By the time she was done lifting a chair during the aria ("to help keep your ribs out"), got rid of her shoes ("so you won't lean forward"), pressed her cheeks together with the back of her hands ("to force the air upward, but keeping your shoulders high, which you don't get if you use your palms"), told to ignore the audience ("to hell with them"), and witnessed an intense discussion between Hampson and pianist Steven Bailey about the sound of the spinning-wheel — Viola was about as shell-shocked as a quarterback after a dozen concussions.

One thing though: she might not have realized, but everybody else — cheering lustily — certainly has: what seemed impossible 40 minutes ago, her getting that note right, did happen.

Enjoyable theater as Terence McNally's Master Class may be, the real drama of a Meistersinger working with students is far more intense and moving. Vocal master classes, in my experience, are never about the "star" (if you listen to Callas' classes, you will find none of the preening and carrying on McNally ascribed to her), and this is especially true about Hampson.

He cares passionately about the music and his young charges. On one hand, he uses intelligent, self-deprecating humor (talking about his golf game, for example) to put the young people at ease; on the other hand, he is involved in the class with a serious, almost scary intensity. In fact, as the baritone was circling Patricia Barboza (a soprano from Concord, originally from Pakistan) working on Mahler's Ich atmet' einen linden Duft, he corrected her posture, led her around, sang to her, towered over pianist Satoko Leisek, pressed in first his own cheeks, then the singer's ("can you make your fingers meet?") — a bizarre image sprang to mind.

What Hampson resembles the most at his most intense (which is pretty much all the way through class, regardless of all the banter, smiles and laughter) and most effective, is a Filipino faith-healer reaching into the guts of their "patients" with bare hands, removing the "bad part" and seeing the sick rise and walk away in glowing health. The big difference, of course, is that the Manila "surgery" is a terrible hoax and Hampson's work is real, with lasting, beneficial effect.

Heather Clemens (from Moss Beach) and Elizabeth Amisano (from Elmira, New York) went through the same hour-long, "instant fix" Viola and Barboza experienced. In the heat and light of Hampson's furious involvement, they all improved drastically, internalizing, and actually using basic information they might have heard hundreds of times before. Here and now, the manipulation took place in the guts.

Thursday's master class was both similar to and different from his Wigmore Hall appearance I attended in November. In London, Hampson worked with brilliant young singers, at the beginning of promising careers. In San Francisco, the four sopranos were all more in need of a voice lesson than a final push before appearing in Wigmore Hall themselves. The Hampson method was the same, the transformation from weak to good much more noticeable, more dramatic, more impressive.

Impressive too is how little Hampson tries to impress the audience, how he deflects the young singers' hero worship. At the beginning of the class, the "star" disappears, the working-teacher taking his place. He wants no attention on himself.

Where should the attention be? Hampson's mantra is simple and powerful: H — B — S. Over and over, he tells singers and their accompanists, he pleads, he yells, he repeats: H to hear what the opening note, the initial phrase will sound like. B to take a breath. S to Sing. If you don't know where you want to go, you can't get there, he says. Must hear what you want to sing. To the pianists, he repeats all evening long: wait until you "hear" the singer hear the music inside, and only then begin to play. He stops them: "Did you hear what she was hearing?" Many times, when the answer is "no," Hampson says: "Exactly. Because she didn't hear it either."

Breath, obviously, is at the heart of the physical end of the singer's triptych (the others are "the spiritual," meaning the inexplicable magic of music and "the emotional"), and I have seen, here and elsewhere, Hampson improve breathing technique "instantly," time and again. He has some standard tricks — holding the chair is his favorite — and he has a knack for explaining principles with great economy, but it is his understanding of the students, his empathy and physical/total involvement that makes the difference.

Along with the physical and practical, Hampson's emphasis on the text, the poetry, the meaning, the idea — the sources of music seems to communicate as well and as effectively. He tells the singer to breathe through the nose AND mouth, while warning her that "German romanticism must never be sentimental . . . it's all about release." Hear the music, he says, then touching her face: "breathe into THIS space."

Hampson's advice to focus on the beauty of the scene depicted in the music is simultaneous with the observation that "projection" is for physical objects, the task before the singer is to make the voice vibrate the right way. Goethe's unhappiness with Schubert ("the song is no longer the poem, it's something new and different") is mentioned even as he is explaining that the voice goes sharp with too much air pressure, flat because of muscle tension. Through it all, he urges the singers — often in vain — to enjoy what they do, to acknowledge every little success, "not just remember the inevitable failure . . . find the pleasure that's inside the music you're singing."

Hampson practices the spiritual-emotional-physical synchronicity he preaches.

(Janos Gereben is arts editor of the Post Newspaper Group and technology editor for www.the451.com. You can contact him at janos451@earthlink.net.)

©2002 Janos Gereben, all rights reserved