While: Ms. Zajick laughingly calls herself a hermit, she is known as a unifying factor in a cast, taking time to make other singers, chorus and stage hands feel included. She shared the following thoughts with us via e-mail.

If you happen to be a hermit, singing opera is a great life! As for socializing after rehearsals or performances, I'd rather steep myself in a good book or write poetry, paint, or just think. When I do feel the need to connect I do it through the telephone or the Internet.

I use the Internet as a communication device and as a way to feel the pulse of the audience that sees me, at least the ones that use the Net. Most of the feedback I get from the Net has been wonderfully positive. I also use it as a kind of traveling library and a tool to find scholarly articles on psychiatric, medical or other esoteric items.

I think the total quality of an opera production is more important than "community," but a sense of comradeship is very rewarding. Unfortunately it doesn't happen often because of the sheer number of elements it takes to pull off an opera at its highest level. A million things can go wrong. Community? I think it is a mistake to try and make your work a replacement for family or community. That's like mixing business with pleasure, and it interferes with delivering the goods. I consider it unprofessional.

I never feel at a loss after a performance. If anything, I feel relieved that I can go home and let my hair down and read or sleep, because by then I am very tired. Performing takes a lot out of me. Occasionally I feel my lack of roots, but then the grass is always greener where one isn't standing.

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At the top of the pyramid, many an artist basks in the memory of some great nay-sayer who tried, back when, to block the way. "Give it up," the false prophet advised. "You're no good." Dolora Zajick tells another tale. "When I started, I had no high notes, no low notes and no coloratura," she says. "My voice was ugly and loud."

Spend a few hours with the reigning dramatic mezzo of the age, and you will recognize the comment as entirely characteristic – frank, unsentimental, unsparingly analytical. "I don’t have a natural vocal technique," she continues, "It took a while to fish out what was in there. I had the great fortune of having a technician as a teacher."

When it comes to technique, Zajick is a believer. "The greatest artists are sublimators," she declares, "and technically oriented. When you're connected technically, you empty out all the energy that is in you -- that is you. All the anguish, joy, everything. That's what people pay to see.

The technician who helped Zajick on her way is Ted Puffer, formerly of the University of Nevada and head of Opera Nevada, now on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music. "He had something to offer, and I had the ability to absorb," Zajick explains simply.

Sure enough, no one sneezes at Zajick's range any more (C below middle C to the Queen of the Night's high F, which she sings not falsetto but full voice). As for her timbre, it is powerfully seductive, full of rich color. The authority with which she commands her instrument verges on the awesome. In 1991 Birgit Nilsson said, "Zajick’s voice is the only one existing today without any competition in the world." Nor has any credible competition materialized

In the meantime. Last May, Die Welt proclaimed, "She has a voice on which one could raise whole temple complexes."

The occasion for this tribute was her portrayal of Amneris in Pet Halmen's new Aida at the Berlin State Opera, but if blowing off the roof were not just a figure of speech, this daughter of the pharaohs would have practically every major opera house in the world open to the sky.

Zajick's Azucena, complete with the part's seldom-heard high C and spot-on trills, has unleashed the same sort of tumult. Her Eboli in Don Carlo too has been greatly admired. This season at the Met, she added Ulrica to her list. "It bothers me a little that it's just one scene," she said months before the premiere, "but it does have its own little splash."

Little splash? As the clairvoyant, Zajick delivered the visceral thrill that the rest of the revival lacked. The word on Zajick in the business is that she "always delivers" -- even when a stageful of other people do not. Under these circumstances, triumph is not all it might be. "When we have a really good cast, conductor and stage director, I come off best," she says. "With lesser colleagues, I have to compensate,and that's no fun." But that is not the reason she is retiring Ulrica after a single season. "Maybe I'11 do it again if I'm sixty-five and my voice drops," she says. "Ulrica is really a contralto."

Zajick likes clean distinctions. She positions herself as a high mezzo. "I can pop an occasional high note," she says, "but I can't hang there." Her best notes, in her own view, are her three B-flats. Saint-Saens' Dalila is an ideal fit. She believes there would be many more dramatic mezzos around if they weren't so busy trying to turn themselves into sopranos.

