Soprano Nicole Car and baritone Etienne Dupuis are a dynamic couple and a shining example of an operatic family. Their careers have taken them to the most coveted operatic stages, but perhaps it is their love and support of young singers and colleagues that makes them truly remarkable. Read about their advice for emerging singers, how they are giving back to artists in need, the value they place on everyone who works on a production, and the deep trust and support they offer each other.
Nicole Car and Etienne Dupuis recently sang for the whole world from their home in Paris at the Metropolitan Opera’s At-Home Gala. They brought the same joyful energy to that living room performance that they had when I interviewed them two weeks before quarantine began, at a coffee shop in New York City where Car was performing in Così fan tutte and Dupuis was rehearsing for Werther. They brought along their three-year-old son Noah, whose cheerful giggling added to a delightful interview.
“Family is our number one priority,” Car says. This means a delicate balancing act with time changes, travel, and beginning rehearsals with less energy than they’d like. The couple met while singing Eugene Onegin in Berlin and since then have had to make conscientious choices for their family as they now evaluate offers for the 2023–24 season. Together, Car and Dupuis are creating a vision of what a family working in opera looks like for the next generation.Nicole Car and Etienne Dupuis recently sang for the whole world from their home in Paris at the Metropolitan Opera’s At-Home Gala. They brought the same joyful energy to that living room performance that they had when I interviewed them two weeks before quarantine began, at a coffee shop in New York City where Car was performing in Così fan tutte and Dupuis was rehearsing for Werther. They brought along their three-year-old son Noah, whose cheerful giggling added to a delightful interview.
Dupuis is quick to note that “luck is an element”—if you’ve got your lucky break and you’re able to demonstrate that you’re the right fit at the right place at the right time, it can help you move forward. “You can’t be hired a second time through luck, though!”
Car adds that luck with a healthy pregnancy and birth in Canada while Dupuis sang in Montreal made a difference for them. “We’re so aware of how lucky we are in our careers—work, family, travel,” she says. “We don’t take that for granted.” Both try to build good relationships with family and friends. “You have to give a lot of yourself to everyone.”
This is perhaps why both singers are so passionate about young artists and emerging singers. They become so excited talking about the ways that they see young singers develop successfully and are the type of couple to feed into each other’s energy—finishing each other’s sentences and becoming even more involved in sharing ideas.
Car and Dupuis both encourage singers to take a deep look at pay-to-sings. “You have to make sure that you have access to good teachers, good coaches,” Car says. “It’s a lot of financial outlay for seemingly not very much. There are probably some really, really good ones.”
Dupuis jumps in, “Do the program once if you feel it can help you.” He continues, mentioning a program where he was invited to do a masterclass. “Kids would come in and sing and then leave and not even listen. The best teachings I’ve ever gotten in this field were from watching other people’s masterclasses.” Car immediately responds, “How much do we learn from sitting in rehearsal and watching other people work?”
They laugh together, deciding who gets to tell the stories from masterclasses they’ve remembered. “We don’t have the same things that are obvious to us as performers,” Dupuis says. “There are other people who need it. Just because I’ve figured out one thing, not everyone has figured out that thing. I’m happy to hear someone state the obvious to me.”
Car thinks developing critical listening skills is incredibly important. “I remember that my old singing teacher at Melbourne University, Anna Connelly, offered her students discounted and free tickets to general performances,” she says. “The percentage of kids who’d take her up on it was so low. You need to see it not necessarily to see what you’d want to do, but also what you don’t want to do.” She suggests watching every performance thinking about what the singer is doing well or what choices you would make in the role.
For Dupuis, constant active listening is key. “It just reminded me,” he says, “that you need to have a filter on when you listen. You have to think, ‘What is he doing? What is that nuance?’ With that filter on, you catch all these pieces of information and you decide, ‘Do I like it? Do I not like it?’ Include [this information] in what you discard and what you keep.”
