“Learn to see, hear, love life,” wrote Konstantin Stanislavsky. “Learn to carry this over into art, use it to fill the image you create for yourself.” The father of method acting (who had an opera theater in his Moscow home) has become increasingly popular with U.S. opera companies. With arts administrators looking to bring in younger audiences, they have come to realize the tradition of “stand-and-sing” is long gone. Exciting stagings with authentically realized performances are the new imperative.
Ten years ago, only one American opera house had a staff dramaturg—Cori Ellison at New York City Opera. While most good directors double as dramaturgs (much in the same way that conductors are inherently musicologists), full-time positions are growing but are still scarce in this country. Bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch laments that “such luxuries are few and far between.” He has worked on only one production with a formal dramaturg in place and did not know what one was until that production.
There are a slew of definitions for dramaturgy, yet director Yuval Sharon puts it most succinctly: “Dramaturgy is dialogue.”
This dialogue includes even the smallest parts, which many singers consider unworthy of a dramaturg’s time. It’s often these small roles that beg more research. “I have always thought that the smaller your role, the more the onus is on you to create your whole world,” says Ellison.
“If you’re playing Spoletta in Tosca, you have a lot more of that kind of work to do than perhaps Scarpia does. . . . What makes a guy like this? Who is Spoletta and why is he working for Scarpia? What are his ambitions? What are his hopes? What did he eat for breakfast?”
Dramaturgy answers these questions and places each singer’s role into the context of the opera as a whole. Research on an opera or aria from all angles—the musical history, the socio-cultural context of the piece’s setting and creation, and the source material—allows singers to fully inhabit their characters, whether a title character or a single-aria role.
Ian Page, artistic director of London’s Classical Opera Company, directs and conducts full-scale productions, semi-stagings, and concert programs. “If a singer [has reached] that place where they are so under the skin of the text that it’s all absolutely second nature and part of their physicality, a child of 10 will catch them if they zone out for a second,” he says. “I find that really thrilling. Some old school singers never get to that point—they just deliver in a professional slick way without engaging in what the text is. The output becomes entirely re-creative rather than creative.”
Stage director and dramaturg Andrew Eggert agrees. “By doing their own dramaturgical research, singers become invaluable artistic collaborators—the living embodiment of the ideas that are the bases of an exciting and original stage performance.”
Certainly the dramaturgical process is multi-faceted, though the baseline practices are already widely used by singers. “The first thing I do when I prepare for a role is I read the libretto and translate it word for word,” says soprano Elizabeth Caballero. The study of the libretto over the study of the score may seem to be counter-intuitive to a professional musician, yet the combination of words and music is very telling. “It’s very clear from the way a composer sets a text that in itself solves a hundred questions,” says Page.
Translating the libretto or aria gives singers a bevy of opportunities to note where their research best lies. This may require an additional translation from archaic seventeenth- or eighteenth-century language into modern dialogue, as Okulitch often does. The extra work is well worth the extra understanding of the role and learning the composer’s intentions.
“The only reason the opera exists in the first place is because of the composer’s wishes,” says baritone Robert Gardner. “The process also slightly differs for newly composed music. Here, there may be only a single source or very little material, and the impact one has on the project is of such importance that what one does can and will be recorded into the history of that piece.”
Harking back to Stanislavsky’s famous tenet, bass-baritone David Pittsinger offers some far simpler advice: “Live your life. . . . The character is something that you have to form your ideas [about] before you begin to stylize and characterize the music within the boundaries of what it is.”
Houston Grand Opera dramaturg Colin Ure agrees that research must take on varied forms and not begin when you’ve booked a recital or been cast in a role. “We live in an age when opera, quite rightly so, is regarded as music theater. [Singers] should read widely and attend theater, exhibitions, etc., as each strand is an essential ingredient of the whole. It is simply not enough to learn the music.”
Being a well-rounded person and taking advantage of the myriad artistic offerings where you live and where you travel is a valuable jumping off point to being a good dramaturg. Next, of course, is research. Some singers, like Ruxandra Donose, write theses on parts that they hope to make signature roles. While it isn’t necessary to go that far, it is necessary to learn as much as possible as you can about the piece.
Eggert suggests starting with the musical and dramatic texts themselves before turning to historical sources, books, and articles about the background of the work. “But research is by no means limited to what can be found in the library,” he emphasizes. “I pull together all kinds of materials—images, audio recordings, artwork, fiction—all can be used to build a strong foundation and inspire a richer and more complex stage production.” Gardner finds himself drawn to the composer’s notes, biographies, letters, and other writings, as well as any program notes and articles he can find on previous productions of an opera. One singer’s or academic’s interpretation of Marcello or a Schubert lied could influence his first performance or his twelfth performance.
