BIRGIT NILSSON IN THE ROLE OF TEACHER

With her hands cupped in an expression of supplication, the acclaimed Heldensopran , standing solidly center stage, gives a young mezzo some pointers on German pronunciation--and a couple of hundred onlookers seated around the auditorium hang on her every consonant.

“It should be more like scheeeeeeaahhrp-fooong ,” the imposing figure drawls, stretching the word out like glottal taffy. “Is very difficult word to sing, no? But it means creation , and this is no small thing--especially to Wagner. Creation was a big thing to him.”

When this particular Valkyrie utters the word Wagner , ears prick up even more around Smothers Auditorium on the Malibu campus of Pepperdine University. For this low-key, affable lady and teacher is not just any dramatic soprano with a working knowledge of the German repertory. She is Birgit Nilsson--no longer immolating herself as Bruennhilde, true, but still representing 30 years of mainline Wagner tradition.

So when, at this master class in this unlikely location on this glorious Friday morning, Nilsson gives a pointer to an aspiring mezzo about vocal nuance in one of Wagner’s “Wesendonck” Lieder, that mezzo is all eyes, ears and trembling lips--even if the young singer, a student at Pepperdine, hadn’t even been born when Nilsson, her temporary teacher, made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera.

As the song winds down to its lento conclusion, Nilsson stops the student again.

“You have chosen such a hard thing to sing,” she says with a sigh. “But you are doing so well with it. You must be remembering, though, that Wagner makes a lot of pauses in the middle of phrases. Don’t let this make you breathe, or let down. You must always be thinking ahead of these, always forward , because the phrase is not at all over with yet.”

Then Nilsson nods, and leans back on one heel, head cocked at an angle. The pianist takes up where the music was stopped before, and the singer, her eyes firmly on Nilsson’s, tries it again.

“Better,” Nilsson says, smiling. “Better.”

That smile comes often to her lips, even in these days when she is retired from the stage and concerned more with organizing Scandinavian Airlines’ opera and music tours than with how to underline the text in Turandot’s “In questa reggia.”

At 67, Nilsson looks and sounds well, her laughter quick, and her opinions about music, Wagner and the retired life direct and uncluttered with undue deliberation. She takes perhaps a bit less care with her appearance--after all, she is no longer a reigning diva--but, then, she feels less pressure to put on a show, she admits in a conversation held the day before her master classes began..

“I’m quite comfortable these days,” says the woman who, in the 1970s, forsook singing in the United States due to an imbroglio with the Internal Revenue Service. (The IRS claimed she owed $260,176 in back taxes. In 1979 she began paying it off in installments.) “I don’t have to worry much about my future that way. But of course one misses the singing.

“Still,” she adds with a sigh, leaning back in her chair, “one must be realistic. Everything has an end, and it’s better not to sing than to make an unfavorable performance. And I was getting more and more nervous about what I still had left, vocally.”

Nilsson smiles. “When you are young, you have everything to gain and nothing to lose. When you are my age, you have everything to lose--and not much left to gain anymore. I was singing so long, and so late, and had all the roles I could really be singing. . . . That should have made it harder to give up, somehow. But it didn’t.”

There were no grand farewell tours marking Nilsson’s departure from the operatic and concert stages--although she was allowed to sing the sole encore, a Swedish folk song, at the Metropolitan’s centennial megaconcert in 1983, since that event served as her Lebewohl to the house. The ex-diva explains that such a tour “probably would have been embarrassing.”

“When you get to the place I was in two or three years ago,” she continues with a shake of her head, “singing a recital--or, God forbid, an Elektra--meant, at least, living up to what the audience expected of you.

“And that wasn’t good enough. I wanted to be better, to show I had learned some things in all those years of singing, and that the voice was still there. But I knew that just wasn’t coming out clear. And since I feel the public deserves the best . . . I just stopped.”

A hearty laugh. “Besides, I can’t stand that ‘Oh-God,-I’ll-go-mad-if-I-can’t-sing-anymore’ business. If you want to sing so badly, go ahead and sing like crazy in your own home. But don’t sing in public. That’s not what they want to hear you doing--making spectacle of yourself.”

The leading Germanic dramatic soprano of her generation has only a few regrets in the way her hugely successful career evolved, from her professional debut in 1946 in Stockholm as Agathe in Weber’s “Der Freischuetz” to Richard Strauss’ punishing Dyer’s Wife (in “Die Frau Ohne Schatten”), the last role she learned--in Europe, while the IRS problems steamed and sputtered over here.

“When I think back on how things went, I think I have been very lazy,” Nilsson says flatly. “I think I could have worked hard, worked more on my voice, built it on a stronger framework.”

