A Singer’s Life - A Typical Day of Rehearsal - Part 1
Over the past four years, I have endeavoured to give something of an insight into the life of a professional opera singer, a career I have followed since 1981. This has been a career of enormous variety, with many highs and the occasional lows, across a huge repertoire of music and a multitude of countries. I have tried to show how we work and where we work, and I thought today that I would attempt to offer a glimpse of the daily routine that I have followed for all this time, up to my retirement from the operatic stage in 2018/19. Each contract is different, and so I am going to use two specific examples from quite different companies to show the similarities and differences in approach. These will be generic examples rather than actual days, so the details will be vague and the characters opaque, but it will give you a chance to get a feel for our lives, in this wonderful world of great music.
Let me take you to the other side of the world, to Victoria, at the southern end of Vancouver Island in Canada. I found myself there for the first time in 2010, when I was contracted at very short notice to sing the role of La Roche in Richard Strauss’s opera, ‘Capriccio’. This is a role I have been associated with since the early days of my career, in 1985, when I understudied it at Scottish Opera at the age of 29. This was ludicrously early for me, as the role was written for the great Austrian bass, Georg Hann, in 1942, and subsequently recorded definitively by Hans Hotter in 1957, but it was good to get started and stood me in good stead for later years. Bizarrely, the singer cast in the role, Stafford Dean, fell ill on our tour that year, and I went on and sang the role in Liverpool, at the Empire Theatre. I had learned it well – it is one of the longest bass parts in the repertoire – and, since Scottish Opera performed comedies in English in those days before surtitles, I was able to enjoy the experience in my own language, albeit that my voice was not yet mature enough to cope with all its demands. I remember afterwards, at the Adelphi Hotel where we were staying (one of the great British railway hotels), the whole cast toasted me with champagne, and I felt that I had really arrived on the operatic scene. After further understudy work at Glyndebourne (in German now), I eventually sang the role properly in 2007, aged 52, in Bielefeld in Germany, and had a great success.
Consequently, when I was parachuted in to take over the role in Victoria, I was at the top of my game, and able to really relish this marvellous character, modelled by Strauss and Clemens Krauss on the great Austrian director and impressario, Max Reinhardt, in all his pomposity and vanity. His very first line, when he wakes up in an armchair after falling asleep in a chamber concert, is perfectly matched to the character - “Bei sanfter Musik, schläft sich’s am besten” (one sleeps best when lulled by sweet music).
When you are invited to sing at Pacific Opera Victoria, you step into a world where music is prized as something worthwhile, and where the artists involved are treated as genuine stars, but at the same time are recognised as part of a bigger enterprise which covers the lives of everyone in the company. On arrival, the soloists are welcomed at the little airport just north of Victoria, after a short flight on a little plane from Vancouver. It’s a gentle introduction to island life. After a flight from London across the Atlantic, over Iceland, Greenland and Hudson’s Bay, you then fly south-west over the Rockies into Vancouver, arriving just under 10 hours after leaving, although the time on the clock is only 3 hours after you left! After immigration, which is not as bad as in the USA but still potentially troubling with work permits etc, you wander through the airport to domestic departures and board a tiny plane for the 40 minute flight to Victoria, having had to collect your bags first. This can be tedious too, as, after a business class flight from London, you are on an economy flight to Victoria, where your baggage allowance is suddenly halved. No waiving of fees is possible, so you immediately find yourself paying extra for the bags which had been free on the long flight. Fortunately, I had been warned in advance, and told I would be reimbursed on arrival, but it seemed daft that my allowance would change in mid journey!
POV always arranges for its singers to stay in a suite at the Chateau Victoria hotel, right beside the theatre, which is an absolutely lovely old style luxury place, with a panoramic bar and restaurant on the top floor, with views of the Olympic Peninsula in America to the south, the Rockies beyond Vancouver to the east and the splendid harbour to the west. Accommodation is provided free for the whole period you are working with POV, a perk not normally available for us.
On arrival, we are given a dossier of information about the city and the company, with a rough rehearsal schedule for the period and a detailed one for the next day or two. You are usually given a day to orientate yourself, and recover from jet lag, because a half asleep performer is of no use to any production.
The day after, a shuttle minibus will take you to the rehearsal studios, a former school about half a mile from the hotel. Within reason, the hotel will transfer you when you ask for it, depending on the drivers’ availability. That first day, you meet your new colleagues, and work begins.