They even apply this critical listening to each other in a supportive way. Dupuis says, “There’s one thing I talk about always with Nicole’s voice: it’s a very even voice, extremely solid, and aligned perfectly in the entire range.” Car laughs and smiles, “I think people find it boring. It didn’t sound hard . . . but I shouldn’t look like I’m about to pop my head off every time I go from a low A to a top A!”
Dupuis compares good singing to cooking: “You can find everything we say about singing in cooking—if you don’t know how the recipe is done and you eat it, you can think, ‘Oh, this is marvelous!’ It doesn’t matter if the recipe is simple, it doesn’t matter if it’s the easiest recipe in the world if it’s well done. If you’re a young artist, like if you’re a young cook, you have to be able to detect what the process is. The same applies to the general audience—you don’t have to know how amazing a cook is to know you enjoyed the meal.”
They also say that you must be willing to jump in and get comfortable with a role and just do the role somewhere to get the experience. For Dupuis, as a young artist in Montreal, he learned the “Canada way” with two weeks of rehearsal, one week onstage in tech, and five to six performances. In revival houses, they now get a week of rehearsal, “if you’re lucky!”
You can break the role in somewhere, even if it’s only with piano. “Sometimes you get to gigs and there’s little available for you—you do these so you can break in the role and really get to know the part,” Car says.
Above all, Car thinks it’s important “to just be nice to people! Learn people’s names, get to know something about them.” In the Così fan tutte at the Met (cut short of its full run in the spring of 2020 due to COVID-19), “There’s a huge group of, we call them ‘skills’ performers, they’re circus performers, and I went over the first day and introduced myself to them and made sure I learned everyone’s name. I may not see them after this ‘Così’ but it’s so important to have the same kind of mentality with everyone. Just be nice, for goodness’ sake!
“Your job is not any more important than anyone’s job,” she continues—and Dupuis finishes her thought, “Not only that, your job is a scary one. You’re in front of everybody without a net every time. If you’re nice to people, they’ll help you. You’re going to meet the same people going up the ladder as when you’re going down it. The only person you’re really competing with in this business is yourself.”
Car adds, “Sopranos get a really bad rap, and it’s very competitive at the top, but I still remember doing a Bohème in Paris and Sondra Radvanovsky, whom I’d never even met before, knocked on my door to tell me she’d heard very nice things about my Bohème and she just wanted to say hi.” “And then she completely melted!” Dupuis interjects.
“If we can be supportive colleagues, it can make such a difference in the workplace,” Car summarizes, as Dupuis encourages Noah in a game he plays during the interview. They seamlessly support one another through their words and actions, in their careers, relationship, and parenting.
“There are people out there that will like you and others that won’t,” Dupuis asserts. “You have to make peace with that as much as possible. It still hurts when there are roles I want, and I see someone else doing it. . . . I have other engagements and I want to be with my family, but my head still does that.” He recommends against posting on the Internet about your disappointments, however.
Car agrees about avoiding social media backlash. “You’re allowed to be disappointed,” she says, “but that doesn’t mean that they’re not doing a really great job themselves.”
Car recalls singing in a masterclass for a visiting soprano as a young artist. “I had seen her sing a very large role,” she says. “I was singing for her and I was a young and impressionable singer. I don’t know why, but she took an immediate dislike to me and decided to be horrible. Young singers should be aware of this. If you think someone is being really mean to you, chances are they are.
“And you’re allowed to say, ‘I understand that you have an opinion about this. Thank you for taking the time to work with me, but I don’t think we’re compatible in this situation.’ You have the right to say that.”
This kind of diplomatic way of saying no is “really hard to do when you’re younger,” Dupuis adds. “It is an empowering tool to be able to respectfully ask someone to provide the information without the criticism being harsh.”
Car continues, “It’s good to be able to communicate that, and also to step back inside yourself and realize that it’s temporary and ‘I can be a bigger person than what this is right now. There will be other opportunities to sing for people who aren’t going to be like this to me.’”
