In March 2003, a friend who works as a professional accompanist sent me an e-mail inviting me to audition for the Rome Festival, an international summer program that brings artists from all over the world into the center of Rome for two to four weeks of performing, studying, and cultural tours.
The Rome Festival Web site makes the festival seem so wonderful: Singers get to travel to Europe, it proclaims, and perform with top artists in “palace courtyards with the Rome Festival Orchestra, Opera, Ballet, Concert Chorus, and Chamber Music Ensembles.” The site also said that the trip was to be partially or fully subsidized by the Rome Festival Association and an American-based educational charity.
When I asked other artists about the program, I didn’t hear any complaints, so I auditioned. The festival invited me to perform on clarinet and voice, and I decided to attend.
All roads, they say, lead to Rome, but had I known then what I know now about the Rome Festival, I would have found a road that leads someplace else.What follows are my experiences at the Rome Festival.
On the very first day, the schedule made things exceptionally challenging. After an overnight flight, I arrived at noon Rome time, with our first meeting scheduled for 2 p.m. I made it to the hotel just in time to drop off my luggage and go to the meeting, where staff members told us some of the things we needed to know, such as what to expect and not to expect. They encouraged us to take advantage of the cultural tours, and told us there would be a handout of information about the places we visited.
They also told us that Fritz Maraffi, the conductor and head of the Rome Festival, could be rough to work for at times, but that he was fundamentally a good person and an excellent conductor. At the end of the meeting, we had just enough time to walk over to Cortille for the first rehearsal, which was scheduled for 3:30-10 p.m. Since most of us were arriving from overnight flights, rehearsing for the next six and a half hours was extremely difficult.
The Rome Festival has overlapping schedules of artists coming and leaving, so when I arrived for the first orchestra rehearsal, I found two clarinet players who had already been in Rome for a week and a half, and two clarinet players, including myself, who had just arrived. What’s more, within the first couple of days, I found out that the festival had hired an Italian clarinetist to play principal. The situation was similar for the flutes. At times, five flute players were available, but with only two or three flute parts.
When I asked where in the section I should sit and what part I should be playing, I was told that we should figure it out among ourselves. Then, at the first rehearsal, we were yelled at because Maraffi said there were too many people playing!
Within the first few days, I discovered that this balance problem also was prevalent within the choral institute and the opera company. Instead of having too many performers in the program, however, they had way too few! I suggested to Maraffi that I switch over entirely to the choral program, since there were too many clarinets and not enough singers, and he agreed. I began work on Daphnis and Chloe, and within a few days, I was also invited to sing in the chorus for La bohème.
When I joined the cast of La bohème, the principals were already well into the staging of the opera, and the only other choristers were Italians, who were sometimes at rehearsals and sometimes not.
The principals were absolutely wonderful and at the top of their craft. Their resonance, interpretation, and personal style were superb—and they were the nicest people I have had the chance to meet. They truly welcomed me and made me feel a part of the cast. It is from the principals that I learned the most during the entire Rome experience.
Despite the talent of the principals and the warm welcome I received, I would call my experience with the opera a baptism by fire. We were singing and staging at the same time, and since I was just beginning to learn Italian, my ability to communicate with the other choristers was limited.
The chorus for RFO’s La bohème was much too small to cover the grandeur and structural power of Puccini’s opera. The production lacked a children’s chorus, and sometimes the main chorus mustered as few as six people. Consequently, the festival dropped or changed large parts of the score, and merged many of the parts written for separate groups of characters.
The part I sang most of the time, for example, was the mezzo-soprano “street urchin,” but the staff also sometimes expected me to sing the parts of people selling on the street, people who were dining in the restaurant, and sometimes even some of the male parts, in my own octave. In addition to merging the chorus parts, the festival told some of the principals to sing some of the chorus parts—which may have covered the part, but made no sense for their own characters. This merging of parts meant that Puccini’s excellence in tiered vocal parts was completely lost.
We had just two weeks of rehearsals before the first performance, yet almost every day the staff changed something major in the staging or the music. Fortunately, about five days before the first performance, two additional choristers from the States arrived to sing in the opera. After that, we had one or two music and diction rehearsals—but the festival never staged any of the choristers, including the Italians. We were always guessing about what to do next, and were yelled at frequently because we weren’t doing what Maraffi wanted us to do, even though he hadn’t told us what to do.
On opening night, we approached the performance with dismay: We knew we had the talent to make the opera wonderful—but we lacked the basic direction needed to make it wonderful.
Maraffi’s lack of preparation was yet another insult. During the staging rehearsals, assistant conductors held sway at the podium, but once the orchestra joined the rehearsals, Maraffi conducted. He quashed many of the artistic and expressive techniques of the principals, frequently lost his place in the score, and had his head buried in the music during the entire opera. Even on the nights of the performances, you could find him in a room offstage, studying the score. The only night that the opera didn’t have any major problems was when one of the assistant conductors took over.
