I recently got around to framing a newspaper article from nearly three years ago published in the Australian featuring a photo of me with my then two-year-old son. The article, entitled “Offstage, Jennifer Rivera’s Motherhood Statements Grab the Fans,” was written in anticipation of my performance of the title role in Faramondo with the (now defunct) Brisbane Baroque festival. The article focused on some of the very honest blogging I had done for the Huffington Post including articles about the challenges of balancing a career as a traveling artist with that of being a mom.
Ironically, in the photo they chose for the article [see top right photo on this page] my son looks positively angelic, despite the fact that he had, only minutes before the photographer showed up, succumbed to a meltdown of epic proportions. Had they snapped the picture in that moment, the whole truth of attempting to globetrot while simultaneously working in an intense and sometimes brutal profession and trying to raise a balanced and sane child would have been more evident than the smiling relaxed faces that ended up peering out of the newsprint image. Although, the smiling picture was us too—both realities were true and present many times a day.
After that article was published, I spent another two full years on the road with my son and, excluding a few days here or there, I always brought him with me. His passport contains stamps from multiple countries, and by the time he was three he had been to more states than most adults have. That all sounds glamorous, but in reality it is a lot of finding creative ways to keep your kid quiet on long plane rides, discovering the playgrounds instead of the museums in any given city, and worrying about who will take care of the most important person in your life while you’re at rehearsal or performing.
While there were a lot of wonderful things about that time and I’m truly grateful for that chapter in our lives, the planning and worrying about logistics of travel and childcare were causing me a lot of stress, even with the amazing support of my family. Meanwhile, although I loved a lot of things about singing, the writing and blogging I had been doing led me to realize that perhaps my calling might have changed. I started to feel extraordinarily passionate about the work of those that support the opera companies themselves by raising money, developing new audiences, and educating people about what opera can be.
So when it was time for my son to start preschool, I made the decision to take a full-time position as the major gifts officer in the development department at Long Beach Opera, a company I had long admired in a place I knew I would enjoy living and raising a child. I’m still around opera every day, but now I’m writing about why it matters instead of showing it does by singing—and instead of traveling to France or Wisconsin, we go to Disneyland, which is only 20 minutes away. It’s turned out pretty well for all of us.
One of the reasons I was eager to work in arts administration is that I really enjoy creative problem solving. And let’s face it, keeping an opera company afloat and attracting new audiences in a world where most people don’t even know what opera is definitely requires a great deal of innovative thinking. But I also felt a desire and even a responsibility to work my way up to a leadership role within the opera industry—partly because I think I have something to offer in terms of energy, passion, and strategic thinking but also partly because we need more women leaders in this industry where the leadership is still so heavily male dominated.
So I was pretty delighted when I recently had the opportunity to be surrounded by a group of future women leaders while participating in the Hart Institute for Women Conductors and Administrators at the Dallas Opera (TDO). The Institute (now in its third year) was dreamed up and brought to fruition by visionary General Director and CEO Keith Cerny in part as a discussion incubator and think tank about what will advance women into leadership positions in the classical music industry.
The program also provides practical tools and instruction that will give the participants the support they need to excel in a competitive industry. From giving the conductors the opportunity to conduct the incredible TDO orchestra in two concerts following masterclasses with the likes of Marin Alsop and Nicole Paiement to giving the administrators direct access to the leadership staff at TDO including seminars on marketing, development, finance, and working with board members, the Institute is an astoundingly complete effort on the part of the Dallas Opera and its supporters to genuinely make a dent in the gender gap in the classical music industry.
The road remains long. The statistics on the percentage of female general directors of top-level opera companies and the number of female music and artistic directors remain depressingly unbalanced.
The #MeToo hashtag had just begun to go viral as the seminars were beginning, and the evidences of abuses women suffer at the hands of powerful men were seemingly everywhere. And, yet, when I arrived in Dallas and headed to the opera house for the first of the two concerts featuring the women conductors, I suddenly began to feel some of my hope and inspiration returning.
Watching woman after woman step up to the podium that night—all talented, unique, determined, and full of promise—I felt the winds of change blowing strongly in our direction. There are so many extra rungs on the ladder for women seeking leadership—what they wear, whether they have children, whether they’re too intense or too emotional—but during this concert I felt like the crashes of the timpani cued by woman after woman were creating that many more fissures in the ubiquitous glass ceiling.
Amazingly, the Hart Institute has generated substantial financial support from its supporters and has already, in just three years, yielded successful results of past participants achieving leadership positions. The news the program has generated has highlighted the problem of gender inequity, and the program itself takes a multi-pronged approach, providing education, career support, discussion, and camaraderie that becomes an invaluable tool for the participants.
Marin Alsop, still the only female music director of a major orchestra in the U.S., stressed that women need to utilize their own natural abilities, including empathy, to be the kind of leaders the world needs more of. I found her masterclasses and seminars particularly revelatory.
I decided to bring my son with me to Dallas, knowing that it would likely be one of the last opera-related trips we would take together. It was a little difficult to juggle a rigorous training program with finding time to enjoy my son, but it was also kind of interesting to consider the qualities that make a great leader by day and compare those with the qualities that make a great mother by night.
It reminded me that they’re not that different, and discovering your best self is something that can happen in the board room, in the kitchen, or before an important photo shoot with a fussy kid. In life’s dichotomies, we find our own truth. I still think of myself as an opera singer, but I now also definitely think of myself as an opera administrator. I’m a mother who wants to be a leader and an artist who wants to be an advocate. And because the world is changing, I’m getting more and more opportunities to be all of the above.
