Critics can sometimes be prophets, especially when reviewing the performances of young artists. In 1998 Anthony Tommasini reviewed the Metropolitan Opera National Council Winners Concert at the Met in the New York Times. He singled out Eric Cutler, the youngest of the 10 winners, and observed, “Voices take time, usually most of a singer’s 20s, to settle. For example, . . . Eric Cutler, a 22-year-old tenor from Iowa, displayed a pliant, lyric tenor voice in familiar arias by Gounod and Donizetti. But with more training his sound should fill out and his understanding of style and language deepen.”
Ten years later, Cutler’s sound has not only filled out, it has made him one of the youngest top tenors of the world. His voice, combined with his imposing 6-foot-3 height, almost automatically assures him an instant stage presence.
If you’re born and reared in the small town of Adel, Iowa, however, exceptional talent needs exceptional circumstances to develop and thrive. In Cutler’s case, a vocally precocious younger sister and the potential of having veteran professionals recognize his voice provided those circumstances. After winning the Met competition, Cutler entered the Lindemann Young Artist Program in the fall of ’99. After completing the program and following the carefully crafted strategy of his manager, Matthew Horner, Cutler continued advancing to one role, theater, and orchestra after another.
I spent a couple of hours chatting with Cutler while he was in Madrid, in a terrace café next to the Teatro Real and looking out at the imposing Royal Palace across the square. My aim was to distill some of the special ingredients of a career that continues to soar.
When did you first realize you had a gifted voice?
I would say high school. We had the All-State Chorus. I was a freshman, and auditioned and was accepted. Then there was a solo. I auditioned for that and was one of the finalists. I really didn’t know anything about singing at that point. I started receiving accolades and such through our choral-work music program. I think that was the first time I realized that I was a good chorister; at least, and had the ability to sing well and was also a good musician. I had a good ear. As far as my voice really developing, it was much later, certainly, my second or third year in undergrad.
What about the family? Was there a musical ambience?
My sister is a gifted soprano. That’s how I sort of came into singing opera because she would sit and sing—and [she] just naturally had this real voice, with vibrato and substance, at the early age of 14.
Luckily, we lived close to Des Moines, and we would go to the public library, take the score out, listen to the CD, and imitate. We would sing Rigoletto, “Traviata,” and such. At Christmas and at other family gatherings, we would get up and sing the “Brindisi” from La Traviata. It was great fun for us and it certainly brought us together as brother and sister. We’re still incredibly close today and still sing together every chance we get.
I started imitating Luciano [Pavarotti] and the three tenors and started listening to older tenors like [Giuseppe] di Stefano and [Beniamino] Gigli. In the first stages of singing, it’s like learning a language. You imitate what you hear. Whether or not it’s right technically is another matter. I knew early on I could sing high Cs without any training. It’s important to listen and imitate sounds. It’s being flexible and pliant that enables us, later in our development, to identify our own sound.
Let’s get to when you were discovered. Did someone finally push you along the way and say, “Hey, you should do something about your voice”?
I started out at the University of Northern Iowa. I went there initially with the idea of studying music but was open to other things. I was thinking of pursuing conservation and studying the environment. I sang a vocal audition for the [late] coach Miguel Pinto, who had worked with [Alfredo] Krause, [Montserrat] Caballé, Rita Patané, Anna Moffo, and [Joan] Sutherland. He heard me and said, “I think you need to really pursue a career as a tenor.”
I thought it was possible, but I just didn’t see how it was practical. I dropped out of school for six months, worked, and was confused. Then I met an admissions counselor from Luther College. Ironically, the first year I was in all-state choir the choral director was Weston Nobel from Luther College. He had a profound influence on me as a musician and as a man. I visited Luther and ended up going there.
I found a teacher, Ed Anderich, who was a tenor. He’s really the one who took over my training. A tenor himself, he understood the trials and tribulations ahead of me.
We spent three years studying really hard. From the outset he said to me,”You really have to prepare six or seven arias and just go after the Met auditions. That will be the focus.” And that’s what I did. I just trained and honed those seven arias.
