A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Opera

It has been a while since I have posted a blog, and it was by design. Although I have received much good response from both new readers and old friends, I have also been told by some that I am too negative and that some of my comments border on pomposity. I could just simply bask in the praise and attribute the con to people who are either uninformed, lacking in appreciation of the arts or simply not able to admit that the Emperor is naked. Although I do not, necessarily, rule that out, I do feel that it is important to step back a bit, and re-evaluate my convictions, especially when they are as strongly felt as mine and so many people rave about performers and performances that I feel to be, at best, average and at worst, disasters.

While in my period of soul-searching, I took my 9 year old granddaughter to “The Barber of Seville” and a funny thing happened on the way to the opera. Walking from the car to McCaw Hall, I asked Sasha if she had read the synopsis I had emailed to her. Her answer took me by surprise, but gave me a new perspective and reinforced my convictions. She answered, “No Papa, that would have spoiled it”.

I realized that it would be a sin of the highest order to divulge the end of a Coen brothers’ movie and no one wants to know how a best seller ends. So what is the difference here? The answer, of course, is simple; opera is about music and singing, not about the plot. The plot is simply a vehicle for the performers. Of course it is important, but not in the way the story is to a movie or a book. You don’t go to an opera to find out if Mimi and Rodolfo live happily ever after, but rather to hear how the singers and conductor shape their roles and music, and hopefully to experience a wonderful emotional high. Opera is, first and foremost, a musical event. The solo instrument is the voice. Staging adds to the experience (or should), but opera rises and/or falls on the quality of the musicians and the soloists.

There is the old joke of a man leaving a theater and saying loudly to the patrons waiting for the next showing “The butler did it”. But would it matter if that same man shouted to a crowd going to a symphony concert, “G major”? We all know how the “Beethoven Ninth” ends (not in G major, by the way) or the “Messiah” but we still go to hear it time after time. I have never been to an opera, the plot of which I didn’t either know beforehand or was not able to read in the theater before the performance. The plots are in the programs because, in America, most opera goers are not conversant enough in the language of the opera to follow the action. Until the advent of Supra-Titles this sufficed, and I feel it is still far superior to Supra-Titles for the enjoyment of opera (but more of that latter). People have been going to and enjoying operas in Italian, French and German for many years; but I don’t know of many non-French speakers who would go to a play in French, even if they knew the plot.

People remember and talk about the time they heard Beverly Sills sing “Lucia” or Artur Rubinstein play Chopin. Even Speight Jenkins, a champion of modern staging, in his articles in the opera programs speaks about the great singers he has heard perform the operas he is about to present. When Richardo Muti, conducts an opera, any opera, it is sold out. The plot is not better when Maestro Muti conducts, nor is the staging. I saw a performance he conducted of Verdi’s “Attila at the Met. (see my May 2, 2010 posting). The staging was minimal and the costumes weird, but the performance was wonderful even though “Attila” is far from one of Verdi’s best. If you are going to an opera for the plot you are wasting your time and money.

As most of you probably know, Maestro Muti recently conducted a concert version of “Othello” at Carnegie Hall with his Chicago Symphony. In an interview with a New York Times reporter, he was asked if the performance would be semi-staged. His reply, “I don’t like semi-staged performances, What does it mean? Opera is either staged or not staged. The drama is in the way the singers sing, the way the orchestra plays, not in stupid movement.”

But if Maestro Muti is correct that, “The drama is in the way the singers sing (and) the way the orchestra plays”, then why do we have all this emphasis today on directors and staging. The answer, I believe, is both simple and complex. We simply do not have enough singers or conductors of the quality needed for consistently great performances. Why we don’t, I believe, is somewhat more complicated.

I will concentrate my comments on the quality of opera performances in America today, since I am not now as conversant with opera in Europe as I once was.

That having been said, we have seen incredible changes in
communications and mobility in the last 20 years. With this technology comes a great excitement and feeling of empowerment. We can, therefore we do! And we do it as fast as is un-humanly possible. In previous generations a singer would spend several years with a teacher developing a sound technique and then start singing with small theaters in Europe until they developed as an artist and hopefully went on to a major career. Today a garage mechanic or a barista can sing one aria on you-tube and a star is born. America’s got talent! Even young singers in universities today expect instant success.

And speaking of universities and conservatories, is it, perhaps, fair to say that we have far too many voice programs for the quality to be good in all of them (or even most of them). When I started singing following law school in 1966, I found that I had to go to New York to find a teacher that could get me to where I was properly prepared to audition for opera companies in Europe. I am not saying that there are not decent teachers in many cities in America today, but I do find it illogical that there could be so many. Teaching voice is an intricate task that requires patience and a great deal of knowledge of how a healthy voice develops. If not done properly a voice can be easily damaged, sometimes irreparably. Think of the time, money and dreams that are wasted.