It’s not just in masterclasses that this sort of situation arises, and both Car and Dupuis emphasize the strength one needs to take yourself out of the situation and be able to respond well. It prepares you for auditions but, according to Car, also “for a director, conductor, movement coach, and diction coach—you’ll have seven people knocking on your door, all telling you different things. You’ll agree with some of them and disagree with others. You have to take it in because they’re management. You take in what works for you and then you discard the rest.”
“When you’re young, you don’t really know all this,” Dupuis responds, “but eventually you figure out a language that you understand. Like when someone says, ‘Oh, you’re flat here,’ which happened to me yesterday!” Car interjects, “But you’re not, right?”
Dupuis answers her, “I’m not, but I’m on the wrong vowel. I’m crunching the sound to make an effect, and the end result is the pitch sounds flat. Translation for me: the effect I’m trying to do isn’t working, and I don’t just need to make the sound higher, I need to change my vowel. I’ve seen directors hammer into young singers during music rehearsals. I’m right next to them and I can hear they’re just singing the wrong vowel. Those conductors or répétiteurs are not capable, in the moment, of communicating it in a different language, and so repeat the same thing over and over.”
Car nods, “And so [they] get stressed,” compounding the problem. “By working against singing flat, they push and sing sharp. The problem comes when it’s time to do the role the next time. What would have been fine is now completely sharp or completely flat.”
Their advice to young singers facing these situations is to listen to their own body and have ears you can trust. For Car, “Whether it’s a teacher, a friend, or a husband, it’s so important, because when the conductor says, ‘It sounds like you’re flat here,’ you have another set of ears.”
“And by trust,” smiles Dupuis, “you don’t mean someone who’s going to tell you everything’s great.” Immediately Car says, “No, you want someone who’s going to tell you the truth, [even when] everything’s not great.”
They laugh together, mentioning times they have come to the other after a show or even at intermission with how the aria really went. Sometimes their comments spur them to improve their performance in the moment. Dupuis says he knows Car gets in her head sometimes about her performance, and he can help her find her way out of it. “You can’t hear yourself properly,” he says, “and you can’t get the same sense of what it sounds like outside your head.”
They build each other up and are able to offer trust-based constructive criticism because “we believe in each other very, very strongly,” he says. “I make fun of her tics and flaws, and she makes fun of mine. If I see a Nicole gesture instead of the character …”
Car jumps in, “He did it just the other day, saying, ‘You’ve just done it.’ Because we have Noah, we don’t get to see each other onstage as often as before Noah was born, so it’s not that frequent.” Dupuis adds laughingly, “It’s not like we give each other notes after every performance.”
But watching each other and commenting constructively has yielded great results in their performances. Dupuis comments that “it still can hurt. There’s a right time for everything, and sometimes there are things you don’t want to hear. But after a little while, and after your emotions cool down, you just reflect on what the person said.”
The intent matters, but Car says, “I now have so much trust in Etienne that he could say anything, and I think, ‘OK, cool, I can change that.’ I never really get upset anymore.” Dupuis interjects, “It takes time to get there. That’s why we’re saying we’re a team. Someone you trust is always helpful if they can be there.”
The couple provide this net of trust for one another and they extend that support to other singers. “I’m really passionate about young artists and making the right choices in their careers,” Car says. “I hate to see colleagues falling down during the prime of their careers because they’ve made snap decisions to do big roles too early or they listened to the wrong people or they’ve done too much and are burnt out.”
Dupuis, in a corny moment says, “Nicole Car, she puts the true in altruist.” Car laughs as her husband continues, “She really cares about her partners onstage, young artists, people she works with. She truly believes in human connections. I don’t; I hate people.” They laugh together.
That altruistic spirit is clear in the choices the couple are making now considering COVID-19 cancellations. Car has created the Freelance Artist Relief Australia fund. “Freelance artists have seen their contracts annulled and income disappear for the foreseeable future and as of today, nobody knows when it will be possible to perform again,” she says. “There is no safety net, and there was no time to prepare. I felt I needed to do something to help my colleagues who, like me, fall into the gaps. This is a time for human kindness and looking after people as best as we can.”
