Soprano Robin Wiper has stepped back from the spotlight. The Metropolitan Opera veteran hasn’t lost her skill. Instead, she’s gained precious family time. Wiper still performs on occasion, but she spends most days taking care of her three young children.
It wasn’t always this way. In 2003, Wiper had singing roles lined up across the country. Her third child, a daughter, hadn’t been born yet, and her two sons traveled with her in a trailer. They would stay in one area for two to three months before completing a show, then hit the road again. A nanny watched the boys during Wiper’s rehearsals and Wiper’s husband visited the three of them on weekends.
Wiper’s sons loved music, but they weren’t always comfortable seeing their mother in costume.
“Each one of them has seen me—fully made up and in a big dress—and cried,” Wiper said. “They called that ‘opera mommy,’ with me in the big wigs and the makeup and the dresses.”
Still, Wiper’s juggling act worked for a few years. Then her sons got sick—one with pneumonia, the other with the croup. To make matters worse, the whole family caught a raging case of pinkeye. After Wiper missed a number of rehearsals due to doctor visits, the music director told her that if she didn’t get some rest and start performing at her best he would have to send her home.
Wiper understood the music director’s position—he wasn’t being unkind, he simply had a show to produce—but she also knew her choices were limited. At the time, she had hired a second nanny, and after paying for childcare, Wiper was barely breaking even. As she saw it, she could continue her career path, trying to work through illness and fatigue while others raised her children, or she could cut back on performing to care for her family.
Wiper ultimately chose the second option. It wasn’t an easy decision. She had worked hard to get where she was. As a young apprentice with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, she had been a self-promotion machine. When she couldn’t get an audition, she wrote letters to opera companies to introduce herself. Her efforts paid off with a spot at New York City Opera. Later, a positive review in the New York Times opened the door to the Met.
“That was amazing,” Wiper recalled. “The Met is one of the few houses in the United States that is actually built for the voice. My voice is on the lighter side, and if you’re singing properly the Met will take your voice and spread it out among the 3,000-some seats.”
Wiper’s brief travels only whetted her appetite. Still, she wasn’t ready to let someone else raise her children—and she didn’t want to worry about the specter of her career ending whenever a child came down with the flu.
“I have heard of some singers who don’t go home between gigs if there is sickness in the house,” Wiper said. “Does that make them bad people? Hardly, but what a choice to have to make.”
Shortly after she became pregnant with her third child, Wiper cut out the traveling altogether. Today, she teaches voice lessons in Chicago and performs only occasionally. She keeps her voice in shape not for the world stage but as a good example to her students.
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it,” she said. “Just recently I had the opportunity to perform La serva padrona on a couple of different artists’ series. It was like putting on a favorite pair of jeans and fitting back into them really well. I remember thinking, ‘I’m good at this! This is what I was trained to do, and what I worked on for so many years. No wonder this feels great!’”
Yet Wiper has no regrets. If she could do things differently, she would have visited Europe more often and tried to set her own schedule, but these days, she’s grateful to have learned to balance work and family. She no longer worries that her children will feel second to music. In fact, her youngest child seems to have caught the opera bug.
“She just breaks into song at, like, 5:30 in the morning,” Wiper said. “She sings every song she knows, and if she runs out of songs, she just makes up tunes with the words she knows. It’s funny to listen to her carry on.”
Wiper admitted her path is not for everyone. “Undoubtedly there are singers out there who can handle the family and career juggle better than I,” she said. “But when it all comes down to it, God is going to be more interested in what I did with my children’s lives than what I did with music.”
