BBC Radio 3 - The Essay - A Passion for Opera

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Opera Singer

In this BBC Radio 3 broadcast, episode 5 from "The Essay - A Passion for Opera" series, Michael Chance describes the challenge of being an opera singer on the road.

The life of an itinerant opera singer clearly bemuses those who may enjoy the fruits of the singer's labours, but cannot imagine how those fruits are produced. It must be glamorous, it must be rewarding, it must be as dramatic off as on stage. Well why? Yes we are indeed lucky to be doing something we enjoy doing, but glamorous? Very occasionally. Dramatic? Well certainly the interplay between working intensively with colleagues over an extended period, and reconciling that with a settled home life is ever challenging and frequently impossible. I would like to draw analogies with the plots of two operas I know well - The Return of Ulysses and Orpheus and Euridice. Ulysses finally returns home after twenty years to a wife who doesn't recognise him, and needs ever more proof that he is indeed the man for whom she has been waiting all this time. While away, every sort of danger and temptation has been thrown in his path, many of which he has succumbed to and only extricated himself from with unmatched cunning. Orpheus too is separated from his wife, but in his case, by her death. His journey to free her is, literally, tortuous, but the greatest torture lies in her refusal to accept who he is without the one action from him he cannot give her. A look, but not just a casual glance, but a look of recognition of her as Euridice from him, the man she loved. These are at the heart of the relationships constantly tested by absence and the dangers and temptations thrown up by performing.

There is a rhythm in the life of an opera production. Much has been accomplished before the singers get asked to take part, but as a singer, it goes like this. The offer; the preparation before rehearsals begin; the first day of rehearsal; the costume fitting; the first time on stage; the first rehearsal with orchestra; the dress rehearsal; the first night; the last; the return home. Each of these can be a breeze or a nightmare.

Many singers, and indeed actors, have said that the best bit about their profession is the telephone call (or, these days, the e-mail) with the offer. Suddenly they want you. They think you can do it. Am I free? Of course I am. Shall I play hard to get just for a moment, so they want me even more? Some undoubtedly do. Can I sing it? Well, they obviously think I can. Since the operatic grapevine works as fast as synapses in the brain, in other words immediately, reputations can rise and fall as quickly as it takes to post a duff high note in a major opera house straight onto the internet. So a singer can listen and possibly watch himself commit operatic hari-kiri as soon as he gets back to his dressing room. If they think I can sing it, I must have done ok last time round. But whether it's a part you've sung before, or a new role, there is often the flaming hoop of the meeting with the director and designer before the offer can be confirmed. These people are more often than not the ones calling the shots in the operatic process. One of my directorial meetings went like this - I was sitting in the foyer of the Schaubühne theatre in Berlin, quietly reading as I prepared to meet the Schaubühne's director for her possible first operatic outing on Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice. "My Gott, what are you doing?" was her rather aggressive opening. "Just reading", I said. "Obviously, but why?" she instantly replied. "Singers don't read books, I am told". I daringly took this as a compliment. "They have given me eight weeks. I usually have thirteen, fourteen weeks. I mean eight weeks. Pah". My heart sank. The production was to be in Leipzig - rather far from home in London, with my wife Irene and two small children not really able to be with me, as I saw foresaw this director sucking blood from me over eight gruesome weeks of intense rehearsal on an opera which lasts little more than an hour. She was intense, but exhilaratingly so. Her name is Andrea Breth. Her idea of a fun day out for the company half way through rehearsals was for us all to pile into a bus and visit Colditz Castle.

And then there is the preparation. Singing the role into the voice. Getting the thoughts clear. I think this is almost the most important part of preparation. Making every phrase you sing full of intention, and leading inexorably to the next. It makes the singing of most of the phrases so much easier. But it is all probably going to be in another language. So getting to the heart of the part in a language you probably don't speak that well, but can sing convincingly in. It still remains a complete mystery to me how opera allows, indeed encourages, singers to sing in a language foreign to them to audiences who speak another language or more still, but who probably don't really understand the language of the opera. In other words, a musical Tower of Babel. So who really understands the idioms and the nuances of the libretto? But there we are, feverishly determined to convey every possible inflection, as suggested by the music, to our beloved public. We hope that there is at least one who really appreciates what's going on: who laughs at the jokes in Figaro, or Poppea. You don't often hear them!

