Jacque Trussel’s career has run the gamut, from professional singer, to conductor, to voice teacher, to stage director. As a professional singer he has appeared in opera houses around the world, including Covent Garden, San Francisco Opera, La Scala, the Metropolitan Opera, and New York City Opera, to name but a few. He received a Grammy award nomination for his solo recording, Sounds and Sweet Airs, and has appeared on live radio and television broadcasts, including Live from the Lincoln Center and the CBC television broadcast of Carmen.
Now, with a successful operatic career behind him, Mr. Trussel is finding equal success as a stage director. He made his directing debut in 1996 at Sarasota Opera with Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffman, and he returned the following year to direct Humperdinck’s Königskinder. Shortly thereafter, he accepted a position as both chair of the Department of Opera Performance/Vocal Studies and choral director at the Purchase College Conservatory of Music, State University of New York.
Mr. Trussel had his work cut out for him in what was then a struggling undergraduate program without a choral or opera program. Since joining Purchase, however, as choral director he has conducted the Purchase College Chorus and Orchestra in performances of Vaughan Williams’ Floss Campi, as well as Handel’s Messiah, and other works. He has also directed Purchase College’s productions of Puccini’s Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and Don Giovanni, Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus, Lehar’s The Merry Widow, Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, and Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites.
Seven years and a veritable plethora of concerts and productions later, the fruits of Mr. Trussel’s labor are obvious. His production of Hansel and Gretel won last year’s National Opera Association’s Production of the Year award. One of his students recently won the prestigious Liederkranz Competition. Purchase College now offers a graduate program in vocal performance, and its graduates are finding success in the professional singing world and in higher education.
More impressive than these public accolades, however, is the impact Mr. Trussel has on individual students. He demands professional excellence from the students in his program, helping to prepare them for the realities and rigors of a professional career. He shares some of his secrets for success in this Classical Singer exclusive interview.
You’ve had a very interesting career. You’re a renaissance man of sorts. You seem to do it all: choral conductor, singer, stage director, and voice teacher.
Unfortunately, it’s been my experience that the people who do that don’t do any of them very well. [Laughs.] I’ve had a lot of experience in various things. I started choral conducting when I was doing my master’s at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind. I took over what was at that point the University Singers from the founding director, who was leaving to take another position. I also conducted, as a graduate assistant, the women’s choir, and I had a church choir the whole time.
When I came [to Purchase] they didn’t have a choir. They hadn’t done an opera in about 12 or 13 years. The program had kind of fallen on hard times. I was hired by the dean at the time, Carl Kramer, to come in and reinvigorate the program. I decided that we needed a choir—and there was no money to pay anybody to take it —so I took it myself.
Was your undergraduate degree in conducting or performance?
I started my undergraduate work at what is now Western Connecticut University and at that point was Danbury State Teacher’s College, in Connecticut. My stepfather was killed in an airplane crash the spring of my freshman year, and my mother and I moved back to Indiana, where her relatives lived. My step grandmother said Ball State Teacher’s College [now Ball State University] had a wonderful reputation, so I transferred.
I was studying music education. They weren’t known for being a performing school, but they had a professor, John Campbell, who’d been to New York and tried to make a go of it as a classical singer. He didn’t have much luck, and came back and got a teaching position. He started his own opera workshop at Ball State University. He heard me sing. The local civic theater was doing a musical, and he recommended I go sing for them.
I got the lead in Pajama Game and started singing in [Ball State’s] operas. I was really fortunate that I was in a place where a man was dedicated to doing opera performances.
Do you think watching him had an influence on your later desire to stage direct? In the groundwork you’ve done at Purchase, certainly, you’ve thought of him.
Because I was such a kid, I just assumed that he was paid to be a professor. I took it for granted, basically. It wasn’t until this last year—when I went to accept the award that we won for our opera, Hansel and Gretel, from the National Opera Association—that I really started to think about all the time I give that has nothing to do with the load I carry here. My conductor and I, we come in, we stay late—we’re constantly here 12 hours a day, five days a week. Most of that time is donated.
