Competent, disciplined talent and lots of good luck, tempered by a touch of serendipity, have been hallmarks of tenor Charles Workman’s career. The son of a Methodist minister, most of the singing he heard as a child came from a church choir in Little Rock, Arkansas. The youngest of three boys and a girl, he followed his older brothers’ example and took up the trumpet. But a disagreement with a high school bandmaster inspired him to join the high school chorale to complete the music requirements for his diploma. From then on, his voice became his principal instrument of musical expression.
Although never singled out as a singer whose voice needed to be fostered and cultivated, he nevertheless mastered vocal techniques sufficiently well to be accepted at the Aspen Music Festival summer school and, eventually, as a student at Juilliard. While there, he got a contract to cover for principal singers at the Met. He debuted as a professional in the lead role of Albert Herring in Toronto with the Canadian Opera Company in 1991. He moved to London in 1995, and his career began to soar.
He sat down with CS in Madrid to share more about his career beginnings and his recent insight into how his voice works.
What kind of music did you like growing up? What did you listen to?
I depended on my older brothers’ records. I was a brass player; they had a recording of brass quintet transcriptions of Bach music, and I just loved it. I would listen to it over and over again. I loved the intricacies of it. And I would listen to classical radio. Opera didn’t interest me in the least. It seemed artificial. I liked intricate classical music—not necessarily Romantic music, but earlier.
What about the Cantatas?
I never heard them. They didn’t play them on the radio and we didn’t have the records at home, so I never heard them. The first time I heard opera singing, I was a junior in high school. We were taken to see a touring production of Fledermaus.
When it came time for college, what did you want to be?
I didn’t really know what I wanted to be. I had done a lot of children’s theater while in high school, so I was very interested in theater. But I didn’t think that I was going to study that in college. All I knew was that I wanted to be somewhere else. I wanted to be in a new place in the world. I ended up going to Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, which is about 30 miles outside of New York City. I wanted a place where I could really sort of find myself. I thought I was going to study calculus and physics, but I ended up auditioning for a play and falling in with the theater crowd there in my first term. After my first mid-term calculus exam, which I didn’t do very well in, I thought I would study theater instead.
But I still had my interest in music and I sang in a chorale choir group, and I began to think I wanted to study a bit more. The first teacher I went to was Jane Bunnell. She was a Met artist, a mezzo-soprano, and she happened to live in a town near Madison. Her father was also a voice teacher. I had a couple of lessons with her. I was singing baritone, but her father said, “I think actually he can be a tenor.” So I sort of made the switch to tenor then, and I worked with another teacher often. But it was never serious study—it was sort of dilettante in many ways. I did that for three years. The summer after my junior year, I was getting more and more interested in seeing if I had what it took to really study music and to become a professional musician. I learned about the Aspen Music Festival and School and ended up going there for five consecutive summers.
After Drew, I went to Brooklyn College Conservatory of Music for a term, and then to Juilliard. I was lucky in that while I was at Juilliard, I sort of slowly began my professional career. I didn’t have a period of having to go through the competition circuit or look for another apprentice program every summer in order to make the next step up. Part of it is being a tenor. I think there’s just more work for tenors generally. But I was lucky. I was in the right place at the right time. My first job with Canadian Opera Company pretty much came about because Brian Dickie, who was the General Director, happened to hear me at Juilliard.
Your career seems to have gone quite smoothly after your debut in Toronto. You got a contract with the Metropolitan, which was a great achievement.
Yes, while I was still a student at Juilliard, I got cover contracts at the Met, which means you’re on standby. I never went on to perform because the people I covered never got sick. But it was a great opportunity. One of the jobs I was covering was The Magic Flute. Jerry Hadley, who was going to be singing in the performances, wasn’t available for any of the rehearsals. So I did all the stage rehearsals with James Levine up to the dress rehearsal. It was a great opportunity.
Did these cover roles become part of your repertoire?
Yes, the only one that hasn’t is The Abduction from the Seraglio. It was the very first job I covered at the Met and, for some reason, it is an opera that has never come my way. It’s just not done that often, I suppose. But I would love to sing it. It’s a great piece.
What other operas did you cover for?
I covered for Barber of Seville as well. “Barber” I’ve sung so many times, I never want to see the score again! I still sing “Flute.” I don’t know whether it’s because they’re roles that you’ve sung a lot when you’re young, but I sort of lose interest in them. I like to do new things whenever I can.
What European experience did you have before settling in London?
I had done a small role and a recording of a Rossini opera called Armida because of Aspen. Claudio Scimone conducted one of the operas I did there as a student. He invited me to Italy for a recording. When I moved to London with my then-wife, as we were expecting our first child, I had had no other European engagements other than in Amsterdam a couple of years before. When I arrived, I didn’t have any engagements at all. But I was fortunate enough to get a job singing the role of Ferrando in Così fan tutte with the English National Opera right away—about a month after I arrived, I started rehearsals.