The first day of rehearsal is always a worry. At least, I find it so. I always have a nagging fear that they got the wrong person, that there is another they meant to get, and it's all been a dreadful bureaucratic mistake. I am happy to say this has never actually transpired, but I continue to harbour doubt.

So we are up and running, well, probably trotting at this stage, feeling our way, gently testing our place in the order of things in numerous ways, trying to be friendly, but preserving our self-confidence, and always nursing the voice, because at the heart of this whole process, we know, in spite of all the theatrical extravagance or Brechtian sparseness as the case may be, the voice is the only really crucial ingredient. Whatever designers or directors try to insist on, communicating and thrilling with their voice is what opera singers are about. The fat lady does continue to sing, although sadly less than before. The fat gentleman also has his part to play. There are singers who never reveal their vocal lustre at all in the stage rehearsals, who are only concerned with the first night. This is dangerous. Learning how to pace the performance is crucial. Let me tell you - getting through nearly four hours of a Handel opera, only to face your big aria, the one you will be judged on, at well past your normal bedtime is a challenge. I have nothing but total admiration for those singers who consistently succeed. Physical stamina and robustness is a necessary attribute not always acknowledged in music conservatories. Placido Domingo is the shining example of this, as in so much else.

We are gradually getting caught up in the world of the production, but, of course, still very much living our own domestic lives. At the tail end of a long period creating a new production of Julius Caesar in Glasgow with the acclaimed German director Willy Decker, who set the whole opera on the vertiginous steps of a pyramid, my very pregnant wife briefly came to the rehearsal room, to say hello. "You're married?" the astonished Decker asked later, "You're going to have a baby? Can we use it?" That was truly a brutal clash of my two worlds, albeit pretty funny in a German sort of way.

How to get through the many hours stuck in a foreign city, when not actually working, is an important part of the whole operatic experience. Creating a home from home is important. I remember Anna Caterina Antonacci arriving in Buenos Aires for The Coronation of Poppea in the amazing Teatro Colon with her own coffee machine and kilos of Illy coffee. No decent coffee to be had in Argentina obviously.

Italian male singers, I am told, have regular visits by their mothers - food and laundry requiring regular attention by the only person who can do these things properly. Some of the grander singers bring their retinues, dogs often playing a central role. The presence of partners is very possibly the main reason for relationships to stay healthy - marriages are notoriously common casualties of the opera world. It's not only the absence. It's the proximity, intimate proximity very often, to other artists who tend to be good communicators, who exude, in the nature of performing, an inclusion of those around them, a vulnerability, an intensity, and, very often, a sheer visceral physicality which can all combine to make them irresistible. You need to be made of strong stuff to resist all these enticements. In the rehearsal room, we are all children, agreeing to play together, bringing our own strengths, but also agreeing to drop resistance. There is nothing more unclothed emotionally than being alone on stage and singing a song. Nowhere to hide. Actors would no doubt say that their craft is even more naked - we have the music to wrap around our nakedness. It often doesn’t feel like that.

So we start to inhabit our character, really to link the physical gesture and move to the vocal and musical, all motivated hopefully by a clear thought and a focussed emotional state. Singers can arrive at the rehearsal room with all this in place, especially if they are experienced in the role, if not this particular production. As a counter-tenor, one role which will inevitably come your way is Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream by Britten and, of course, Shakespeare (shaped by Peter Pears). MY first outing in this part was in Peter Hall's magical and now legendary production at Glyndebourne, in a hot summer in 1989 long before the new Glyndebourne took glorious shape. This was already a hugely popular and much loved production - a pretty much guaranteed sell-out, I would imagine. John Bury's dimly lit moving forest infused the whole evening with mystery, enchantment, sensuality, dreams and desire.

Coming into this richly informed and well established world was both a gift and a challenge. A new kid on the block following James Bowman's unrivalled previous outings in this role in this production. The part really only came to life for the first time with his voice, his wit, and his physical and dramatic authority. So no challenge there for his successor! Peter Hall came at the end of the rehearsal period. Getting a note from him is unnerving but always enriching, delivered "sotto voce" as if in a confessional, - intense and absolutely to the point. My memories of that first Glyndebourne summer are still strong and many - being constantly followed everywhere, even to have a pee, by small boys with elphin ears, and being addressed as "Obron". I sent them off to fish in the lake in the long interval, and we played havoc with all the picnic paraphinalia in the gloaming when the mortals had gone back for Act III, and we faeries indulged our antic hay.

