Wherever I happen to be, I always head for the nearest body of water. It may be because I grew up near water, in Florida. Here in Chicago, where I’m working on a singing engagement, I often go down to the river and spend time looking into its depths, surrendering to the current, its smell, its essence, the noise it makes. The water gives me a sense of breadth that I don’t get in any other environment. Banks – river banks, shorelines in general – are my favourite place to be. Something deep down within me needs to be close to water.

Every body of water has its own individual smell. The sea off Florida has a saline smell. In San Francisco you have the ocean, which is salty, too, of course, but has a fresher fragrance to it that you don’t get in Florida. Different waters have different sounds. The Chicago River with its modest swell, makes a gentle shhh, shhhhhh noise … curving past the houses like a lullaby. The ocean has a rougher sound to it, like tttttshhhhhooo, tttshhhhhhooo, with crashing waves and spume. Water is like an animal talking to me: I can here its song when I’m swimming in it. It sings to me like a mother sings: a low, quiet, nurturing voice.

Ronnita Miller by the Chicago River. Looking out across water gives her an inner sense of breadth – even in the city, with tower blocks and bridges on all sides © Nikki Segarra

 

It may be that I like gazing out across water because it is a touchstone back to when I was floating in my mother’s tummy, surrounded by liquid, feeling her heart beating. Perhaps I like being at the water’s edge because there’s so much below the surface that we know nothing about. There’s so much to learn about the depths. It’s like a huge subconscious waiting to be discovered. Someone once said: we know more about outer space than we do about the ocean, although most of the globe is covered in water and humans are made up mostly of water. Maybe it’s a common thread running through humanity: down the ages, everywhere, people have settled near water, near lakes, seas, rivers.

When I’m next to water, I can’t do any work. Ok, I’m thinking about a particular role and I’ve got a head full of stuff, but as for listening to music in preparation for a new opera or rehearsing my lines in my head or learning tunes, not a chance. I can’t do that looking out over some body of water. There I blot out any urge to work. I let go of mental stuff. I just am. And yet the expanding essence of opera and classical music is totally suited to that environment, to this breadth of scape.

Wagner and water go together brilliantly, too. The prelude to RHINEGOLD, for instance, captures the essence of water perfectly. It starts off in E flat, a note that simultaneously conveys all the calm of an ocean and all the upheaval. Every time I hear or sing a role in the RING, I can feel the music crashing over me like one of those waves that gathers and rises and consumes everything in its path. The first time I listened to the RING cycle from beginning to end, from the first E flat in RHINEGOLD to the last note in TWILIGHT OF THE GODS, I grasped why people travel far and wide to hear the music, why it has this fanatical following.

I weep every time I hear TWILIGHT OF THE GODS drawing to a close. It’s as if we all have the same yearning within us and at that very moment the yearning is being fulfilled – the wish that everything could return to square one, be restored to its proper place. Like someone pressing ‘reset’ and fixing it so that humankind in its entirety could be safe and secure. Those last bars articulate a universal hope that we could be borne out in all the decisions we take – regardless of what’s going on in the world, of how mean things are getting, of the sacrifices we are being asked to make: the hope that we’ll be ok. Don’t we all yearn for a person or place that provides us with a feeling of security? The way I see it, water and Wagner’s RING are both imbued with the oceanic sensation of peace, security and protection – despite the frightening depths.

Ronnita Miller at the Wells Street Bridge in downtown Chicago. In her words, water gives her strength, an energy that is also found in the music of Wagner © Nikki Segarra

 

I'm now in Berlin reprising the role of Mary in THE FLYING DUTCHMAN. Out on the high seas you can disappear, fall overboard, get bashed about by the waves – but then Mary comes along, a beacon of a character. The mezzo-soprano is usually the protagonist representing security and solidity, and Mary introduces a stabilising element to all the drama involving the cursed and rootless mariner, the uprooted Senta and the dreams they weave together.

I’ve been singing Wagner for twelve years now, with only short pauses in between. Each time I sing one of the roles, I learn something new or hear something I’d never picked up on before. And yet it was kind of a fluke that I got involved with Wagner in the first place! If you’d asked me, I’d never have thought I’d start singing his material. The tunes are so well-known, but even so I’d never envisaged myself appearing in one of his works. And then I kicked off my career with Wagner. Ever since then he’s been a constant in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Berlin. Not that I sought out Wagner. The music found me.