HOW BARBARA HENDRICKS SANG HER WAY OUT OF RURAL ARKANSAS, ONTO THE WORLD’S BIGGEST OPERA STAGES AND INTO THE LIVES OF REFUGEES ACROSS THE GLOBE. BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE
T
MATTIAS EDWALL
here’s a recording of Barbara Hendricks singing Maurice Ravel’s “Vocalise en forme de habanera” with the National Orchestra of Lyon, France, on New Year’s Eve 1988. Even at two-and-a-half minutes — a breezy length, by classical standards — it’s a staggeringly difficult piece to sing, with fluttering trills and virtuosic leaps and rapidfire swoops up and down the scale. Chances are, if you’re harboring a flaw or two in your technique, Ravel’s brief and wordless wonder will find that flaw and crack it wide open for all to hear. No such thing happened on the last day of 1988. Hendricks’ soprano glides around seductively and deftly, seeming to change colors in midair — voluptuous and warm one moment, feathery and delicate the next. It’s an electrifying sample of what she can do vocally, and a three-minute master class in human agility. It’s also but one of the ways she has used her voice over her lifetime. Now 72 years old and a Swedish citizen, Hendricks has carved out parallel paths as a world-class lyric soprano and longtime ambassador of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. She’s been speaking out against oppressive political systems for longer than many of us have been alive — and at a time when celebrities weren’t necessarily expected to do so. Once, in her operatic heyday, a journalist asked her why she had stopped singing to devote her time to working for refugees. She explained that she had, in fact, not stopped singing at all, and was fully booked. “I assumed that since my career was going full blast,” she said, “and I was singing for full halls in Europe, North and South America and Asia, I did not need the publicity for myself. … I prefer that my career serves this important cause and not viceversa.” When I spoke with her from her home north of Stockholm earlier this year, she made it clear that she’s come to see her activism as a calling, one she answered because of where she was born, when she was born, and to whom she was born. Hendricks’ voice was heard for the first time in 1948, at her grandparents’ farmhouse in rural Stephens (Ouachita County), where she was born. She remembers her childhood as pastoral, if regimented. Calendar years were marked by week-long church revivals in the sweltering Arkansas humidity,
22 JULY 2021
ARKANSAS TIMES