Don't get her started on vocal technique unless you have plenty of time and really want to know. "You should be able to bring the head voice down to a third below the top of the chest voice," she announces. "It will be weak, but it will be there. And you should be able to bring the chest voice at least a major third above the break where the chest voice ordinarily ends. This gives you strength in both directions. You should be able to go from above the break to below and back on all vowels, without a break. When you can do this, you've mastered technique. You can choose. Say you have a B-flat below the staff. You can sing head. You can sing chest. You can sing half and half, or more one than the other. In Mozart you'd usually use head voice, but in 'Non più di fiori' [Idomeneo] you must use some chest -- though some people treat chest voice like a disease. In ‘Voi che sapete,' the middle C must be head."

How about that trill of hers, which passes muster even with that exacting connoisseur of ornament Will Crutchfield? "I just learned," Zajick replies. "It took a long time. I started thinking about it as a student. It was in the back of my mind. I fiddled around. I needed it for Trovatore. Now I have it." For the role of Adalgisa, which she took on last year, she needed a pianissimo high C. Now she has that, too.

Zajick has dismantled her voice from top to bottom, examining each and every working part. Articles about her often hearken back to her brief stint as a pre-med student at the University of Nevada, in Reno. "I switched to music early, because I would rather be in rehearsal than memorizing nerves and bones and the intricacies of biochemistry."

All the same, her clinical mindset lodges very deep. Everything she tackles is dissected, anatomized, diagnosed. "I'm a stylist," Zajick says. "I won't sing a part unless I've got the style down." For each act of an opera, she prepares a workbook containing, in parallel, the complete text(phrase by phrase, with repetitions), a verbatim translation and a phonetic transcription in the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Zajick's acting has rarely been singled out, but then, a singer is so often at the mercy of stage directors. "Do you know how many productions I've been in where the most important thing you do is usurped by the decor? An Aida in which at every important reaction the lights would switch or a column would open?"

No, she would rather not name names. No, she would rather not speak of her colleagues, neither to censure nor to praise. Well, there was a Trovatore in Toulouse that was "quite wonderful," in the round, on a raked stage, with a unit set, with lots of action and lots of interaction. "What looked like a sky at one moment would be a castle wall the next moment." The director? "Nicolas Joel l -- a tyrant but a genius. And no smoke!" Zajick is allergic to smoke -- cigarette smoke, pipe smoke, the smoke they use onstage for atmosphere. Her contract has a no-smoke clause. A new "cracked vapor" system called DF-50 is O.K. with her, however, and she carries the product description in her compendious leather organizer.

For the fact that she needs that organizer, she has Ted Puffer to thank: not only did he teach her technique, he also pushed her out of the nest. As a novice, she expected to stay on in Reno, "living a cozy life," as she has put it, and singing in Puffer's shows. At his insistence, she struck out for New York. When Juilliard's doors failed to open to her, she landed at the Manhattan School of Music, where she spent three lean years. Reports that she slept in Central Park are true. How long?

"On and off for about a year," she answers. "It's not that dangerous if you have your feelers out. My last year, I took out a big loan from school, several thousand dollars, and started living decently: one bed in a room, with a roof over my head." Church jobs helped, again in more ways than one. In 1982, on a single Sunday, fellow choristers at the First Presbyterian Church in New York took up a collection from the congregation to send Zajick to the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. She came home with a bronze medal, the first American to place in a dozen years. Stage director Lou Galterio, who knew her from Manhattan, started talking to Elizabeth Crittenden of Columbia Artists Management, who brought Zajick to the attention of Terence A McEwen, then general director of San Francisco Opera, who accepted her into his company's young-artists program. After three years of intensive grooming, she emerged in May 1986 in Il Trovatore, revived especially for her with a cast that included Ghena Dimitrova and France Bonisolli. In McEwen's words, Zajick "walked off with the show." She was just past thirty.

