Dorothy Byrne is an “Opera-preneur,” and she wants you to be one too. What’s an Opera-preneur? An Opera-preneur is someone who thinks of his or her singing career as a business and approaches that career like an entrepreneur starting a company, says Dorothy, or Dot as she breezily refers to herself. Byrne should know. In her mid-thirties, with no prior formal voice training, no music theory background, no foreign language training, and little knowledge of opera, she left a thriving career as a marketing executive to plunge into the turbulent waters of professional singing.
“I got to a place at a very young age where I held a very important position within a company . . . and thought that that’s where I always wanted to be. I was making the money and had the prestige, and the credibility, and the challenge, but I just was not fulfilled.”
Hearing Byrne tell her story is an exercise in fun. She’s one of the most interesting, down-to-earth people I’ve ever had the pleasure to speak with. No diva is she. She is, as she forthrightly says, a working artist who negotiated a steep learning curve to carve out a successful career for herself in this most competitive of fields.
Talking via phone from Hawaii, where she was rehearsing Berta in The Barber of Seville for Hawaii Opera Theatre, Byrne told me that she had always loved singing, but she didn’t start to explore it more seriously until she was at a Christmas party where friends heard her sing and urged her to consider singing professionally. From there, she used the knowledge gained from years as a marketing and development professional to pursue this new direction.
Byrne tapped her network of contacts to find the best voice teacher in her area. She initially thought of being a cabaret singer. At her first voice lesson, however, Byrne’s teacher asked if she had ever considered opera. Byrne was flabbergasted. She had never even seen an opera. But because her voice teacher—a respected professional—suggested it, she thought, “OK, if that’s where the product belongs, then fine, I’ll try it.”
It was quite a leap of faith—but Byrne doesn’t see it that way. “Success is a real combination of having knowledge and having a wide-eyed view of things . . . the willingness to take risks. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t realize how great a risk it was at the time.”
She sees that as a positive.
“This business, and being successful in it, is so much about your psychological point of view, of yourself and your potential. It truly affects how you go about not only approaching an aria but approaching work and the possibility of work. It’s the same old thing: positive energy begets positive energy. That’s come home to me many times in my career. When I really think it’s going to happen—and I do everything that I can do, that I can control to make it happen—chances are it does happen.”
That is the key to Byrne’s success: doing everything she can to make it happen. Her list of accomplishments speaks to that. She started her career singing in the chorus of Lyric Opera Chicago, but within a few years she was singing principal roles. How did she do it? Hard work, persistence, patience, taking risks, and most important, maximizing every opportunity that she saw before her.
When she was a chorus member, Byrne constantly observed the onstage techniques of the solo artists and made it her business, after studying their backgrounds, to work with those artists by asking them to coach her.
“They were more than willing to do so. Every last one of them,” she says. “There wasn’t a single person who said ‘no.’ So, to be able to study the Cherubino arias with Anna Sophie von Otter, you cannot replace that experience. It’s invaluable. It didn’t advance my career per se—she’s not going to get me a job—but what it did is inform the way I sang those arias at an incredibly high level.”
She also associated herself with three other singers in the chorus and developed performance opportunities for the four of them.
“I went out and developed relationships with the opera guild of Lyric Opera, offered our services because they have meetings every month,” she explains. “I donated our services for the annual Lyric Opera Operathon, and I developed a Christmas caroling company that went out and sang all over the place. So, I utilized, once again, the resource that was already there to begin to expand my solo work.”
This not only expanded her network substantially, it gave her the experience of singing solo in front of a variety of audiences, so that when the opportunity arose to audition for the Hal Prince-directed Phantom of the Opera, Byrne felt confident doing the audition. She was called back several times but ultimately didn’t get the role. Byrne wanted to know why. So—pay attention here because what she did next is a real lesson in persistence, taking risks, and believing in yourself—she called the casting director. She didn’t reach him. She called again and again until finally, on the fifth call, she spoke to him. She very politely asked for a chance to sing for him again, if the role was still open. He asked if she could be in New York the next day. Byrne went, sang on the stage of the Majestic Theater, and got the job.
“If I had not followed through, if I had not picked up the phone and run the risk of being told that I was a terrible singer, and not good enough,” says Byrne, letting the sentence hang. “And that’s what you do, you run that risk—and believe me, I’ve had people tell me that I’m not good enough for them.”