RFO often scheduled cultural trips for the mornings, when most of the artists didn’t have rehearsals. Seeing Rome for the first time was a highlight of the trip for me—but the cultural jaunts had their own set of problems.
RFO led us to believe that the staff would guide the group tours, and that we would receive loads of information about the places we were visiting. The festival also told us that we were going to participate in private tours and that we would somehow have advantages, compared to the average tourist in Rome. None of these things actually happened.
The festival’s version of a guided tour consisted of walking us, or taking us via public bus or train, to the scheduled site, dropping us off, and wishing us a good time. We never received any handouts about the sites we visited, and frequently the staff didn’t even tell us how to get back—leading sometimes to situations where we were hours away with no clue about how to get back to Rome. Fortunately, some English-speaking Italians helped us—but it was frightening to be in a foreign country and feel lost.
The opera principals rarely attended the cultural tours, for several reasons. Their rehearsal schedule involved three hours of rehearsals in the morning, and then three to four hours of rehearsals in the late afternoon and evening, often conflicting with the cultural tours. What’s more, for the first two weeks, the opera rehearsals were at “rehearsal space A,” a Methodist church almost a mile away from the hotel. They were never given bus passes, and so they had to walk to and from the rehearsal site, two or three times a day. Add to that the challenge of singing principal in an opera in temperatures that soared to 100 degrees, and it’s understandable that they felt they didn’t have the energy to participate in the cultural trips. Furthermore, one of the opera principals didn’t have a standby performer, and so he felt the pressure of making sure he didn’t get sick. Needless to say, the principals got to see very little of the country.
In the beginning of this article, I mentioned how the Web site made the festival seem so wonderful. Here are some truths about the festival itself:
1. The Maraffis garner quite a financial benefit from the festival. On average, about $1,200-$1,500 goes directly towards your lodging, the small staff, and the cultural visits. I would guess that most of the remaining money (between $1,500 and $2,500) that you or your sponsors spend pays for Italian principals to perform, the cost of renting the rehearsal places, and the Maraffis themselves.
2. Just three people make up the administrative staff in the New York office: Fritz Maraffi (who sometimes goes by the name Chris Silver), Jeanette Ferrell (Maraffi’s wife) and a part time administrative assistant. Rome also has very few people on staff.
3. The educational charity wants you to send hand-written “newsy notes” that announce you have been invited to perform in the Rome Festival. They follow up with a formal letter of solicitation for sponsorship. You need to authorize how much money they are to ask for, and it has to be $100 or more.
4. RFO in Rome offers very little space to practice individually, so you either end up rehearsing in your room or, if you’re lucky, in one of the designated rehearsal spots.
5. Performances are in the courtyard of Cortille, a school that is out of session. The stage is very small, the only sets are hanging off of poles that don’t get changed between acts or scenes, and because it is outside, there are interruptions due to weather. At most, the audience capacity is 100 people.
6. Generally, the opera had two casts of principals and three performances. The Maraffis did not announce who was going to perform for the third performance until after the second performance. When not performing the principal part, non-cast principals sang in the chorus.
7. On average, we performed every two to three days. There were only two days in my entire three-and-a-half weeks when we didn’t have a rehearsal or a performance.
8. Air conditioning in the rooms costs an extra $24 dollars per night. Most participants have to share rooms with one or two other people.
9. The time scheduled for breaks and meals is very limited. On average, the dinner break is 30-45 minutes—and you have to order dinner, so there is little time to actually eat.
10. If the cultural tour is too far away to walk, be prepared to take a public bus, which is often overcrowded and known for its share of pickpockets.
11. The plumbing in Cortille (the place where most of the rehearsals are) is extremely antiquated and prone to major problems.
In the end, I had mixed feelings about my experience with the Rome Festival. I was very happy to have seen the country and to have met some wonderful people. I also felt that I benefited greatly from my conversations and socialization with the opera principals, choristers, and other festival participants. The assistant conductors, Carol Nies and Kevin McMahon, were very good overall, but often treated very poorly by the Maraffis.
I felt that the Rome Festival administration—especially the Maraffis—and the overall musical experience, was poor. Usually, I feel uplifted and proud when I perform in concerts. I cannot say that there was one time I felt that way after a concert while performing in Rome. The talent was there, but without the proper direction from the administration, we were doomed to mediocre or poor performances.
The best candidate for the Rome Festival Opera is someone who wants the opportunity to try a new opera he or she hasn’t performed yet. It also could be good for someone who has some roots in opera companies here in the States but who has not yet made it big. If you participate in the festival, be prepared to roll with a lot of punches, and be willing to let go of a lot of things we performers often take for granted.
The best advice I can give anyone who is considering RFO: Look someplace else. Other festivals give the same benefits, without the negative aspects I have pointed out. Sad to say, when I was considering the Rome Festival I was misled by my own excitement for seeing Rome, and by the lack of negative feedback. I hope nobody else will be misled the way I was.