I started thinking about John Campbell, and how much time he gave because he loved the art form and the kids. When I accepted the [award] I said, “I want to accept this award for John Campbell. I didn’t realize at the time, but I now know how much work it is. I now see that in retrospect—and I think so much of him when I’m doing this work.”
Of course, this man has now passed, and I haven’t been able to go and thank him. But I guess my thanks is actually in continuing the work he did.
It’s similar to how you don’t appreciate your parents until you’re one yourself.
Yeah—how much smarter they get when you get older.
Tell us about Purchase. What goes on each year in the opera department?
We have a very small program here. We have 50 undergraduate students and seven graduate students. My sense of it was, unless you do an opera, you’re not going to be considered a really good conservatory. They didn’t have a graduate program at the time, and we’ve added that.
I’ve kept it small because I think young kids need to begin performing as soon as possible.
I remember my wife, Bonnie Hamilton, said, “You’re going to have to hire some famous voice teachers.”
I said, “Why would I want to do that?”
“Because you’re going to have to recruit,” [she said].
I said I [had] a better idea.
“Why don’t I hire some voice teachers that I think teach really well and will turn out really good students. Then our work, in the form of our students we turn out, will be how we get students back.”
I knew it would take a while before we started seeing the results of that. I’m in my seventh year now, and we regularly get students auditioning for us [who are also] auditioning for Juilliard, Manhattan, [and] Mannes. We’ve gotten a better and better grade of singers coming to sing for us because they’ve heard about our reputation for turning out good singers, and also for having an undergraduate program that puts people on stage. We double-cast [Hansel and Gretel] and there were only two graduate students … the rest were all undergraduates.
Did you always know that you wanted to stage direct one day?
Yes, I really did. I’ve always been fascinated by the dramatic parts of theater. I remember in college, I would go into the dance room and look at my pieces in front of a mirror until I got them to look the way I wanted them to look. I was always fascinated by the lighting, by effects, but mostly by relationships in theater and in opera.
You mean relationships within the opera?
Yes. I’ve worked quite a bit in Europe and done a fair amount of “Eurotrash.” I remember doing Salomé in Europe, and a very good friend of mine and I sat in a very lengthy meeting with a fairly well-known director, who was describing his concept. He went on and on, and everybody in the meeting was nodding and looking around, nodding again, like, “Oh, how wonderful.” It went on for a couple of hours. We walked out together, my friend and I, not saying anything, and [finally] he turned to me and said, “Do you have any idea what he was talking about?” And I said, “Not the foggiest!” We started laughing, because of all the people in there nodding and saying “oh, ooh, ah”—and it was just nonsense!
So many directors, as they put a broad brushstroke on things, forget about the characters. They forget there are real relationships going on and that those relationships are what make opera and any dramatic form function and be interesting and exciting.
I hated Hansel and Gretel. You’re always being subjected to it because they’re doing it in some company where you’re doing something else. It’s always this cutesy sort of thing. The witch comes out with a green tongue, [and] you wonder why the kids are such idiots that they can’t see that this person is really weird and they should be running away.
My wife suggested we do Hansel and Gretel [because] we [had] all the right voices [for] it. I said OK, even though I hated the opera. When I began to study it and really look at the history, and read the Grimm’s fairy tale, I found such richness. It wasn’t all this cutesy stuff, but there was a real opportunity to stage real people and to make a real story where the characters were very, very important and really said something. It was very exciting! The kids [in the opera] got excited about it.
You were talking about stage directors that maybe you don’t agree with. What advice do you have for singers when they find themselves in a position like that? Do you speak up? Do you say something? Do you just do whatever you’re told?
I have a class for sophomores called “Stage Techniques for Singers.” It’s basically an acting class, but it’s also a mélange of other things. We talk about health issues, auditions, and the difference between auditions and recitals. We deal with the whole idea of how being an operatic actor differs from being an actor in the theater. I also deal heavily in philosophy and what your philosophy as a singer has to be in order to make it in the business.