This tenacious attitude is part of what Byrne teaches in her “Business of Singing” seminars. (Check her website www.dorothybyrne.com to see a sample of the seminar.) Time and again, she stresses that the responsibility of developing your singing career is in your hands. You are the leader of your career, not your voice teacher, not your coach, not even your manager (if you have one).
“Some (singers) will have managers who truly do manage a career; that’s maybe 1 percent. The majority of us, if we even have managers, are going to have to manage our own careers anyway.”
In other words, you have to do your homework and be prepared to create your own opportunities, something you won’t learn in most conservatories or music programs. Indeed, too often singers are taught that talking about the business side of the profession sullies the art form, that art and making money don’t go together—but as Byrne points out, “We have to survive, and all [teaching] that does is make us stupid about how to manage ourselves as business people. . . . We’re cutting off our nose to spite our face if we believe that. I’m not suggesting I want you to go out and make a million dollars, but not knowing even the very basics about how much money a singer can hope to make who has five gigs a year—maybe one A house, four B houses—what does that mean, financially? They don’t know.”
Along with the chutzpah you need to direct your own career, you must stay aware that the business of singing is a subjective one.
“It’s a qualitative business. What one person thinks another person doesn’t. I still face that. There are companies that won’t have me. They don’t think I’m what they need or want. . . . I’ve been able to separate my personal feelings about that from my professional [feelings], and I take it less personally, but it’s hard. I tell young artists that you need to make follow-ups when you’re feeling strong not when you’re feeling weak.”
Easy? No, but as Byrne quips, it’s not rocket science—it’s common sense. Nor is it new. Business leadership books often refer to the entrepreneurial spirit needed to successfully launch and grow an enterprise: “Entrepreneurs are motivated to achieve, to take risks, to seek the results of performance, to innovate, to plan, and to set goals” (Bass and Stodgill’s Handbook of Leadership).
Byrne stresses those very points. She underscores the need for you to see yourself as a product, and own your career. That means you have to think about marketing yourself, not just once, but consistently, over time, and with your eye always looking toward what’s next: the next audition, the next workshop, the next gig, the next networking opportunity, even the next issue of a journal or magazine that will keep you informed of what’s going on in the business. And yes, Byrne stresses, this is a business. But don’t be afraid of that. It can be an exciting prospect to be the CEO of your own company.
So, to help you continue to forge your career, let me leave you with some “Dot-isms”—words of wisdom and questions from this 20-year veteran that will get you thinking about your life as an Opera-preneur.
1. You are a product, so know your product variables, because they determine how you put yourself out into the market: What is your voice type? Your physicality? Your age? Your ability with languages? Your experience level? That is what you package.
2. Know what is in your control and what isn’t (and don’t sweat it). You can’t control, for example, your voice type, your gender, your height, or whether you’ll be cast. You can control bettering your acting skills, your movement skills, your language skills, your weight, and your ability to work well with others.
3. Know where your time is best spent in refining yourself as your product. For instance, you can become more proficient in Italian, but will that affect your career? Does the market need or want that from you? If you’re not hired to do a lot of Italian operas, it’s probably not a priority.
4. You can define “success” in many ways (it’s not always singing at the Met), and they’re all valid. How do you define success? Does success mean making a certain amount of money? Or being able to perform a certain role, no matter where it is? Knowing this will help you determine how and where to market yourself.
5. Professional singing is a risky business. How much risk are you willing to take? What kind of personality are you? Are you risk-averse, or are you a risk-taker? If you’re not sure, take a risk assessment test. It will help you determine what level of career you feel comfortable pursuing.
6. Create a “board of directors” around you of people whom you trust, people who are honest with you—your teacher, your coach, your family, your accountant—anyone you feel will be a source of support as you move forward in your career.
7. If you’re in school, take an elective in marketing for small businesses. If you’re out of school, take business planning courses at your local community college. The earlier you do it, the earlier you’ll develop your business perspective and the more you’ll be able to build it into your everyday thinking about yourself as an artist.
8. Always be on the lookout for information about what’s going on in the business. Take workshops that will benefit your growth as an artist and as a business person. Read all of the journals and magazines—look for announcements of which conductors are working where, who’s singing where, what companies are holding auditions when and where, who’s new to a company’s administration (and if you know them, send a congratulations e-mail and ask them to keep you in mind). The more informed you are, the better you can guide your career.