Today her rapidly expanding repertory encompasses Russian (Marfa in Khovanshchina, Tchaikovsky's Maid of Orleans), verismo (Adriana Lecouvreur's Princess) and French (Dalila, Massenet's Herodiade,which may be heard on the new Sony recording). Not Carmen: "I'm an actress," Zajick explains, "not a dancer." Ortrud lies ahead, as do La Favorite and Santuzza. She is hoping for Meyerbeer's Fid~s. In her spare time and for her own enjoyment, Zajick is realizing the bass of the score of Handel's Serse, hoping to bring it to the stage someday.

In November, Zajick invited me for a demonstration of the technique on which she has built her career. While her mentor, Ted Puffer, was recuperating from an illness, she IL took over his most advanced students from the Manhattan School.

Puffer's technique, its most noted practitioner maintains, suits voices of all sizes. The voices of the students she will be working with today, however, are big ones. "Technique," Zajick believes, "is specific things done to achieve specific results. It's not done with allegory.'Sing like you have soda pop up your nose and going up between your eyes,' or 'Sing like a morning meadow.' When a teacher says this kind of thing, you know you're in trouble."

Her own image for what's going on is strictly mechanical. "You're putting a nozzle on an air flow," she tells Lillian, twenty-four, a soprano with what sounded like the makings of a Donna Anna, "but you've got to have an air flow to put a nozzle on. Does that make sense?"

Arguably, this is no image at all but more like an engineer's schematic. The air now is an air ~ow, after all. In anatomy, they call that nozzle by another name (trachea, or windpipe) but "nozzle" is descriptive. The object of Zajick’s exertions is a quality she calls focus, which, though the term is borrowed from optics, may not be an image either. "Say nyin-nyin-nyin!" Zajick commands, a San Francisco dead ringer for Henry Higgins, producing sounds of old Peking. "Yek-yek-yek!," sings Lillian, holding her nose in one hand, her chin in the other, tip of an index finger to alveolar ridge, then repeating the exercise with hand to the belly. "Again!" Zajick orders. "Nasty! Like a witch."

"Yek-yek-yek!"

"Do you feel your diaphragm moving up or out?" Zajick wants to know. "Both," says Lillian. "Good!" Zajick declares. "It should be both." Later I check my ear against Zajick’s. "Wasn’t Lillian singing ‘yek-yek-yek’?" "That’s a hard one," Zajick says. "And she had a cold."

Her next visitor is Phil, twenty-four, a baritone with the build of the martial-arts threat he used to be. "Focus from your diaphragm," she tells him. "It’s not brute strength you need but coordinated strength. If it’s misapplied, strength works against you." So there is Phil, arpeggiating, moaning, baying, all with the object of toning up the diaphragm, building a doughnut at the midriff that may look like fat, says Zajick, but is actually muscle. Only singers who sing right have it.

Presently, Phil swings into a Handel aria, at first a little rockily. As Zajick goes over the technicalities of the aria, issues of vocal control shade into considerations of art. "The fatal day is come!," Phil trumpets, but the mechanic hears a glitch. "It’s very hard to sing a d after an l," she advises Phil. He tries again, improving. "How do you keep that classy sound without losing your energy?" Zajick asks rhetorically. "You don’t want to get arty. Coordinate accents! That immediately will give you lots of energy."

Willpower, cognition, study, patience: these are the tools of Zajick’s craft, which she knows how to pass on. Though the approach has worked for her, it does have limitations. There is something sphinxlike about her, something abstract, withheld. There are mysteries of art that analysis cannot capture, locked doors to which the key is intuition. So far, Zajick seems mostly to have let them be.

By her own account, Zajick prefers, in her work and her life, to operate on the intellectual level. She is not what you call a confiding person. Back in the files are some stories that give a few glimpses into her background, but not many. The most touching, from Operaglass involves her father, whom she paid back for an interstate bus ticket with tickets to her San Francisco Opera debut. But family is no subject for exploration. She allows that she is the first of five children. Of her three brothers, the oldest could have been a Wotan. We move on.

Zajick lights up when she speaks of her home in Nevada, to which she returns for at least three months a year, much of it devoted to reading (poetry, psychology, anthropology, history, natural sciences). She loves her garden, pictures of which she shares with the infectious delight of a proud parent. And what are these little faces popping up from the pond? Frogs! "I know more about toads and frogs," Zajick says, "than anyone else I know!"