Stronger? The chandeliers at San Francisco, the Metropolitan and the Vienna State Opera had a hard enough time with the Nilsson super-fortissimo, which made orchestras, choruses and fellow singers tremble in its wake.

“Not so much stronger, but maybe a little smarter,” she explains, lacing her fingers together and looking out the window. “When I first began to make the successes, you know, I was so much in demand to sing all over the place--I had to sing so many performances that I had no time to really think ahead--though of course it was I who decided I should sing so much, until of course I got a manager. And then I was really in for it. Still, when I think back, I probably would have been singing fewer roles and studying scores and breath technique more, trying to figure out things better.

“But ever since Glyndebourne (where, in 1951, she made a terrific splash as Mozart’s Electra in “Idomeneo”), and especially once I started singing in America, there were performances, performances, performances. It was sensational to be loved so, but maybe I am not singing now because of it.”

The early-career-overcommitment syndrome--whereby a young singer, beginning to get engagements, casts full speed ahead for stardom while seldom considering the long-term physical consequences--is the thing Nilsson would most like to help the young singers she encounters in the master classes avoid: The rare survivor educating the unknowing.

“It’s because of this as much as anything else that there are so very few singers of Wagner these days,” she says. “They blow up trying to sing Tristans or Isoldes before their voices are ready. I had thought: ‘If I could stop even one singer from doing that, it would be a good thing.’ So here I am.”

That Birgit Nilsson should return to Southern California is news enough: Her concert appearances in the area have been few and far between, and while she sang such roles as Isolde, the Dyer’s Wife and, of course, Bruennhilde at the San Francisco Opera, her local appearances--including her U.S debut at Hollywood Bowl in 1956--have consisted mostly of “bleeding-chunk” Wagnerian programs and incongruous piano-only recitals.

But that Nilsson should return as a teacher--a role she avowedly disliked while still singing on the world’s stages--is surprising.

And that the site of her master classes (four altogether) should be the attractive, expensive and somewhat exclusive Pepperdine University/Malibu--heretofore something of a cipher as a music school--is very surprising. Why Pepperdine?

“This is one of the things we’ve done to let people know what we’ve got here,” says Norman Hatch, director of the music program at Pepperdine. “People have said to me, ‘Gosh, I didn’t realize you had a music school!’ So I guess we’re one of Southern California’s better-kept secrets. At this point in time, we’d rather not be.”

“We’re trying to take a step into the big time,” adds Violet McMahon, one of the teachers at the school. “We’ve got the endowments, we’ve got the teachers--now it’s time to get the word out.”

“We’ve been recruiting across the country for a while now,” Hatch says. “That’s been working out all right, if slowly. Then we realized that, through the connections our faculty has, we could get some big names out here. So we’ve made a few calls out on the ‘good old boy’ network.”

As it turns out, Nilsson’s appearance at Pepperdine also had its genesis on the “good old boy” network. Word of the diva’s successful master classes at the Manhattan School of Music in 1984 reached the ears of one of the singer’s longtime admirers, Dorothy Sivertson of Pasadena, who had struck up a correspondence with Nilsson after hearing her sing in Europe in the early 1950s. Sivertson just happened to know a teacher at Pepperdine--McMahon--and regaled her with the success of Nilsson’s classes in New York.

“Everyone, including Dorothy, told me (Nilsson) was not fond of teaching,” McMahon recalls. “But I just called her up and said, ‘How would you like to come to California to do some master classes?,’ holding my breath all the while. Then she laughed and said, ‘I think I would like that.’ ”

Both the university and its music program are proud to have Nilsson associated with them. “This was a real coup--I still am having trouble believing it,” Hatch confesses. “But it’s going well, and (Nilsson) is really good with the students. They love her.”

Back on stage, as a young soprano--just finished with the aria from Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci”--listens intently, Nilsson says: “I remember when I was young singer and the managers and the directors wanted to push me into bel canto repertoire, and that they could line up 10 engagements as (Bellini’s) Norma. . . . For once I said, ‘No!’ Is a very hard little word, that. But is very powerful.”

“You can’t use it all the time, though,” the young soprano--an aspiring pro who paid $100 to sing here today--comments.

“No, you want to work, of course,” Nilsson replies, smiling. “But you must always be remembering the differences between wanting work and wanting love . Just because they are wanting to hire you doesn’t mean they love you. Is important difference, no?”

Then Birgit Nilsson sits down, surrounded by scores, admirers, stage lights and even a couple of small, potted trees. She crosses her legs, takes off her half-moon glasses.

“Now again, please. And remember: You are happy! You are singing of love!”