That Voice recounts a Jewish baby boomer’s youthful attempt to define herself as a musician. The youngest child of a music-loving family, Marcia Menter describes the life-changing moment her father gave her a recording of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. She was enthralled by the voice of Ann Drummond-Grant, a major star of the D’Oyly Carte Company, the official opera company of Gilbert and Sullivan’s works. Menter resolved to become a singer of light opera like her idol — but, far more than most young singers, she really needed the meticulous training that’s required to prepare the voice for opera. And despite a succession of teachers, she never found it.
Menter documents every step of her journey through the world of classical music and the barriers she faced because she began with an inadequate voice that blocked her access to the best schools and teachers. As she continued to fail as a singer, Menter turned to piano. She homes in on numerous classical pieces, composers, pianists, and singers. She also devotes many pages to her obsession with the life of Drummond-Grant and the work of Gilbert and Sullivan.
One of the most difficult tasks for any writer is to try to render the sound of music on the printed page. That Voice does so by using metaphors of texture, sight, and non-musical sound. Menter goes into loving detail about the technical and physical requirements of singing, including breathing from the diaphragm and placing the voice in the head. These are techniques that good singers know instinctively, and they are critical to a successful career in opera.
Menter once felt the typical baby-boomer distance from her Jewish heritage. But in the years that she was immersed in classical voice and piano study, she found Jewish performers and teachers everywhere, both during her semester abroad in Amsterdam and in her training at home. In the early 1970s, when she was studying, there were Jewish musicians of the highest caliber who had started their careers over from scratch after surviving concentration camps, hiding, and spending the postwar years searching for new beginnings. Menter’s Scotland-born idol, “Drummie,” was married to a Polish Jew named Israel Gotfryd whose name was changed to Isadore Godfrey when he became a British citizen. As the musical director of the D’Oyly Carte Company, Godfrey is just one example of the outsized presence of Jews in twentieth-century music on both sides of the Atlantic.
Music lovers will enjoy plunging into this musically focused book, especially if they appreciate classical music.
Beth Dwoskin is a retired librarian with expertise in Yiddish literature and Jewish folk music.