Star though she is, she views opera as a very strange world, almost a madhouse. "Artists tend to have affective disorders, which is why they have more to put out. The field is full of people who need to be the center of attention. It's suspended between high art and a primal scream. The business is full of egomaniacs, top to bottom. I've seen some real lulus." She hands me Kay Redfield Jamison's book Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. "It's all in here."

Zajick does not disavow a need of her own to be the center of attention. But her degree of self-knowledge, her methodical rigor, her need to categorize, these put her in a space apart. "I am somewhat of an anomaly," she admits. "I'm driven more by intrinsic things than many of my colleagues are. Some of my colleagues say they love to go on, but I see them sweating. For me, the most rewarding experience is often a Sitzprobe, when you can really enjoy what you're doing. I enjoy music for the music itself."

And what about the extrinsic things? Money? "I like to get paid." Applause? "I definitely appreciate applause at the end of a performance. I connect with an audience. I feel that. When people stand up and cheer – nobody can take that away from you.

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"I’ve got this big mama with a big voice," was how the stage director Lou Galtiero described a student in his class at the Manhattan School of Music to the artist’s manager, Elizabeth Crittenden. That was in 1982 and he was referring to Dolora Zajick, a young mezzo-soprano who had just been awarded the bronze medal in the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. (Her name, which is Czechoslovak and pronounced ZAH-chick, was spelled Jakic then; she has since added a "k" in a rather dubious attempt to make pronunciation easier.)

The mama is not so big anymore, thanks to dieting, but the voice is even bigger. Moreover, it is an instrument that has the same sound throughout its range without any audible shifting of gears as she passes from the lower range to the middle to the top. She is also blessed with an exciting edge to the voice that allows her to cut through an orchestra and ensemble and always be heard.

The normal mezzo range is generally two octaves, from A flat to A flat; Ms Zajick can descend to a solid G on the bottom and rise to a brilliant high C. These gifts have made her that rarest of vocal birds these days, a true Verdi dramatic mezzo, capable of taking on those great parts requiring the utmost in beauty and stamina – Azucena, Amneris, Eboli, Preziosilla and Ulrica – which have generally languished unfilled since the retirement of Giulietta Simionato and the winding down of Fiorenza Cossotto’s career.

At Ms Zajick’s debut in "Il Trovatore" last season at the Metropolitan Opera, Will Crutchfield wrote in The Times: "Her assumption of Azucena was distinguished by certain details of craftsmanship that have long been rare in Verdian mezzo parts. She commanded the range of the role easily, from the strong chest notes at the bottom to the high C, which is usually left out but which Miss Zajick hit square on with no apparent effort."

Ms Zajick was awarded the telecast of the opera over Ms Cossotto and was given the plum of this season’s opening night, in what many consider to be her finest part to date, Amneris in "Aida." Donal Henahan of The Times wrote of that performance: "Perhaps the most deserved triumph came to Dolora Zajick . . . [Her] voice tastefully controlled but capable of house filling outbursts when necessary, was firm and focused." He noted, however, that she was ". . . not yet an actress of great distinction or immediate stage presence." Ms Zajick, in that performance, took the fortissimo high C flats in the Triumphal Scene that most mezzos either fake or leave out.

At the age of 36, Ms Zajick, who will be singing two more Azucenas at the Met this week, on Monday and Thursday, as well as a concert version of Tchaikovsky’s "Orleanskaya Dyeva" at Carnegie Hall on Feb. 28, qualifies as a late bloomer. She comes from a large family with "lots of brothers and sisters," as she puts it, in Reno, Nev., where she enrolled at the state university and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

"I was scratching for money always, working as a bus girl or at a hospital, to put myself through school," she says matter of factly. "I was always musical, but I had no technique. Learning to shift vocal gears didn’t come easily, and I couldn’t even manage a top F." The man she credits with rescuing her was Ted Puffer, the manager and director of the Nevada Opera, who began giving her voice lessons. She still works with him today on technique and repertory.