I detailed the rehearsal period in a previous article, but let’s look at a typical day now. As I wrote before, these rehearsal periods vary from country to country, with very short periods in North America (where there is little public funding) to much lengthier ones in continental Europe (mostly all public subsidy). Consequently, you have to work faster in Canada, although I must say that I have never felt rushed, and somehow, you adapt your own system to wherever you are.
By ten days into the schedule, you will probably have mapped out the basic shape of how the production will look. The director and the singers, with the help of the musical staff, will have ‘blocked’ the whole opera, which is to say that you will have gone from start to finish finding out roughly when you come in, where you go and when you go offstage. Depending on the director, you will probably have done most of the simple blocking without much music, and certainly without much singing, as there is no point singing full out when you are learning your moves. At this stage, there is minimal character development or psychological nuance, although everyone will understand his or her position in the story. One of the best bits of advice I ever received, early on in my career from John Abulafia at Mecklenburg Opera in London, was about focus. At every moment when you are onstage, you must be aware of where the focus of the scene lies. This applies to every role and every character, major or minor, and holds good at all times. At any given moment on stage, someone is the object of attention and focus, usually when they are singing, but not always. Everyone needs to be aware of this, often subconsciously, but the success of any given scene will depend on the accuracy of that focus. If you are the centre of the focus, you have to grab it and realise your importance to the scene. If you are not the centre of focus, you must do everything in your power to direct your attention to whoever is the centre. At no point when you are giving it, should you take focus, so no mugging to the audience, no clever winks and nudges, no showing off. There are one or two singers who go against this rule, or are arrogant enough to think they are always the centre of attention, but it is very rare these days, and most singers know who to avoid. There is an old axiom - never work with children, animals or X (fill in a name at will!) - but, fortunately, I have rarely come across such people, and I think they are a dying breed.
Having plotted the basic map of the production over several days you go back to the beginning, and start again in detail. I’ll use the first day of the recapitulation as an example.
By now, you are used to all the various people involved in the production at this stage. You know your cast members, the conductor, the repetiteur (the pianist who plays for all the early rehearsals, providing the necessary music for rehearsal in lieu of the orchestra), the stage director and assistant, the stage management team, the props person and the company manager, who will liaise with the creative team over rehearsal times and any other problems which may arise. Large companies will have a much more rigid structure, but a small company like POV will be more relaxed and flexible.
If there is a chorus in the opera, you will have had a couple of rehearsals with them, but they are usually only called occasionally at this stage, since the director and conductor want to work with the soloists in some detail, and don’t want to waste chorus time (and money).
A day will usually start for us about 10-10.30am and wherever you are in the world, a typical session lasts two and a half to three hours. Most European companies will work a two session day, with occasional three sessions, but in North America, with a much shorter rehearsal time, three sessions are more frequent, although frankly often counter productive. For me, nine hours is too much in a day, as the nature of our work is so detailed and intensive that one is actually mentally exhausted by that third session. I have found that it is mostly the megalomaniac directors that insist on three sessions, and I never felt much was gained by going on and on, over and over.
I also preferred, at lunchtime, to go off on my own rather than spend it with my colleagues. When you are working at such an intense level with the same cast for a three hour period, the last thing I wanted to do, with the best will in the world, was spend an hour in their company over food. This is absolutely not about problems with the cast, it was much more about space, both physically and mentally.
After lunch, the next session would follow on from the previous one, although some directors like to chop and change between scenes. I never liked that much, as I prefer to work in a linear way, developing the character in the way that the composer directed. By the time of this second work through of the opera, many more details of the staging are becoming apparent, and one’s character is becoming clearer both to the singer and to the director. This is the time for the most intense work on movement and psychological insight, as we are still only working at half voice, and the musical aspect of the role is put to one side. You will have sung the role through, and you will intersperse stage work with separate coaching on the side throughout, so that, although you are not singing out in stage rehearsals, you are keeping the vocal aspect topped up at the same time. This is the part of the process which is quite different from working on a non singing drama. I should also point out that, during my career, I was generally singing operas which were more cerebral than frothy. By this I mean that I naturally gravitated towards operas which were more concerned with the drama than with just singing nicely. I rarely sang in the operas which formed the basis of the Italian Bel Canto movement, from the first half of the 19th century, and spent much more of my career singing operas from the late 19thcentury well into the 20th century. These operas put less emphasis on sweet singing, and more on psychological insight. This meant that my rehearsals were generally more about what I was saying, and less about what I was singing. The musical aspect was important, but the dramatic side was my main focus, at this stage.
In the next part, I will tell you about how a day pans out during rehearsals with a big national company, The Royal Opera, Covent Garden.