Part of the reason was because the two girls doing the Dorabella and Fiordiligi roles were both tall, but the house tenor they wanted to use was kind of short. The director said she couldn’t use him because she had already done a feminist slant on the opera. She felt that if the girls towered over both boys, then people would think it was overly feminist. So it was a role that became available sort of late in their casting—and I was there, so I got that.
Then I got an agent. There was so much work in Europe that I was able to fill out my year very quickly. I went to Nice to do Armide by Gluck, and that was the first thing I did with Marc Minkowski. That turned out to be a very fruitful relationship because he wanted to use me very often, and I did recordings with him. Then I started going to the Rossini Festival in Pesaro. I was there for about four or five summers in all, and I started working in Salzburg and all over Italy and lot in France. Things just sort of took off.
Why do you think you did this so apparently easily?
At the beginning, I think that part of it was that I was hired for a lot of Rossini roles, which people weren’t singing. And a lot of these Rossini roles were these baritone-tenor roles, which even fewer people sing. So that was one advantage. I don’t think there is anything special about me. It is a bit easier for tenors because there are fewer of us, generally. And also a lot of tenors tend to cancel jobs, so jobs become available. It was a lot of good fortune. I had success with the jobs I did do, so they would lead to other jobs.
You’re obviously quite happy to continue the rest of your career based in Europe. You have an added incentive because you have two sons and a daughter growing up in Britain. Are they musically inclined?
My daughter is very musical. She also takes ballet. My sons have a certain innate musical ability, but they don’t really show a leaning towards it. My daughter’s extremely musical. I think that, if she wanted to, she could have a career in music. But she’s still very young and so has plenty of time to decide.
Do you have any advice for American singers who want to come to Europe? In your case, you just showed up and you looked for work and found it right away. Would you suggest the same thing for an American singer wanting to get established in Europe?
I think if a singer really wants to settle in Europe, they should know that the German Fach system, with the house contracts, isn’t a horrible thing. For some people it can be debilitating. But if they want to have the chance to spend a couple of years and learn the language and get settled, if they can get a fest contract at a decent house, that’s an excellent thing to do.
Otherwise, if they just want to stay based in America but start working in Europe, they can come and do an audition tour. It’s very easy, whether they have an agent in the States or someone here. They can just write letters, because most of the opera houses have regular auditions. I think it is every Wednesday at noon, just about every opera house in Europe is having auditions. Certainly that’s how it is at the Bastille in Paris. And it seems to be the case in most of the houses—at least once a week they are hearing people, and they’re always happy to hear unknown American singers or singers from anywhere in the world. They’re looking to discover and possibly save some money too, if they can get someone early on.
Who have been your most important teachers?
Well, my teacher at Juilliard, after Ricky DiGiuseppe, was Beverley Peck Johnson, who was also Renée Fleming’s teacher. And she’d been around forever. Everybody knew Mrs. Johnson. She was the most revered, I suppose, among the teachers in New York. No one ever knew her age when she was living, and I think the New York Times said when she died that she probably was about 99. But she was a good teacher. I worked with her during my final years in New York.
I really didn’t have a steady teacher after her. I went for 10, maybe 15, years before I finally happened to find Gerald Moore. There was one woman, Anna Sims in Britain, whom I worked with a little. And she was very good for making me aware of certain things, breathing and so on. But it was with Gerald that all of a sudden a few light bulbs went on. I probably only had six lessons with him over three years because I was traveling and he was traveling. But it’s the sort of work that I can carry on my own.
How was it that you went so long without a teacher?
It’s often the case when people start their careers and you get all caught up. And since I moved to London and my teacher was still in New York, I couldn’t see her. I said to myself, “I had my training. I can do this.” And that was only true to a point. You have to be able to take care of yourself, but you always need another pair of ears to look out for you, in a sense. I was lucky that I didn’t run into trouble. I did realize after many years that I was missing having someone there to really point out the little things that were starting to go wrong and to tweak things that were right but could be better.
So actually you might have discovered the beauty in your voice sooner had you seen a teacher more regularly?
Yes, it might have been. But I think that part of it might have been just me being emotionally and physically ready to find this right direction. I think the way we all develop and mature as singers has a lot to do with our voices and our technique—but a lot has to do with our outlook on life and how things are going. It’s all interconnected. I don’t think that 10 or 15 years ago I would really have been able to trust in myself a lot of things that I’m trusting right now and to deal with a lot of the tensions and things that I’m starting to get rid of.
Did anyone ever tell you that you had an exceptional voice?
I don’t think so really. I always had success. I was accepted at the schools I applied to. And certainly teachers encouraged me. But no one ever said, “This is a voice that we have to develop. We have to mold and create it.” It was never that. I don’t believe I ever created that sort of excitement.
And, to be honest, it’s really in the past few years that I’ve begun to really understand what the voice is about. I’ve made 15 years of career singing OK and doing all right, but it’s really only recently that I’m starting to really understand some things about my voice. It’s nice to be in your forties and feel like you’re making progress instead of deteriorating.
What has led to this greater understanding? And what are some of the elements of this understanding?
