Ah, the life of a Fest singer. When I was writing the last column, I barely had enough time to think about anything except work―and now I’m practically dying of boredom. It’s amazing how I can go from overworked to underworked in the blink of an eye. Friends and family often ask me what my day-to-day life is like, which is always a hard question to answer. Every day is really different. And since I’ve had a lot of time lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how variable the day-to-day life of a Fest singer can be, and how it has changed my life.
I was in Leipzig for almost three years before I became Fest, and was a guest artist at the opera house during that third year. Because I’d lived here before I started working, I’d had time to get used to living in Germany and didn’t have to deal with the stress of starting a new job and moving to a new country at the same time. Moving here was definitely difficult, and I remember being extremely lonely my first year. It’s hard to do much of anything when you don’t speak the language well, and Germans are notorious about taking a long time to make friends. And just when I started to feel like I had a handle on things, Daylight Saving Time ended, and the sun came up at 8 a.m. and went down at 4 p.m. You have no idea how important the sun and blue sky can be until you go weeks without actually seeing either one of them. I’m so happy I had that first year behind me before I had to deal with the stress of a full-time singing job.
During my time at the Hochschule, I (eventually) got to know a number of singers who have since gone on and gotten jobs of their own. A lot of them express shock that, once you start working, people expect you to deliver every day at every rehearsal and, of course, every performance. It doesn’t matter if you have a lot or a little to do: this is your job and you have to bring it.
Timothy Fallon, one colleague and friend, was recently in intense rehearsals for a new production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (he was one of the Meistersingers) and, within the space of a week, had two other shows reopen. In one, he sang Count Almaviva, and in the other Narciso (in Il turco in Italia). No one cared that those two roles are really hard, or that sitting around for four hours waiting to sing a little bit is every bit as tiring as jumping around the stage in a bee costume or lovely yellow heels for the same amount of time, or that Wagner and Rossini are completely different. He was expected to do what he’d been hired to do, without any excuses. In the end, he was fantastic, which is partly a product of the quality of singer he is and, I think, partly a product of what this job teaches you to do.
When you’re involved in three or four shows at once, out of necessity you learn to be flexible―but more than anything else, you learn exactly what your limitations and boundaries are. Then you just have to be brave enough to stand up for yourself when you’re asked to do something really out of your means. A lot of American singers are willing to take risks that other singers aren’t, and we’re also more likely to say yes than other singers. It can lead to great things, for sure, but it can also be dangerous.
Being here has taught me the value of saying no: if you’re asked to do something and you aren’t adequately prepared or aren’t capable of hitting it out of the park, you had better say no. No one gives points for effort in this business because, at the end of the day, you are here to perform, not try. It hurts, but it’s true: no one cares how that high E-flat was yesterday, because today is always a new day. If nothing else, it’s a great deterrent to stasis.
Another shock for me was the structure of the performance and rehearsal schedule. This next bit is convoluted, but I don’t know any better way to spell it out. It’s all kind of a thorny mess, and I feel genuine pity for the folks whose job it is to pull the schedule together every day. Soloists are available to rehearse Monday to Friday, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., then again from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.; Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. And, every once in a while, 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. (provided there’s no performance going on). When a singer is involved in both a new production and a revival, and time and space are short, rehearsals for the revival are afternoons from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Performances are scheduled from Tuesday to Sunday.
To make everything a little more complicated, since tomorrow’s daily schedule is sent out at 2 p.m. today, you can never really be sure what any given tomorrow may bring. Even if you’re in staging rehearsals for a new production, you can never be sure if you’ll be called. Mix in the musical rehearsals for other pieces, and it’s a virtual grab bag of opera. During my first year, I had staging rehearsals for Traviata and Hänsel und Gretel in the morning and musical rehearsals for Don Giovanni and Rondine in the evening. Going back and forth between those pieces was not easy, and I’ve never been more thankful for small roles.
Combine everything, and it means that you can go weeks in a row without a day off. All of us in the ensemble have at some point, and we all hate it. But I think we hate it more when we have days or, even worse, weeks where we don’t have anything going on―and, since we find out only one day in advance, we are stuck in town and can’t go anywhere. Either way, it makes for very long days.
For me, that has been the biggest challenge: getting used to living, basically, a day in advance. Those hard-to-get-to know Germans also love to plan (dropping by someone’s house is almost never done), so by the time Thursday afternoon rolls around and you finally figure out what your Friday night looks like, it’s too late to schedule a dinner party.
My fiancé loves to joke about how “hard” life is for an opera singer: wake up at 11, sit around most of the day, then go into work for an hour in the evening. Cry me a river, I know. But when you’re not called until 8:45 p.m., and it’s the middle of December and the sun said goodnight five hours ago, and it’s rainy to boot, and said fiancé is making an amazing dinner, and all you want to do is stay home and eat that dinner . . . it’s hard to rally. I know I’m lucky to be doing what I do, but on those cold nights, it’s easy to lose perspective.
As with everything else, though, it’s all still a work in progress, and I’m both happy and lucky that I get to keep working on it.
