Some singers move to Berlin to work at one of its three opera houses—others, to base themselves in a convenient, cheap, and beautiful city while they do auditions or freelance around Europe. Classical Singer sat down in a café a few blocks away from the Deutsche Oper with five Berlin-based American and Canadian opera singers to see what they had to say about moving to Germany, living in Berlin, auditioning, and working the Fest system.
Working Fest
Lucas Harbour: Along with the premieres they have here, there are so many other productions. Deutsche Oper has like 40 different shows going on in a year. This year just my schedule at Deutsche Oper, not including anything else, was over 40 performances, which I’m sure is the case for everybody. Even if you don’t have to do anything, they say, “Oh, come watch a performance.” So you’re there [at the theater] the whole time. It still sucks the energy out of you.
But I was told for people with decent technique it’s a great training ground. I didn’t know this when I was going to come, but when I came here for my first role—although it was not big—I had 10 minutes of musical rehearsal, and five minutes of stage rehearsal, and then I had the show. That would never happen in the States. If I had one dress rehearsal, I wouldn’t be nervous. And it’s not like it was a big part or anything like that, but you never see the set, you never see anything until you’re on the stage doing it.
Ben Wager: Don’t worry about an orchestra rehearsal. That will come when you go onstage.
Lucia Cervoni: Yeah. Like my debut.
BW: A friend of mine who had done this program, he was like, “After the training in the States and then going and spending a year at Deutsche Oper, you’re prepared for absolutely anything.” Because they’ll do a production, they’ll throw you on, they’ll give you a crash course in the staging in 15 minutes, make you walk through it twice with piano—without the conductor even there sometimes—and then you’re on.
LH: Yeah, if you’re doing a role debut with Carmen or Zauberflöte or something like that that they do a lot, good luck. Because everybody knows it and they don’t care that you don’t know it. I’m sure that’s the case with any theater.
LC: We have so many Wiederaufnahmen (revivals) this next season. There are five shows coming back, and they have a Neuebesetzen (new cast) next season—and you get like four days or two days of rehearsal, you see the conductor once, and then go, because there’s no money if you do more. We have two mezzos, four sopranos, everybody is filled into their Fach, and then you go.
LH: My most extreme case of that was in November, the “Ballo.” And I was doing Tom, which isn’t a huge part, but it’s in every single act and almost every single scene. We had two days of rehearsal, no chorus, no orchestra. Sink or swim. Between the three performances that we had and the two rehearsals, I probably was on stage performing more than I was actually rehearsing for the show. But after you’ve had that experience, it stays with you. All of a sudden getting nervous to sing in front of the class, it’s like, “It’s OK; this isn’t a big deal.”
Why Germany?
LH: The reason why I came here is there are 80 theaters that are full time that hire people full time.
Roberta Cunningham: I think it’s more than that actually—over 100.
LH: And in the States, how many do you have? I mean maybe you can call the Met that. But anybody with a real full season, there’s maybe like one opera house in the States. So your odds are a lot better here.
LC: For those people who want to get married and have children, if you’re Fest, which means full time at a theater, you have a full-time salary, you have your afternoons off—and then, as a woman, you can have children, get a year off paid (a percentage), and then I believe also that your job is held for you without pay for another two years on top of that. You know, it’s a great possibility for two [married] musicians to lead the closest thing to a regular life that you’re going to get in our career, which is usually “gypsy land.”
Learning German
RC: The working language is German. Your stage directors are German. The people in the costume department, they’re German. If you need to have things changed or you don’t like something, if you need to ask questions, you really have to speak German. And it’s just better for your own mental health. Because also . . . you’re running around afraid people are going to talk to you because you can’t talk back to them, and that has to play a role in how you sing, because you’re carrying around tension. The more you speak German the less of that kind of tension you have. There’s other stuff to deal with, you know?
Nathan De’Shon Myers: My first year here I had the fortune of getting a scholarship to go to the Goethe Institute, which is a really well known German language school here. When I had rehearsals, I used everything that I learned in class that day in the theater, immediately. I also asked colleagues to speak with me in German. I usually sat around the older colleagues who spoke a little bit slower and much clearer than some of the younger colleagues did, and so that really helped.
BW: The really young kids, if they’re under 25, they all try to practice their perfect English, so you never get anything done talking with them. But I would say, after seven or eight months here, my understanding of German was pretty good. The nice thing about German is it doesn’t melt together like French or English. They don’t take shortcuts; everything is pronounced. So once you get the vocabulary up to snuff, it’s actually not too bad. But forming a sentence on your own is a completely different story. I’m still getting my head around the basics of the grammar.
RC: It used to be they would hire you with no German at all. They would say, though, even sometimes in the contracts, “We expect you by the end of this year to be able to speak a bit more German,” and I’ve known people to get fired because they didn’t. Most of the time, the people really did make an effort and it’s not a problem, but they did have it in the contract. They would hire them with no German knowledge and allow them the time to get it under their belts.