I suppose maturity is one thing. Part of it is just whether I wasn’t ready to be aware about this stuff when I was younger. Or my teachers didn’t quite hear it. I never tried to sing beautifully. I think part of it came from the kind of music I played when I played trumpet. I was aggressive. I was trying for brilliance. And it’s only recently that I’ve tried to make more beautiful sounds. And the funny thing is that all of a sudden people are starting to notice that. Gerald Martin Moore could hear this certain gripping and tension in the way I would produce sounds. A couple of people had sort of hinted about it. But I never had a teacher ever really deal with it.
A sort of light bulb went off, and I began to realize that there is so much in the language. As Americans we’re very guttural in the way we speak. Right now I’m speaking very much in my throat, which is very bad. And we have to fight against that to sing well. I think we tend to create our consonants as well as our vowels in a way that is not in the best position for good vocal production. You can get by with it, but it does hinder. It does create tension. It does stop the voice from really blooming.
So the trumpet had an impact on your singing?
Oh, it did. And I think also it may have just been my nature. I think I may have played trumpet that way and sung that way just because there is some part of me that is like that. I’ve had to teach myself to relax a bit and to let it happen. I was able to see that there was another way, another means, of making music. My means was more about technical brilliance, getting all the right notes, getting them in the right place.
And you can feel the difference?
Oh, yeah. When it goes well, it’s a whole different thing! Most of the people I’ve known and sung with over the past couple of years are all saying, “Wow, you’re singing so much better.” And for the first time in my career, really, I get more and more people saying that I have a beautiful voice. All the years I was singing, no one had ever said that. But suddenly I’ll have a conductor or colleague say it’s a beautiful voice. It was always proficient, capable, but never beautiful.
As a whole, I think there was a lot of tensions that I just wasn’t aware of. For whatever reason, a lot of the teachers I worked with either thought that was just basically my instrument and it wasn’t something that I could remedy, or they just didn’t necessarily hear it. They were listening for other things.
Do you have any advice for young singers?
I think my biggest advice would be don’t be afraid of the criticism. It can be very difficult. I think the thing that successful singers have most, over anything, is a very tough skin. The ones that succeed are not always the most promising, who have the most beautiful voices—often those people fall by the wayside very quickly because it’s a very tough business. You have to be able to take criticism and take from it what you can, but don’t dwell on it—and to take heartache as well, because that’s a very big part of the business.
Some 14 months after that interview CS traveled to Barcelona where Charles Workman was performing at the Liceu in a new production of L’arbore di Diana by Mozart’s Spanish contemporary Vicente Martín y Soler. We were interested to see how his newfound approach to singing was going. It had indeed progressed, thanks to a new girlfriend who is also his new teacher.
A development in recent years is the discovery of a new a quality in your voice. Have you seen a continued growing of this quality?
I may have spoken of it as a quality before, but now I realize it’s more of an understanding of mechanics. And it’s really a lot of the mechanics of vowel and consonant production. My girlfriend, who is Italian, Matilde Fassò, has been a brilliant help. I’ve always had good technique, especially in terms of breath control and things like that. But what I didn’t realize, and what my teachers in New York didn’t seem to realize—or either I didn’t understand—was that I was contradicting it with my vowel and consonant production. My vowels were too far back and too dark and all over the place. My consonants were also being produced too much in the throat.
With Matilde I’ve been able to realize that it has a lot to do with what teachers call the “mask.” What my teachers never said was that part of this mask is also keeping the vowel production in the same place, forward in the mask, and also keeping the consonants there as well. I discovered that my phonetic [i] vowel was so gripped and so far back that it was throwing everything out of line. I think that’s what bothered people who might have found my voice particular or didn’t like it for years. The vowels weren’t all of the same sort of quality. They were going back and forth in different directions. It’s something I’m repairing.
This breakthrough was originally thanks to your work with Gerald Moore, but it seems to have been enhanced by your new teacher and girlfriend. How did you meet?
It was just by coincidence. I had been working with Gerald for about a year and I went to Geneva to sing in Ariodante. [Matilde] works in the opera house there. We just happened to meet, and we started dating. It was about six months later that she sheepishly said, “You know, can I tell you a couple of things about your voice?” (She had studied singing as well.) She was a little bit scared to say things at first because she was afraid I would take it badly. But she has a great ear, and I think she’d be a great teacher if she ever decided to teach voice because she’s also very enthusiastic about singing. She hears everything from everyone, and I’ve really learned a lot from her.
Actually, it was Anna Sims who was the first person to tell me, “Your [i] vowel sounds a little strange.” No one had ever said that to me. With Gerald Moore, I began to realize that things were sort of in the wrong place. Then with Matilde, all of a sudden I had someone telling me . . . every time I would be going out of line. And that’s what’s really been helping recently—the constant sort of coaching which no one can ever get by seeing a teacher every now and then.
Obviously, I don’t see her all the time. We see each other every four or five weeks. But I sometimes sing for her on Skype, which is a nice way to keep in touch. She can keep track of whether I’m going in the right direction or falling back in the wrong direction. Skype’s been a brilliant thing for singers. I don’t know whether other singers use it with their teachers, but it certainly has stopped us from being so isolated when we’re abroad.
