Every Wednesday during the Tanglewood season, there is a master class offered between 1:30 and 3:30 pm in Studio E of the Linde Center; it gives outsiders an intimate look at the kind of coaching that goes on between each summer’s Tanglewood Fellows and the teaching staff and visiting artists at the Tanglewood Music Center.

On July 11^th, mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, herself an alumna of the Tanglewood Music Center delivered one. I first heard her at the beginning of the 1993 Tanglewood season, fresh out of the State University of New York at Potsdam, where she received a degree in English writing in 1991 and in Music the following year. For singers at Tanglewood, the summer begins with “Death by Aria,” the nickname given to a lengthy session in which all the singers and the collaborative pianists perform for each other (without prior rehearsal) to give each of them an inkling of what the summer will offer. When Stephanie took the stage to sing music from

Falla’s Seven Popular Spanish Songs, the listeners were stunned to hear such a young singer already clearly at home on the stage, with a rich voice and clear projection. These qualities were widely recognized the following year when she won the Metropolitan Opera National Council Audition. A year after that she made her debut with the company and has sung all over in the ensuing years.

Her masterclass at Tanglewood, though, did not involve the coaching of operatic arias or even Lieder, but represented her other serious interest in what is known as “the Great American Songbook,” representing the repertory of popular songs from Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood between the years following World War I to roughly the 1950s. It is a repertory that she sings in her own cabaret performances. Indeed, she gave one such performance, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, just up the road from Tanglewood in June, performing an evening of Johnny Mercer, some he composed himself and others by Hoagie Carmichael, Harold Arlen, David Raksin, and Henry Mancini. The evening proceeded in generally chronological order, with lively information about Mercer’s extraordinary career, including the founding of Capitol Records, and involvement with the words and music of some 1500 songs, including 18 Oscar nominations (and four wins). Along the way, she genially talked about her own musical life and how popular music is intertwined in it. To close, she invited everyone in the audience to join in (“Singing together is the best thing”) in a performance of a song that just about everyone knew, Mancini/Mercer’s “Moon River.”

For the masterclass, she worked with four students (soprano, tenor, mezzo, bass) each performing a song of their choice. Before the first singer entered, she explained the importance of the Tanglewood Music Center to her. “This is where I found myself.” Here she knew what she wanted to do and why, and she met teachers, coaches, accompanists, and fellow singers who continued to play a role in her career long after her student years.

Then she turned to the matter at hand. She listened to each performance through fully and offered an expression of gratitude before talking about the song and its performance in various ways, often with a sometimes salty humor, but always with a deep familiarity with the song, the composer and lyricist, its origin and role in the history of American popular music.

When soprano Karrigan Bigelow (accompanied by Hikaru Kanki) sang “I’m a stranger here myself,” from the1943 show One Touch of Venus, she asked what was significant about the composer, Kurt Weill. One answer, she said, is that he was an immigrant (her emphasis). Many of our composers were themselves immigrants or came from recent immigrant families. And what about the lyricist, Ogden Nash. Who was he? When Kerrigan replied, “He was a poet,” Stephanie said, “A special kind of poet.” Then, turning to the audience (mostly decades older than the singers), she asked, “Can anyone name his best-know two-line verse?” One gentleman immediately called out:

Candy is dandy,
But liquor is quicker,

producing instant and widespread laughter.

Mary Martin sang the role of the Greek goddess Venus who has been magically returned to modern New York, where she develops a passion for a hunky modern New Yorker, but is unable to understand the modern ways of American romance. She recounts her observations and her mystification at the ways modern men approach romance. Each stanza ends as she informs the audience, “I’m a stranger here myself.” Stephanie worked with her especially on the pointing of the lyrics, so get them (with their humor) out clearly, emphasizing certain ones, and casually slipping the last line in as an amusing afterthought, considering that it comes from the goddess of love.

Tenor Suowei Wu (also accompanied by Hikaru Kanki) sang “Maria,” from West Side Story, by far the best-known song of the afternoon. Many signers whose native language is not English, Stephanie commented, sing our songs despite dealing with a foreign accent, and are cheered, justifiably, by American audiences, who do not always offer the same generosity to American singers. In this case, she worked mostly with vocal phrasing, of keeping the air stream free, and building to the major climax of the melody.

Mezzo Carmen Edano (accompanied by Haniel Anugerah) sang “If I Should Lose You” by Ralph Rainger (lyrics by Leo Robin) from the 1935 film Rose of the Rancho. At the end of her performance, Stephanie complimented her on a beautiful rendering of Nina Simone’s version of the song. But she pointed out that there are many ways to conceive a song—far wider than is normally allowed in the classical repertory—and that she might want to consider it separately from an recording, no matter how much she loved it. In doing so, she suggested speaking the lyrics in rhythm, without the music, and thinking of various ways the text can mean something to the singer, and then considering how the tune might be reshaped in emphasis and tempo, for example, to shape a song like that one, deeply emotional, to one’s own experience and desire to express.

Baritone John Arlievsky (with Zhaoyuan Qin at the piano) sang a song originally composed in French as La Mer by Charles Trenet, in the 1939 film Together Again. The English lyrics “Beyond the Sea” were added in 1947 by Jack Lawrence. After he sang, Stephanie showed her remarkable knowledge of the popular repertory. Trenet is far less well known to most Americans, and she suggested that anyone singing an example like this look up the composer in a resource like Wikipedia to gain at least some basic familiarity with his work. She also suggested that, in considering ways of approaching this song, which was taken up particularly by jazz musicians, might consider both jazz versions and orchestral settings made for pop singers, to consider various ways the song can be interpreted.

As a whole the masterclass illustrated many possible approaches to popular song that rarely considered by singers focusing on classical song and opera. Stephanie Blythe opened minds as well as voices in this fascinating two hours

Steven Ledbetter is a freelance writer and lecturer on music. He got his BA from Pomona College and PhD from NYU in Musicology. He taught at Dartmouth College in the 1970s, then became program annotator at the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1997.