[Pinto and Anderich] got me listening to the right people and to the right repertoire. I believe that all through my youth, and my 20s especially, there was always this little angel on my shoulder. And so I really feel that these two people were divinely placed in my life to sort of push me in this direction. I loved singing, but there were plenty of other things that I felt I could have done and would have loved doing. But as things progressed I realized that this really is just truly what I’ve been called to do and what I have to do.
So it was clear by the time you graduated from college you would pursue a career in singing?
I would go after it vehemently. I decided that if by the age of 28 I wasn’t singing the roles that I wanted to sing, primo tenore parts, leading male parts, that I was probably going to go into conservation, probably doing something with wildlife management in a national park, because I just didn’t want to wake up at age 45 thinking that I had wasted a lot of time trying to fulfill a dream that wasn’t happening. But by 28 I was doing what I’d hoped to do.
Tell us about the Lindemann Program. How long does it last, and what does it consist of?
It’s three years. You’re exposed, first of all, to the best coaches in the world. They pay you a salary to study and they pay for all your lessons. They pay for music and recordings, to some extent. But then they bring in all these teachers. When I was there I got to work with people like [Régine] Crespin, [Renata] Scotto, and [Birgit] Nilsson. Visiting conductors who are there will work with you. You have the fullest extent of the Met, and you have a sort of a carte blanche to work with all of its resources.
I really was this naïve farm kid who didn’t know a lot, and because I was, I dare say, ignorant, I just soaked everything up. It was more life training, instead of having your nose in a book and listening to recordings all the time. You’re there live. You’re doing small parts. For me it was essential.
How did you support yourself during the process of training?
I was incredibly fortunate because I went directly from my undergrad to the Young Artist Program and they provided a stipend. That second year I started singing smaller parts and that paid a little bit more. It wasn’t much by New York standards, but still, I was in a much better situation than most of my colleagues starting out.
You didn’t have to wait tables.
No, I didn’t, thankfully. But I did put myself through undergrad. I worked at a gas station all through my undergrad. In the summers, when I was off, I would go home and work in a brickyard. I have certainly done manual labor.
Your career is now international and you’re ahead of the game in terms of age. To what extent is this due to managing?
In the beginning stage it was getting me the right parts at the right places, and that’s a balancing act. It’s important, for instance, to come to the Teatro Real. It’s important for them on this side of the pond to hear me and get to know me. But you don’t want to necessarily come over here singing First Prisoner in Fidelio. You want to come in the right way—I’m with IMG Artists and I have full management in New York, London, and Italy—and it’s important to come with the right repertoire.
I think it’s important not to push too hard and do too many debuts. We see this more and more in young singers, who at 26 or 27 are singing Faust for the first time, and most of the time they’re really, honestly, just not ready. Tenors take a long time to develop, technically, on stage, and emotionally.
The role of managing is twofold, trying to get the right theaters to hear you in parts that are appropriate while avoiding pushing things too fast. A lot of us tenors get shoved up there when we’re just not technically ready and we don’t know the parts well enough.
The first time you get up on stage you realize that there’s a heck of lot more that goes into being Plácido Domingo than just having a great voice. There’s the stagecraft, learning how to sing with an orchestra from such a far distance, knowing how to be with the conductor, to be in your character, and to be in your costumes. It’s a long process that for most of us—no matter how unbelievable of a wunderkind we might be—takes time.
My agent, Matthew Horner, was really wonderful at getting me the right parts in places where it was OK if I accidentally tripped over the hedge or did something stupid, because we need those places to develop as artists. You just can’t all of a sudden just pop out of a Young Artist Program and be the next great tenor of the world. Managers, instead of just being good agents and getting top fees and parts, should really help you manage your career.
Part of your manager’s strategy for launching your career was to have you record a CD early on. Can you tell us something about the difference between performing live and performing in a studio?
I found it incredibly rewarding. It’s something I’d like to do a lot more of because it allowed me to have a first hand look into what I was doing technically. Sometimes you think a phrase or sound that you make is perfect. You listen to the recording and you realize that it’s not actually what you thought it was in your mind. It was a wonderful thing for me to do because I could focus on making the perfect arch or shape of a phrase within the context of a piece, whereas in performance, it’s really all about one moment that you’re expressing and one emotion.
In the recording, it wasn’t so much like just taking a photo of something, but rather like actually having a chance to make a painting, and to paint it exactly how you wanted it to be. And—especially now, with modern recording—you can go in and splice one note, one second, if you want to.