Never headstrong or impulsive about a career, her conservatism seems to have paid off. She has always insisted on being prepared and ready for each step. It was Mr. Puffer who told her when it was time to go to New York, in 1982. Once there, no one seemed to know what to do with her. She was turned down for classes at Juilliard as well as for membership in the Met’s youth development program. She was accepted at Manhattan, and once more discovered new mentors, Helen Vanni, with whom she studied voice, and Mr. Galtiero.

Ms Zajick acknowledges times were rough while she was at the Manhattan School. Slowly, without bitterness, she tells of occasions when she had no place to live, sleeping on park benches and in the school lounge. Friends took her in and she did housework in exchange for a room. She painted eggs for holiday decorations, even setting up a stand outside of Macy’s where she was regularly chased by the police. ("Maybe you’d better not put that in; after all, it was illegal!") She speaks without embarrassment and without the defensive arrogance of someone who has overcome adversity and flaunts it.

When she decided it was time to attempt the competition in Moscow, there was no money for the trip. With help from members of the First Presbyterian Church in New York, where she was a choir soloist, and the board of directors of Manhattan, she scraped enough together to make it. When she returned with the bronze she was the only non-Soviet and the first American in 12 years to place in the competition.

It was a turning point. Richard Adams, now dean at Manhattan, and others in the administration helped her obtain a $15,000 bank loan. The manager, Ms Crittenden, who has built a reputation of old-style nurturing of raw young talent, took her on as a client. She was accepted in the Merola Opera Program of the San Francisco company and brought slowly along, watched carefully by Terence McEwen, then general manager, and the music director, the late Sir John Pritchard.

In 1986 she opened the San Francisco spring season in "Trovatore" with Ghena Dimitrova and Franco Ronisolli. She won the Richard Tucker award and gave four crucial auditions – for Riccardo Muti and Mstislav Rostropovich and for two opera companies, the Chicago Lyric and Houston. She was hired by them all. She was also offered assignments as an emergency standby for the roles of Amneris and Eboli at the Met and turned them down. By the time the 1988-89 season came around she had made her debut at the Met and in Chicago, Vienna, Paris, London, Rome and Verona. She has not forgotten who helped her get where she is and is lavish in praise of all of them. In December she sang a benefit for the First Presbyterian Church to say thank you.

Ms Zajick is still very much like a schoolgirl when she discusses her idols, Fedora Barbieri, Ms Simionato and the late Ebe Stignani. "I would love to coach with Barbieri or Simionato, but it’s really not necessary now. I listen to their records and I know what they did and why they did it. Besides I want my Italian to be perfect before I meet them. It’s good now, but I want to have all the colloquialisms and idioms down pat." She has been offered Strauss and Wagner roles, but she’s not German-oriented (except for Mahler) and feels that a different technique is required. She thinks the bel canto repertory is great for the voice, but only Adalgisa ("Norma"), Giovanna Seymour ("Anna Bolena") and Leonora ("La Favorita") interest her. The Rossini serious parts she can’t take seriously and she believes she is unsuited to the comic ones.

What Ms Zajick does want to do is the Handel repertory, which she believes keeps the voice in shape (she has been know to vocalize a Handel aria or two between acts of "Aida"). She is drawn to Slavic music, and in addition to the Tchaikovsky "Dyeva" here will sing Marfa in Mussorgsky’s "Khovanshschina" for San Francisco in the fall, as well as record Rimsky-Korsakov’s "Mlada" with Michael Tilson Thomas and Prokofiev’s "Alexander Nevsky" with Mr. Rostropovich. She is being coached in Russian now. In the future, Dalila, yes, Carmen, no. Despite her success, she is not returning to the Met next season.

"We’re still sort of feeling each other out," she explains. "I will be back the following year for more Amnerises and Ebolis." La Scala, however, has offered her a multitude of roles. The Italians have given up on pronouncing her name; to them she is simply "La Dolora."

She has obviously been warned about interview pitfalls and says flatly, "I will have no comment on any aspect of my private life and I will venture no opinions of any of my colleagues." Although she has an aura of guileless honesty and vulnerability, she also displays the determination for the present that is so evident in her past. "Sometimes you have to go along," she says with a shy smile, "but I have a quiet way of digging my heels when it’s necessary."

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