance, singing more freely and powerfully than ever, and garnering overwhelming critical acclaim. Recently, in light of his domestic happiness and the emotional stability it's brought him, he has considered returning Werther to his repertoire.
Since that watershed night, Shicoff has learned to recognise the risks his dramatic intensity can pose to his own psyche. Of late, he has been considering temporarily retiring Peter Grimes from his repertoire, before its emotional extremes and physical violence undo him psychologically. He has also recently adopted a strategy of interspersing his favoured soul-wrenching roles with those whose demands are predominantly vocal, alternating between a Hoffmann and an Edgardo, a Grimes and a Manrico, for example. But he also admits that he really uses opera as form of personal psychotherapy. Extravagant self-expression is what Neil Shicoff is all about, and to appreciate Neil Shicoff the artist, one is compelled - wittingly or unwittingly - to confront Neil Shicoff the man.
Shicoff is fascinated by every aspect - even (or, perhaps, especially) the least appetising - of his own humanity. And yet, that same humanity can make him squirmingly uncomfortable. But put another face on it, call it Hoffmann, or Lensky, or Don José, and that discomfort magically transforms itself into an inexorable compulsion to self-expose. Shicoff is deliciously shameless about digging into the deepest, remotest, most painful recesses of his psyche to dredge up his innermost feelings (the more profoundly dark and disturbing the better) and put them on public display through his harrowing characterisations. Self-indulgent? Perhaps, but given the stunning results onstage, who cares? C'est lui.
For this reason, Neil Shicoff seldom appeals to opera-goers for whom the voice is all and drama an afterthought. This is not to say that Shicoff doesn't sing magnificently (he does!). But as he himself has stated repeatedly, he does not employ his voice in the service of some disembodied ideal of "vocal splendour". He employs it in the service of creating the character, and of expressing himself through his creation. And yet, true to his artistic committment to himself, and the hard work that demonstrates that commitment, his already dazzling vocal technique just keeps getting better and better.
Not surprisingly given his personal artistic objectives and modus operandi, Shicoff claims to often find more satisfaction in the process of preparing and rehearsing a role than in actually performing it. But he also immediately qualifies this observation: with the right cast and a responsive audience, performing can utterly transport him. (For example, the exuberant audience ovation at the end of his opening night performance of La Juive [Vienna, 23 October 1999] brought him to tears.)
With loving support from his wife and son, Shicoff's artistic "life strategy" seems to be working like a charm. As he himself has observed on more than one occasion, the Neil Shicoff of recent years has noticeably matured and mellowed as a man. Neil Shicoff, the enfant terrible of the operatic stage, is finally growing up. And yet, intriguingly, his personal evolution has been counterbalanced rather than mirrored by his artistic growth: his deeply felt, multilayered characterisations have become - and keep becoming - not more mellow, but more thrillingly passionate and fascinating with every new performance.
- Karen Mercedes (Copyright © 2000 by Karen Mercedes)
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Copyright © 1999-2002 by Karen Mercedes. All rights reserved.