At 62 and looking good, Tom McEachern is holding a mind-boggling time record —and he is planning to extend it. The Mill Valley, California baritone has sung with the San Francisco Opera for six decades, and he’s planning to make a few guest appearances in the next decade as well.
McEachern’s career in the War Memorial Opera House began in the 1940s, with the Boys’ Chorus. He was a boy soprano in the 1949 Carmen, and started singing with the Opera Chorus in the next decade. His retirement from the chorus (subject to change) came last December, after the last season performance of Peter Grimes.
The entire company marked the occasion, as General Manager Lotfi Mansouri presented McEachern with lavish praise, a certificate, a tie made from the Opera House curtain (the old one, not the new yellow silk curtain), and an invitation to come back to extend the record “to qualify you for the Guiness Book,” and sing again.
“To be part of this company for all those years,” the singer says, “was something truly wonderful. I cannot imagine a more glorious job in the world. This is one of the great opera companies in the world, and I find it terribly difficult to stop. Yes, I think I will take Lotfi up on his offer!”
It’s also one of the toughest, most demanding jobs you can imagine. On paper, the schedule for the SFO Chorus looks simple enough—a minimum of 26 hours for each of the season’s 31 weeks. But during the “staging period,’ according to chorus and ballet manager Jim Meyer, it goes up to 40 hours and beyond. In October, for example, there are three operas in rehearsal and two in performance concurrently, and the work week stretches to six days. With rehearsals in the morning and afternoon, and then performances in the evening, the work day may be “only” 8-9 hours, but the singers spend time in and around the Opera House from 10 a.m. to midnight on many days.
At least in the case of San Francisco, thanks to the company’s new contract with the chorus, there is a certain amount of financial reward for all that hard work—$895 a week minimum for the 48 tenured regular chorus; $1,133 top minimum, plus overtime, benefits, etc. The extra chorus receives comparable pay but these 40-50 singers have no job security, and they must apply and audition for a position each year.
Being “in the shadow of the stars” (title of a famous documentary about the Opera chorus) is also a psychological challenge—most performers want to be at center stage, and some who don’t make it can (and often do) feel resentful. That isn’t true of this chorus member, who has remained cheerful and fulfilled with regard to his career.
“Sometimes we are called ‘the meat that sings,’” McEachern says, laughing, “but I am incredibly proud of ‘my company,’ and of that very special environment I had the privilege to share.”
Mansouri, who calls McEachern “a dear person, a wonderful colleague with whom I worked ever since my first San Francisco engagement in 1963,” says that the chorus is as vital a part of the complex work of an opera company as the soloists or the orchestra. “Tom and the others in the chorus must learn the music, stage direction, and perform as individual characters, in different languages, various locations—singing in French one day, being a British fisherman the next.”
What Mansouri calls McEachern’s “great love for music and enormous diligence” was well in evidence early in the singer’s career. Living in Marin and San Francisco from early childhood, the shy young man found fulfillment in stage roles. He started in high school, joined the Lamplighters, traveled to London, the Valhalla of Gilbert and Sullivan fans—and ended up with “real” opera, at Sadler’s Wells, forerunner of the English National Opera. Making eight pounds a week in the 1950s was a pretty good deal, but British labor laws and the pull of his Bay Area home brought him back.
He settled in Mill Valley, had a successful audition with the San Francisco Opera Chorus (“sight-reading in four languages was one of the requirements”), and he’s been either with the main chorus or the extra chorus ever since.
Memories of his career come flooding back at the mention of any of the big names who came and went during his time. There are hundreds of programs, photos, and treasured memories. Beverly Sills, in the title role of La Traviata, became so involved in a conversation (per stage direction, but becoming real) that McEachern had to remind her that it was time for her big aria. To be on a first-name basis with some of the greatest stars in the opera world is a crazy dream for music fans—for McEachern, it’s an established fact. And there is that next decade coming up.
