More insights into Maestro Frisell's life
What I write here are personal anecdotes that Maestro shared with me during our time together both in lessons and later in the Nursing home where he was confined for the last couple of years of his life. He had had a stroke, and with no immediate family to take care of him, he was sent to a nursing home in Far Rockaway, a peninsula at the edge of Queens, New York. As he recovered, he quickly regained control of his mind, but not completely his body, and was forced to stay there. Visiting him in that place was similar to the scene in 'Amadeus' when the priest visits Salieri. He was surrounded by insane and incapacitated people. He was desperate to escape, but could not. He still felt that he had so much more to contribute. He could no longer teach, but spent his time coordinating with his students in publishing his vocal works and writing his novels.
He worked as a youth at the local Oper house in New Orleans. There he heard the greatest singer of the time. He was called to war and served as a nurse in the navy. When he returned he went back to the opera, and was quickly recruited to work on the shows themselves, leading to him directing several productions. He was also responsible for driving the famous singers around, helping them with any issues they had, and from his stories, there were plenty! He also sang some roles himself, but of this he didn't speak too much. He was, when I met him, a very eccentric and prolific person. He wrote novels, librettos, voice manuals, and even a book about the sexual horoscope (he was very interested in astrology).
As far as vocal technique, Maestra said that as a young man he was struggling to find his voice when he met, what he described as a small quiet man from South America who told him he would teach him an old bel canto technique, now mostly lost, that dealt with developing the head voice. He said that he studied briefly with this person, but most of his insights came from his own experiments, and what he described as divine insights from higher spiritual realms.
He had many students throughout his years. The most famous being Sandor Konya, and Flaviono Labo. Labo was a tragic story, as he died in a car accident in Italy. He was doing very well in his career and had bought a sports car. Maestro said that he had tried to dissuade Labo from buying the thing, saying it would kill him someday.
When I met him, Maestro was living in Sidney Portiers old apartment in Hell's Kitchen. He was 80 at the time. He had a few loyal students in New York and a few foreign ones that would come to visit. At this age he was quite eccentric and would sometimes go into very long soliloquies about the corruption in the United States Government, or the discovery of Alien's or some other drama. It took some patience to get through lessons, but his insights, not only on technique but also on style, were amazing. He could sing a very robust high C, and would often demonstrate, though because his voice at this point was so 'mixed' that there was no difference between chest and head voices.
Maestro wrote three major voice treatises in his life. The first was the Tenor/Soprano/Baritone voice group, when he was quite young. The books are an introduction to his head voice development techniques. In my opinion in is an amazing but also cryptic set of books that are quite difficult to understand for the average reader. I edited a kindle version of the book, and both this and the original are available on Amazon. The second book was 'A Singer's Notebook'. Now out of print this book in my opinion is the most accessible he wrote. There is not a separate book for each voice, and it is a bit longer and cleared about the technique. I have uploaded a PDF version of this book on to the site. His final work was 'Verismo', a sprawling manual about everything Verismo and the Italian style of singing. It is an incredible read for those with a deliberate mind and high intellect. It is also available on Amazon and was edited by one of his students. You can reach out to me if you have any further questions about Maestro, through my email, Dzigrino@yahoo.com
thank you for reading!
Dmitri Zigrino