Britten's music for Oberon demands a certain view of the counter-tenor voice - spooky, disembodied, slow, measured, no opportunity really to let rip, but wonderful words, and each scene a beautifully crafted presentation of power, anger, vanity, and sensuality. I thought my route through to trying to suggest some of these was through the text as much as the notes themselves. But, of course, in the hands of Britten one cannot be separated from the other, but you can at least be conscious always of the delicious power of the words rather than just communicating with colours of sound. Another darker memory also still haunts my memories of this time - the first night, and my first moment alone on stage with a tiny Puck. I completely dried. I could not remember my first line "Thou remembr'st the herb I showed thee once". "Will somebody prompt me? Can I nip into the wings to get the line? Oh God, what do I do? The move- it's usually the move which prompts the thought and thus the line. The move came without thinking, thank goodness, and I was saved.

Subsequent versions of The Dream which I have been lucky to sing in have included new productions in Amsterdam with the first outing of the singer Brigitte Fassbender as director - luminous blues and greens and acres of body pant were the hall mark of that show. Two other things stand out, -an elderly seen-it-all done-it-all Puck in the shape of the tenor Alexander Oliver, who had obviously been wrapping girdles around the earth in forty minutes or fewer all his life, and, quite frankly, had no desire to attempt this feat ever again. Very funny. And the ever more elaborate picnic suppers we concocted after every show, which we performed all over Holland as a touring production. I returned home each evening to a central Amsterdam apartment, with my new wife and even newer son installed for the duration. So all the joys and strains of babyhood, broken nights etc, etc mingled mostly delightfully with being part of the community in a wood near Athens. We went straight from that to another and very different wood near Athens, this time in Sydney. Welcome to the wonderful world of Baz Luhrmann. Just for a moment, I could imagine that I was in a movie. Every try out in a rehearsal started with "action", every stop with "cut". And - you guessed it- every day ended with "it's a wrap". But God it was fun. The physicality of his theatre, the precision, endlessly rehearsed, of his humour, the simplicity of his drama. It was very much a show. But the effects are in the detail. And talk of a roadshow - the whole company of Australian Opera (as it was then) got taken over, invigorated by the Baz spirit of "can-do", a veritable flying circus. It was, in retrospect, quite hard to compete, or survive, in this showtime atmosphere. But I just managed to stick to my maybe parochial guns, and just survived. My Oberon had to change, of course, but still circumscribed by Britten's view of him and his world, and my own determination to preserve at least the core of my previous experiences as him. Ideally, each time a singer revisits a part, he or she adds to it, both by simplifying and enriching. Maybe one provokes the other. Certainly, our aspiration is mostly to bear what we do down to the core essentials, so that every inflection, every musical and dramatic gesture has to be there - none is superfluous. Watch and listen to Callas or Domingo or Chaliapin or Freni or Baker. You are not disturbed by any extraneous action either vocally or physically.

We return to Odysseus and Orpheus. Orpheus is a poet, a musician, a creative artist. How does he reconcile these roles with his need to rediscover intimacy with Euridice. What does she need from him in The Look? Does she require recognition from him as the artist or as the man or both? Are these possible? In the many and various operatic treatments of him, he often seems detached from the difficult business of being a human being when he speaks or sings as the healing and creative Orpheus. Euridice wants all of him, but can he give that to her? Odysseus nurtures the single objective of returning home after a lifetime of adventure, struggle, and blandishment. The idea of home never quite leaves him. He needs it to sustain him. We constantly await the final moment of reconciliation with the ever constant Penelope. Some treatments of the story have her submitting to the attentions of a suitor or two - but the idea of her loyal and unswerving commitment to him is central to his identity. The analogy with the world of international opera is less secure, maybe, than the relevance of the Orpheus myth. But it gives, I believe, an insight into the mindset of those who ply their trade in a constantly changing community of artists, often in constantly changing locations.

Listen to 'The Essay' on MichaelChanceCountertenor.co.uk
Michael Chance & Nancy Argenta as Orpheus and Eurydice in Gluck's opera
Broadcast page on BBC Radio 3

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