LH: Some of these pieces, like Die Zauberflöte at Deutsche Oper, are basically an improv show once it hits the dialogue section. I mean, I’ve seen two or three different people, and they all do it different—and sometimes they’ll throw in extra stuff, they’ll throw in random humor. If you’re not really fluent—and not even if you can kind of speak it—if you’re not really fluent, you could get lost.
Auditions
RC: Do not come over here and do a six-week audition tour. It doesn’t work that way anymore. And there is no [typical] audition time in November and December [like in the States]. The most people I know who have gotten hired have gotten hired in April and May, because they [opera houses] do all these auditions in November, but they don’t make any decisions. And then they wait, and they have to do them all again in February and March and April. And they keep holding people off. I mean, if you want to come over and spend six weeks in Germany, wonderful—but just not with this idea of “I have to get the job in six weeks.”
LC: I don’t necessarily agree, because I came for a month—and all I’m saying is you can come, just don’t tell them that you’ll have to go back at a certain time. Don’t tell them your last day.
BW: Don’t ever tell them you’re going back to the States.
LC: And then this creates a possibility for you to come back. I had to come back over and audition, but it was important for me, so I just made it a priority.
BW: You come over here for a couple weeks, and you audition for something, and then they ask you—possibly in German—“Are you going to be in Germany for the next year?” You tell them yes.
RC: Lie with joy. Absolutely.
LH: Something to think about for people who want to create that illusion that they are here: you can go on Skype and buy a German number that you can access anywhere in the world. Somebody calling can leave you a voice message, you can pick it up anywhere. They say, “Hey, are you available in two weeks?” and you can go online, buy your ticket, and go. I mean, it’s possible.
RC: Or you can say, “I have a concert on that day, I’m sorry. Can you get me another audition date?”
NDM: Make sure that you have a plan. No matter if it’s six weeks or six months, you have to have a plan. Because the one thing that I have seen, because Berlin is very lively, is that you can get lost in the city. There are so many young people here, with universities and all that stuff, people backpacking—all of Europe comes here at some point. So there’s a lot to be distracted by if you don’t have a plan. And I’ve watched some young people who come and they blow all their money just having a good time, meeting new people, without a plan of “OK, I’m going to this, I’m going to do that, I’m going to stay focused, and every day I’m going to do something toward my reason for being here.”
LC: Something that really helped me was going to operabase.com, and [for] every country it lists all of the agents. I didn’t know anything and I just wrote everybody. You just go, you take a chance, and it may be that you’ll get one or two auditions. I got two auditions. Some people do three and get a job. Some people do 50 and don’t get a job. Some people do one.
Agents
LC: With a few exceptions, you can have as many German agents as you want. So if someone gets you the audition and you get the job, they get the chunk.
RC: You don’t pay a retainer fee or anything. You pay only if they get you a job.
LH: I have to say on the subject of agents: they say that all the German agents get announcements at the same time. They will get the “official” announcement [at the same time]. [But] people know that some [agents know about auditions] before it’s ever published. [Or] why would people have different agents?
I got put up for a job that one of my other agents had no idea about, for a theater that I asked her to look into. And even after she looked into the theater, the theater said, “No we’re not doing any auditions,” for an audition that I got.
Berlin
LH: When I talk to guests [artists contracted for one show]—for a lot of people that’s their eventual calling, to guest around—and I always ask these singers, especially who come through here, what cities are best to live in, and [Berlin] is almost always in the top five. The four cities that come up the most are Milan, Frankfurt, London, and Vienna. But London and Vienna are both insanely expensive.
NDM: Summer is short but beautiful. The winter is long and it can be beautiful. I love Christmastime in Berlin. But the cold is something, especially coming from Texas where it’s hot most of the time. But it’s a beautiful city.
On a more global idea of this city, Berlin is a small version of New York. It’s sort of a mixture of small town and big city at the same time. You have all of these little neighborhoods—Kreuzberg, Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf—where they’re small microcosms of a big city, basically. And so it’s really convenient, because no matter which neighborhood you live in, you always have a grocery store, all the amenities that you need, cleaners and restaurants, and all that. And there are a lot of young people in the city. It’s full of artists and all different types from musical theatre to opera to visual artists to dancers—everything.
RC: Public transportation is fabulous in this city. Really fabulous.
LH: It’s cheap! Rent is dirt cheap; food is dirt cheap.
LC: High quality of living for a really low price. I’m paying for an entire apartment what I paid for one room in New York, for example.
LH: I can’t believe things are as inexpensive as they are, because we are in a big city.
BW: Beer is cheaper than water.
RC: It is far away. I mean, we are almost in Poland. Really, we’re only an hour from Poland, but the main train station here is the biggest, most modern train station in the world. And it has connections really to everywhere, fairly quickly.
LC: I just think the coolest thing about singing over here is that I’ve been here for two seasons, I’ve racked up like 10 or 11 new roles, and I’m learning my craft every day from going on the stage. Doing new things—stuff I never even knew I could even accomplish. And stuff that killed me in a performance; it was embarrassing and I cried later. But some really amazing accomplishments: learning how to sing, learning how to act, learning a new language. And you’re doing it all in a performance. I didn’t experience that in the United States. I would only say, “Come.”
