“Your voice was made for Rossini,” said my coach. “Have you considered doing a project with a Rossini specialist?”
The prospect was intriguing. I have a deep love for Rossini’s sparkling orchestration and take-no-prisoners heroines, and my voice just can’t get enough of the Rossini coloratura that drives a lot of mezzos to thoughts of a nice secretarial job somewhere.Il barbiere di Siviglia is on nearly every company’s top ten, and so …
“What a great idea!” I shrieked, and promptly decided that in the summer of 2004 I’d make my first solo trip to Europe, to learn Rosina with a Rossini specialist. Now all I had to do was find one.
After a month that felt like one solid Web-and-email session, I struck gold.
Dr. Peter Berne is a conductor and professor in Berlin. During the summers, he conducts two-week, private role-study programs from his summer home in Kirchbach. He is an internationally respected Rossini specialist and spent many years studying with Luigi Ricci (as in the Ricci cadenzas). And what do you know? The opera that year was “Barbiere.”
After much nail biting, I sent my CD to the Internationales Studienzentrum für Oper Kloster Kirchbach. I whooped with joy when I got the letter accepting me to sing Rosina—and after much fundraising, packing and prayer, I found myself hopping off a Boeing 757 at Vienna International on a lovely day in July, clutching an address in an extremely remote Alpine village and without a single word of German except danke.
If you ever have the urge to characterize the members of a single nationality as being the nicest people in the world, let me help you out: Austrians are the nicest people in the world. Between the lady at the tourist information desk at Vienna International, several assorted groups of complete strangers, and the lady who just happened to know Dr. Berne and was heading towards Kirchbach on a bus that afternoon, the Austrian nation got me, via seven different trains, to Kirchbach 24, A-3911, Rappottenstein, Austria, and treated me with nothing but respect and courtesy for the two weeks I was there.
Was I an American? God bless the United States! Was I an opera singer? How wonderful! Such hard work to sing! So important to sing great music! I get tears in my eyes just thinking about it, especially when I call to mind the horrible stereotypes some of us here in America harbor about German-speaking people.
The Austrians have music in their souls. I had the wonderful opportunity to attend Mass in the little church in Kirchbach on Sundays. Having become accustomed to the milquetoast mumblings of suburban American churchgoers when it’s time for the opening hymn, I nearly jumped out of my skin when a bell sounded, opening chords crashed out of the organ above, and 200 Austrians shook the rafters with “Leibster Herr Jesu.” I tried to join in, and I think I did, but my throat kept closing, somehow.
The program was wonderful, too. I have never had such one-on-one attention! The program was only the size of the “Barbiere” cast, and each of us got a one-hour coaching each day, in addition to rehearsals.
Working with an extremely precise German conductor is a great exercise in humility! Fortunately, I grew up in a discipline-intensive choir and have a hide like leather when it comes to conductors. On opening night, when I heard a small but distinct “brava” from his general direction at the end of a recitative, I knew I’d earned it. I also nearly fainted from shock, to the great amusement of the audience.
A wonderful Italian woman staged the opera. Everyone should work with an Italian stage manager. I am an Anglo-Saxon, West Coast gal to my core, and as such have very clear ideas about what my personal space is, but personal space doesn’t exist when you are working with an Italian stage manager. Not only do they grab you, they move you about. You just smile.
We performed the opera twice, first in a castle, which would make a story in itself, and then in a bank. A bank. Can you imagine performing an opera in a bank in the United States? Can you imagine anyone coming to an opera in a bank? Well, they came, all right. To both the castle and the bank.
My mother told me years ago about the waves of European rhythmic clapping she remembered from when she toured Europe with a music program as a teenager. I’d heard European rhythmic clapping when I went to Europe with my choir as a teenager. But this was opera, and I’d just sung Rosina in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia. The waves of rhythmic clapping seemed to sing back to us, and my throat kept closing up again, somehow.