I found that I could make a song in Liederkreis exactly how I wanted it—“Mondnacht,” for instance. I was so thrilled with the way that it came out. I had the time to get each phrase just how I wanted it to sound. Sometimes, on stage, you want to take a few of those back [he chuckles], but you can’t because it’s live.
This production in Madrid has a dynamic young conductor, Kristoff Koenig. I noticed immediately at the press conference that he’s very personable and that you were chatting away and exchanging comments. How does the music director affect your performance?
Well, that’s a huge question. It can make or break the performance, really, because as singers we’re individuals. We’re not just an instrument like a piano that can be played a hundred different ways. Most of the time, we all have a real perfect tempo, and if the conductor is great, he knows that. He can hear when you’re struggling.
One would assume that having a dialogue with a conductor is only natural, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes you have conductors who have an idea or vision of how they want a piece to go, and you are simply a cog, and that’s that. And those are usually the hardest scenarios that you find yourself in because you want to try new things. You want to grow and evolve as an artist and certainly as a technical singer, but sometimes it simply isn’t going to work that way.
Kristoff is one of those conductors who know singers. He was himself a singer. He loves singers. And it’s fabulous when you get people like this because there’s real open dialogue. You have a sense that he knows what’s going on with you in the moment on stage, and he’s always there.
Another factor in your performance is your relationship with your colleagues, especially your leading lady.
The bottom line is it is your job is to get along. There’s obviously going to be those colleagues that you are closer to, but nonetheless, at the end of the day, no matter how much you hate your soprano, you’ve still got to look like you love her on stage.
Singing with you in this production is veteran bass-baritone Eric Halfvarson. Do you ask for professional pointers from him?
Eric is a good friend now, I think I can say. Since I grew up in the Met doing smaller parts, I’d be crazy not to seek the advice of older, more experienced singers. There isn’t just one way to go about the career. I’ve wanted to see what has worked for others and, certainly, for people I respect, and Eric has been one of those people. I’ve asked him a good deal of tax advice and things dealing with just stagecraft, because sometimes when you’re up on stage you find yourself wandering, singing into the wings, doing things like that. It’s nice to ask something of someone who’s been singing for over 30 years. And he’s been really great about this.
From what you’ve said so far, you seem very conscious about the relationship between your age and your voice, and about how you want to develop.
I am confident now in the direction my voice wants to go. Every day I warm up to C-sharp, D, or higher, if I can feel it wants to go there. I always think of tenors as racehorses. Sometimes if you don’t let them run and just let them sing up there, they lose their nerve a little bit. Sure, I’ll sing Mozart maybe once or twice a year, but I really want to start going into some of the high-flying parts a bit more, because I think, instinctually, I respond to them well. They bring out the best in me as a singer and as a technician, and I think they allow me to do what I think I do best. In that way, I think it’s a good balance. I still sing Mozart—I’ll sing Tamino, probably, as long as I live—but I still do a fair amount of recital, and I do a fair amount of concert work.
In opera I try to remain as varied as possible, because I think sometimes it’s easy for us to be straitjacketed into a specific Fach, you know, just being cast to sing early music or Bel Canto. In my opinion, this not only limits our technical evolution, but more importantly, our creative musical instincts. I try to keep things balanced as much as I can, but I certainly would like to start moving towards more of the French romantic parts and Bel Canto parts a bit more.
Do you have any advice for young singers?
I have two pieces of advice. One, learn to speak as many languages as you possibly can as soon as possible. The more that you understand other languages the better off you’re going to be. People all of a sudden have to find ways of remembering text. You won’t have to do this if you know the language you’re singing. Two, I think people should be patient. Vocal development and technique need time. Your voice sort of parallels the way that you develop as a person and you can’t force anything vocally. It’s a direct link to your innermost expression, your soul. Those things you can’t hide. You can’t lie. It just is what it is.
My main mantra has been: “Stay lyric, lyric, lyric, as long as I possibly can.” When you’re 50 some day, you’re not going to have beautiful, easy, pianissimi, passaggio notes. The aging process alone will develop the voice. And I think that just as long as singers accept who they are and where they are, and are patient, things develop they way God intended them to.
