I doubt he remembers, but I had crossed paths with conductor William Fred Scott before meeting him for this interview. The year was 1999, when I was in charge of the classical music room at Tower Records. Proud of my new position, I sat back and watched my friends laboring away in the main room, helping a customer locate Hootie and the Blowfish CDs.
“Peons, all peons!” I was thinking when an unassuming gentleman walked into the room and headed straight to the opera section. I recognized my potential customer as William Fred Scott, conductor and artistic director of the Atlanta Opera, and a man who had had a direct influence on training my operatic ear. Despite being star-struck, I remained the picture-perfect prototype of a jaded ‘90s youth and pointed the maestro towards the new-arrivals rack with limp disinterest.
I look back at this moment with a smile when I assess the impact Scott exerted in both my musical upbringing and that of our city. Atlanta has never been the picture of cultural refinement, but the city has a hunger for opera dating back to the days of the Metropolitan Opera regional tours. Despite the willing audience, a lack of appropriate venues and an unadventurous musical attitude made Atlanta a challenging town for opera impresarios—and yet Scott managed to keep the company alive for a span of more than 20 years. In the process he introduced a lineup of powerhouse singers who were silently setting regional stages on fire instead of posing for Rolex ads. Singers such as Brenda Harris, Martile Rowland, Edoardo Villa, Dolores Ziegler, Donnie Ray Albert, Philip Cokorinos, Pamela South, and Aimee Willis returned to Atlanta season after season to recreate the great roles in the operatic canon brilliantly. Many of them confided in me that they recognized in Scott a conductor who understood the special needs of the operatic voice, and they felt protected under his leadership.
I caught up with Scott last spring to discuss his long career and hear some pearls of wisdom.
You have sat through many auditions during your long career. Is it appropriate for singers to request feedback following the auditioning process?
If they have managers, that’s what they’re there for. It avoids a potentially embarrassing situation, on the part of the singer and the person listening to them. When I was a judge for the Metropolitan Opera, we held question-and-answer segments. Almost always, the only question that singers asked was, “What do you think about my choice of audition arias and should I be doing something different?” After you have been listening to 100 singers, that’s not the time to be asked for a voice lesson.
Another tip I have for singers: Remember with whom you have worked. If I ask for the name of the last director with whom you worked, saying that you don’t remember is a sure sign that the job didn’t mean much to you. It doesn’t do your career any favors if you aren’t good with names. If I’m in a bind, I may call Speight Jenkins [Seattle Opera] and ask, “I know that you’ve worked with this tenor. How was he?”
Another big detail to keep in mind: Don’t bring water onstage. Very few opera performances allow you to turn around and have a drink of water in the middle of them. If you haven’t figured out how to get juiced up for a 15-minute audition, then forget it.
Once you hired a singer, what were your expectations for the first day of rehearsal?
Arrive knowing all your notes, and be able to sing them in tune and at the right time. This also needs to include knowing who is singing to you and what they are saying. I conducted a production of Eugene Onegin, and it was clear to me that the Onegin had no idea what the Tatyana was saying to him. He had learned when he was supposed to sing, but there is a great swatch of time in which the Tatyana is singing to him, and he had no recourse but to look rather idiotic. You can’t do that. You have to know what you want to do dramatically, simply out of self-defense. You may not have a lot of time with the stage director, or in the auditorium itself.
Directors sometimes ask singers to do things that the singers may feel uncomfortable doing. Do you have any thoughts about how to best handle these situations?
This business of singing is so miraculous on the one hand and so weird on the other. You must have a strong ego to be a good opera singer, but you also have to be a meek little lamb and be instantly flexible. That said, most people (unless they’re very arrogant) can understand if you give a well thought-out reason for why you don’t want to do something. If you are being asked to do something which makes you worry about your throat, then say, “Excuse me, maestro. I am afraid that I will do damage to myself.” It’s important that you phrase it “Maestro/Mr. stage director, I’m not comfortable with me.” Avoid saying: “Your staging idea is bad,” because I’ll immediately want to make you do it.
You also shouldn’t discuss your problems when the whole company is present. That will make the conductor/stage director more adamant, and the company will dislike you. If you get to a point where you’re just not getting through, make an appointment with the head of the company and talk about it quietly.
When I was first starting in the opera business, a costume designer pulled me aside and said: “They will give you lofty things to talk about, but this is just ego management.” In a way, she was right. You’ve got a lot of ego invested on both sides of the footlights because we work with the greatest music ever written.
Singers have different opinions about using recordings when preparing roles. Where you do stand on this issue?
Singers should listen to recordings in order to get an aural picture of how the piece is made and to get a sense of the possibilities. The more you study the score, play other versions, and keep your ears open [the better]. One day you’re going to hear a singer do a subito pianissimo high note and you’re going to want to run the car off the road. Why did she do that? Is there anything in the text or in the music justifying this, or was it just a good gimmick? And if it’s a good gimmick, is it one I should steal?
More likely than not, the singers that made recordings had bigger careers than yours, so that’s worth a listen. Ultimately, all of this keeps your mind active. There’s no such thing as “I’ve learned this piece, now I don’t have to think about it again.” If your pilot light is not burning any higher than that, then get out of the way, because there are plenty of people out there whose pilot lights are burning high.
Know the history of your profession. Artists like Degas and Monet met when they were in the Louvre copying paintings of Velasquez. They stood in front of these great works and learned how to combine colors and make techniques happen. Why do singers think that they can’t possibly learn from somebody before them? And to hide behind “I don’t want to do this just like Callas,” well, that’s the cop-out. . . . so sit in front of these great old masters and study how they did it.
The sad reality is that the great singers of tomorrow may learn something from the great masters of yesterday but it’s looking more and more as if we won’t have many recordings of those future stars.
When I was starting in the business, record companies were willing to try out young artists. You had singers that were given a debut recital on a major label, or were given parts in an opera recording that was also going to have Tebaldi and Del Monaco. So the listening public got to hear new singers and new singing. For instance, you are aware of the enormous hoopla that surrounded Elena Souliotis.
Oh yes!
There would be no way for anyone today to know a singer like Elena Souliotis. She would be singing in some opera house in Europe and no one would hear of her. But Decca believed in her enough to get her name in the international circuit. It was the same way with Christina Deutekom. They sank or swam because of their vocal personality, and the record companies helped keep the art form alive.
The fact is that now that Pavarotti and Sills have died, nobody is going to get that sort of worldwide celebrity in the opera business again—and in a way there is no reason for a singer to try to build their career as if you were going to be that famous. You have to build a career on honesty about yourself and your own worth, [on] integrity to the musical and dramatic process. The business is changing and we have to redesign our singers’ lives.
