Short Features

It is summer 1999. She is at Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass., singing in Italian in front of about 100 other students: "When will the day come when I will see your face?"

"That was fine," comments the professor leading the master class. "But you need to get connected to the text. Can you think of a time when you missed someone?"

Indeed, she can. Ludwig has just graduated a year early from high school and has been studying voice at Tanglewood for eight weeks, the longest she has ever been apart from her love, jazz pianist Ryan Parker. Ludwig sings the song again, this time imagining Parker's face. Everything else recedes and she is singing only to him. Within two or three measures, she is sobbing in front of the professor and the assembled students.

"That was the best thing that ever could have happened to me as a singer," Ludwig says today. She has since learned to express her emotions in her singing and now audiences hear but do not see her tears.

At the appointed hour in the Bratton Recital Hall, Ludwig stands radiant and statuesque in a long red sheath. The audience would never guess that she has accidentally pulled out her insulin pump in the process of getting dressed.

The program begins with a set of Debussy songs, dappled with high clear notes, like the light in an Impressionist painting. German songs by Wolf follow. In three, she must start singing before the accompaniment begins, using her perfect pitch to pull the note out of thin air. Next come four short love songs, very high, flashy, surprising.

The program includes translations, but these aren't needed to get the emotional gist of each song. Ludwig is French and dreamy one moment; Germanic and indignant the next. At the end, she ties on an apron, and gives a musical lesson on cake baking. In an hour she has taken her audience from "The Bliss of Love" through "Homesickness," "You Have Destroyed Me," and back to bliss—the bliss of baking a chocolate cake so light, it's "almost like a soufflé."

With the recital over, Ludwig can return to her normal life—teaching more than 25 lessons each week, playing the organ in two churches and singing or playing the piano in various gigs, in addition to her full-time studies. She will be singing the national anthem at graduation.

Ludwig entered UNH four years ago with a dual major in piano and voice, but soon realized she didn't want to spend four hours a day at the piano in a solitary practice room. She was in love with Ryan Parker and she loved having a full life.

She was, however, fortunate to have more than one gift and fortunate that singers can't practice for too many hours a day. A singer, she is convinced, also needs a reservoir of experience to draw on for the acting aspect of singing.

She and Parker are preparing for their June wedding and thinking about having a family. The future may include graduate school in voice and some combination of a day job as a wedding planner or florist, singing and teaching.

"As a singer," she says, "you have to live."

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