One of the things we talk about is what you do when you take a role. My recommendation to all of them is that you must prepare your character and your role carefully, by researching the book or the play or the movie or whatever the opera was derived from, by researching the time period, by writing a diary about your character, by looking at a timeline and finding out what else was going on in the world that influenced your character. We really talk in depth about how to prepare a role and how to prepare a character.
When you go to do an opera, you have to pretend that someone has invited you to dinner and said, “Bring a dish. This is a potluck.” You may be told when you arrive, “Gee, that bottle of white wine that you brought looks wonderful, and oh, you’ve gone to such care to choose a wonderful year and a great vintage. But we’re having roast beef, and we’re afraid that wine won’t work with our meal. So thank you so much for bringing that; I’ll set this aside and sometime I’ll use it.”
Your dish is [like] the careful preparation of your character. You may go to your staging [rehearsal] and they may have decided to update the opera and set it in a different setting—in which case you may feel like a big part of what you prepared isn’t going to work—but you have available to you a core of a character that will work in any of those settings. Or you may arrive and a director may say, “Why don’t you enter upstage and let me see how you feel this should go.” So you walk on that stage and you have something viable to present.
I try to prepare my singers for the eventualities that are coming their way. I tell them [that] there are so many things in this business you can’t control. You don’t know if your conductor is going to conduct so slowly that you can hardly sing. You don’t know if your director is going to have great ideas or not. You don’t know if the set is going to fall halfway through the first act and the conductor’s going to keep conducting. You don’t know if your pants are going to rip open, which might happen on several occasions.
If you’re not prepared with all the things you can control, you’re going to fall apart in those places, because you’re busy trying to control the things that you never got in place!
What is your dream opera to put on the stage?
Do you know Finian’s Rainbow? There’s a song in it called “When I’m Not Near the One I Love, I Love the One I’m Near.” People were always asking me my favorite roles. I find that when I’m in the process of doing almost any role, I just love the role! I’m so involved in it, so ensconced in it.
I find that when somebody asks that [question], I say, “You know, I’m just really loving this role.”
When you say, “What’s my dream opera?” Hmmm. You know I’ve done [Benjamin Britten’s] Peter Grimes several times, and I would love to direct that, because I find that so many people miss the boat (no pun intended). They keep talking about this poor man—was he a homosexual, and was he this and was he that. I say that’s really not the issue. Peter Grimes is a poet, and he’s misplaced in this fishing village, and he just simply doesn’t know how to live with everybody else, as a fisherman. I’ve never heard anybody say that, but it’s always how I played the role. So that’s an opera I would love to stage direct because it’s so full of conflict and interests.
Any parting words for Classical Singer readers?
I’m so grateful and I’m so blessed. I had a wonderful career as a singer. I was never Pavarotti or Domingo—I was never that kind of star—but I always did leading roles, and I did them all over the world.
I had such a great time performing. I always felt so blessed to walk on the stage and portray these characters and sing this music. I always went to the stage and before the curtain came up—it kind of sounds corny—but I just thanked whoever it is that’s responsible for this wonderful opportunity I had to serve this great music.
I think that people put the cart before the horse. I hear so many people say: “I want to be an opera star. I wanna, wanna, wanna—for me, for me, for me.” One of the things I talk about all the time is our duty to service. My job as a stage director is to serve this wonderful work, to the best of my ability.
When I hear singers getting puffed up about themselves I want to say, “Serve the music, think about your job as service first, and if you do that, you may or may not be an opera star, but you will never be disappointed.” I see so many people being disappointed that they didn’t become a great star. I am so grateful to have done what I did for so many years. I never drove a cab; I never waited a table.
That was another life, another me—a singer working with all those wonderful directors and performers. Now I’m giving that back to other singers and performers. It’s such a joy, and I feel like I’m living another beautiful life.
So when I think of John Campbell, I think, “Thank you, John.” He had a passion that he passed on to me. If I can do that for these young singers and performers, I will have made that circle [complete] somehow.