Where did all these teachers come from? I feel (as do most of the teachers I respect with good track records), that to really prepare a young singer for a career, teachers should have had a career themselves singing in major theaters. A young singer must be able to take what they learn from their teacher and integrate it into their own instrument, so that they develop the skills to deal with the routine and demands of an operatic career. One of the most difficult things for a singer is that like all performers they are nervous (and rightfully so) before every performance. The difference for a singer is that the voice is the instrument and it is also nervous. Pianos don’t have nerves. Also other instruments do not tire as a performance goes on, or have to deal with emotional ups and downs. A teacher who has had a career understands and has conquered this and can impart it to their students. How many of the teachers in universities and conservatories around the country have sung in major opera houses? We are all born with a voice and the capabilities to sing. What sets an opera singer apart is the ability to use that voice in such a skilled manner as to produce beautiful sounds that thrill the listener…not unlike the skills required in figure skating. It is interesting that in the world of figure skating there are only about five instructors in the whole world who one must train with to succeed. How can there be so many good voice teachers?

I recently finished listening to over forty young singers who submitted their bios and CDs for admittance to the finals of the “Sun Valley Opera Vocal Competition”. Almost every bio was impressive, yet I found it very difficult to find four finalists. Not because they were all so good, but because even though many had beautiful instruments, their techniques were flawed. Most of them had studied with a least three teachers and had sung in innumerable master classes and several young artist programs. Proper vocal technique is actually quite straight forward but requires a great deal of time and diligence to master. Too many teachers today teach tricks and shortcuts and physiology, instead of good old fashioned technique.

There are also more opera companies in more cities around the country today than ever before, not to mention the small suburban ones springing up almost daily, that do one or two performances a year. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but where do the singers for these performances come from? From the bank of students who graduate from voice departments each year, who are told by their teachers how great they are? They are more than eager to sing in a “real” staged opera performance. Most of these singers are not ready for the roles they sing and many are not ready to sing on stage no matter the role. But that doesn’t stop the companies from using them, with the emphasis on “using”. So singers with improper or not firmly established techniques go on to sing in young artist programs that don’t give them proper training (there are a few exceptions) and then sing a role with a small company here and there, and unfortunately that will probably be the extent of their vocal life. This is not only unfair and sad for the singers, but because of our lack of classical music exposure in our schools, and the hype that opera companies make about their performances, the average opera goer comes to believe, or wants to believe, that they are hearing “Grand Opera’. Our standards are so low today that even the critics start to believe bad singing is the norm.

Because the quality of singing is not equal to the task, and we are now bombarded with high-tech glitzy Broadway and instant management- created stars, opera companies have had to look for ways to compete. Enter the “genius” stage director who comes up with “La Boheme” on Mars or as Peter Kazaras did in” Falstaff” in Seattle, have the singers dress and undress on stage (not a pretty sight). The opera attraction has become the staging, not the music and voices, and the stage director gets top billing. To see how far this has come, read Anthony Tommasini’s review in today’s New York Times of the Met’s new production of “Walkure”, which probably should be re-named “ The Stage Set That Ate Brunnhilde”. Seattle Opera, as I have stated before, does not even have a Music Director. Why bother!

Here is where Supra-Titles come in.. The stated idea is for the audience to be able to follow every word of the libretto. Of course this really isn’t possible because it is someone’s translation into American vernacular, which can be quite different from what the librettist really intended. Never mind as long as the stage director likes it. If a tenor and soprano sing a five minute love duet does it really matter what words are actually spoken. The singing should be more than enough to create the mood. In fact, isn’t music really mightier than the spoken word? (sounds like a Geico commercial)

I feel that more than anything else supra-titles take the audience’s attention away from the voice, and the performance turns into reading a novel (a bad one at that) while listening to background music, making it hard for the singer or orchestra to really connect with the audience’s emotions as it should. It also lessens ones realization that the voices are inadequate. One clear example of this was illustrated in Seattle Opera’s performance of “Amelia”(posting May 24, 2010) Many times during the performance the orchestra clearly covered the singers and they were not audible, yet many people swore that they heard every word. How about, read every word.

We who care about opera and the classical music as a whole, must be more vigilant and try to make our politicians (maybe not) and educators realize that the classical arts are an important component in a healthy life and must be included in our education system. There is an emotion and thrill in a live opera performance, well executed, that lifts the spirit in a way that is hard to imitate. There are so many electronic stimuli in our lives that something so intrinsic to our being as the human voice must be allowed continue to inspire and not be minimalized or cheapened.

In a review in the New York Times of the Met’s “Il Trovatore” Friday April 22, 2011, Zachary Wolfe writes “…the convoluted plot of Verdi’s “Trorvatore” can seem like the setup for a joke….“Trovatore” overcomes it’s absurdities, though, with irresistible melodies and tightly driven rhythms. Oh,and it helps if you have four amazing singers.” He goes on to ask, “Where are today’s great Verdi singers?” He later states that the conductor was unable to keep things moving forward properly, and in closing states “without that crispness and tightness “Il Trovatore”, which can be riveting, all too easily slackens into yet an other punch line”.
“Trovatore”, unlike “Attila”, is one of Verdi’s best.

In closing, opera is not about plot or staging; the drama is in the way the singers sing and the orchestra plays. It is about the singers and the conductor and if we don’t produce great singers and demand high standards of our presenting organizations we won’t continue to have opera, at least not as we have known it.

Thank God for “American Idol”.