Learn to see, as Stanislavsky said, but also learn to see outside of the operatic box. Lucia di Lammermoor is a story of family drama based on a fictional account of a true story. It is also, however, a story rooted in feminist studies about the Victorian notion of madness in women. Studying Japanese international relations colors Madama Butterfly in a way beyond the inherent love story. Knowing not only the political implications of Le nozze di Figaro but also that the characters had previous lives in Beaumarchais’ Le Barbier de Seville will add to the greater depth of its roles.
The same holds true for new works, even though they lack the production history of standard rep. “When we presented Haroun and the Sea of Stories [at New York City Opera],” explains Ellison, “it was research on Indian culture and Bollywood. . . . You’ll research the culture of the piece itself because, of course, you have the composer and the librettist right there, so you don’t have to really represent them to the company or the public so much.”
These areas of study may even be more fruitful than research around the source material for an opera. Xerxes, for example, has very little to do with the ancient king of Persia. Studies on performance practices for the opera itself—such as Handelian performance and dramaturgy—are, therefore, important areas as well.
The job is no less important or difficult for singers performing a single aria or a song cycle, and there still exists a large and rich pool of resources. “One of the best things you can do if you’re working on a cycle of Schubert songs is to go to Vienna and go to the places where Schubert hung out and visited,” says Ellison.
In the absence of travel, there are ways to supplement a cultural saturation. “Watch films. Look at old images and engravings and photos. Read biographies, read social histories,” Ellison suggest. “Pretty soon you find yourself immersed in these worlds—Debussy’s Paris, Tchaikovsky’s Russia, Copland’s America—any music that you might be working on really deserves that kind of treatment.”
Fully inhabiting a role means that no detail is too small. “One of the questions I get asked the most by singers is how should they pronounce ‘whiskey’ in Madame Butterfly,” laughs Ellison, who is quick to add that there is no hard-and-fast answer, so long as you’re consistent with how you pronounce it.
These details are what allow a singer to get under the skin of the piece. “If Don Giovanni is going to touch his cape,” posits Pittsinger, “what does that mean? What did it mean when a nobleman touched his cape?”
With such details, however, is there the possibility of too much preparation? Okulitch prefers to go into rehearsal feeling “unfinished” so that he can more comfortably collaborate with the director, cast, and artistic team. Others, like Pittsinger and mezzo-soprano-turned-director Diane Kesling, feel there is no way to over-prepare. There is never enough rehearsal time and there is no such thing as too much knowledge.
Sharon considers it a double-edged sword: “A singer who understands how they fit into a scene and how they fit into the opera as a whole is great. But there is a problem when the singer feels like they know a role too much, because then they get in the trap of coming into rehearsals with decisions already made.”
This goes back to the idea of dramaturgy as dialogue. The issue is not over-preparation, but what singers do with their preparation. “The best advice that I can share with young singers is to be as prepared as possible,” says Caballero. “Come in to the role with your own ideas and interpretations. Don’t be afraid to do it your way first and if the director does not like what you are doing, ask questions as to why it does not work and why they prefer it their way. Most directors appreciate it when you ask questions and want to learn from them.”
Meeting with the director and cast mates before or after rehearsal is one of the best ways for a singer to engage collaboratively and find an intersection between points of view if the camaraderie is high. Kesling offers alternate advice from her years of working at the Met with the likes of Kiri Te Kanawa and Leontyne Price.
“The most valuable thing is . . . to go to all of the rehearsals and watch what happens. A singer will eventually let you know what you need to know because they’ll ask the questions of the director or of the coach, or they’ll say ‘this is where I have problems’ or ‘this is what needs to happen so that this can happen.’ . . . We all walk the same path—it’s just the nature of the singer that we’re very guarded about what we let people know.”
Using resources to your full advantage is also a dramaturgically inclined singer’s best tool. “If you adopt it as your hobby and look at it as a fun thing to read the books, see the films, look at the pictures, travel to the places that directly have to do with the music that you work on, it can be great,” says Ellison.
She and most dramaturgs are also happy to act as resources so long as you don’t rely on them to spoon-feed you your information or do the work for you. Also keep in touch with dramaturgs from past productions, whether they’re staff members of the opera house, full-time directors, or freelancers. And ask your peers and colleagues if they have worked on the role and how they approached it. Communication, after all, is the foundation of the arts.
“It’s about committing and communicating with an audience,” stresses Page, and “making sense of the music and re-creating the music in an absolutely creative way with enthusiasm and understanding rather than feeling beholden to a score we all revere with fear and admiration.”
