When it comes to attaining a career in opera, Darren Woods knows its path is unlike any other in the performing arts.
As an operatic tenor for almost 20 years, his professional credits include engagements at Santa Fe Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Connecticut Grand Opera, Glimmerglass Opera, Lyric Opera of Kansas City, and Seattle Opera. However, in the final three years of his singing career, he went from on stage to at the helm, running opera companies and taking over Seagle Music Colony as general director.
What began as a training ground for classical singers in the making has risen in the ranks as one of the most prestigious programs in the country, whose singers have gone on to high-profile apprenticeships and professional careers in opera houses throughout the world.
But it’s not just another program to prepare singers’ technique, Woods explained. It aims to transform them from singers into business-savvy professionals with a plan.
“It had always been a singer training program, but we wanted it to be more,” Woods said of taking over Seagle. “So, we turned it into turning the singer into a working professional—which meant focusing on audition techniques, strategic planning, tax planning, and all things associated with having a business.”
Woods celebrates his 19th year with Seagle this summer, but he has other Young Artist Programs to his credit as well, including those at Shreveport Opera and the Fort Worth Opera Studio. We recently spoke with him about what he believes aspiring young singers should know—and, in large part, don’t always consider—when entering a career in opera.
What is your opinion about the preparation of young artists today in terms of readying themselves for a career in opera? Do you think students are prepared or underprepared? If they are underprepared, what do you attribute this to?
We in the field find singers largely underprepared. Too many voice degrees are being given out. Many universities are not preparing students well enough or are not weeding out those that might look to another area of the business to get involved. And there are not enough jobs to service the amount of singers. Even when there is a great gift there, there generally is language and dramatic work that is lacking.
Singers need to ask themselves, “What will I do when I finish graduate school?” But they need to ask that question when they are sophomores so that they can chart a five-year plan that will help them get a job when they graduate.
Too many teachers want the student to be “ready” before auditioning for something like Seagle Music Colony, Brevard, or Opera in the Ozarks. We don’t want them “ready.” We want them rife with potential so that we can help shape their whole careers, not just their vocal training. The vocal training is important—perhaps the most important. But it is only the first element. The rest has to be there, too, and it is too often ignored.
How should students be readying themselves for a career in opera? At what point in their education should they start?
The second a singer says that they want to be a voice major and professional singer is the day they should be readying themselves for the field. Some of our most successful singers came to Seagle at the age of 19 and 20. The ones that came earliest were able to look ahead to the requirements of Santa Fe or Glimmerglass’ Apprentice Artist programs, or even Lindemann’s Young Artist Development Program, and start to obtain the skills necessary to get those jobs.
You have to think of your career as your business. Yes, you are an artist, but you have to have marketing skills, development skills, and financial management skills—everything you need to run any business. Your business is your art. On the artistic side, you have to have a wonderful voice, a great technique and connection to text that comes out dramatically, flawless languages, and that “animal” inside you that believes you have something so special to say that the world must listen.
What is the focus of your Young Artist Programs? What do you look for in singers that are hoping to gain acceptance into one of them?
For the younger ones, I look for raw talent. I look for that instrument that makes me sit up and take notice regardless of their technical skills. Two such voices were taken into Seagle this summer. The voices are world class, and I want to begin guiding them at a very young age into the business. I want them to know what is ahead of them and what is expected. In an older singer, I look for that amazing voice and a little more polish. At Fort Worth Opera, we are looking for a great deal of polish, as the singers perform in our main stage productions. Most of all, I want a singer to have something to say. I want them to take risks, have a point of view, and challenge me in an audition. I loved being surprised. I love great intelligence. I also love being a mentor—so for my Young Artist Programs, I look for extremely talented people that I am going to be around for many years.
What do you believe young singers are missing from their preparations for a career?
Planning. There is nothing as disheartening as having an artist of great ability who has just completed graduate school with no job or job prospects for the coming year. It will most likely be 12–18 months before they will even have a chance of being employed by an opera company. They often move home, to New York, or somewhere else and take a “get by” job that is easy to get trapped in. They are out of school, so they have to pay for lessons and coachings.
I only know of a couple of universities that are starting to address this and are teaching strategic planning. However, if we get a 20-year-old at Seagle, we can have them for a couple of years, prepare them for one of the studio programs at Wolf Trap, Central City, or Chautauqua for the year between undergraduate and graduate school, which will propel them into the other summer programs, so that their last year of graduate school they have credits, have networked, and are somewhat known in the business. That year, they audition for the year-long programs and begin working.
If you look at the Seagle singers from the past 10 years, you will see them in every opera house in America and in about six opera houses in Europe. Yes, they are all extremely talented. But they are also business people.
Young singers often will delay program work until they (or their teachers) believe they are “ready.” How do you feel about this? How do students become “ready”? What signifies if they are or are not?
The Internet was not available when I started my career. Look up the programs or the companies and see if you fit in, be bold, and audition. You have to listen to your teacher, but know that none of us wants perfection. You’re never going to be perfect. Just when you get “it,” “it” moves farther down the road. That’s what being an artist is about—always reaching for that perfect marriage of all the elements, but knowing that we are human. It is the reaching that is important.
Back in the winter of 1982, I applied to audition for Santa Fe. I wanted a job and I was courageous enough to believe I was ready. My teacher told me not to go. She said that her name was on my application, and I might not sing well and embarrass her. I cried all the way to the airport, got on the plane, and sang the audition. Guess what? I got in with a role and three covers. I also was hired by Texas Opera Theater, made my Carnegie Hall debut, and returned to Santa Fe in 1983. Had I not had the courage and knowledge of what I could do and cancelled that audition on the basis of what my teacher thought, I would not be sitting here today.
Describe the importance of a five-year plan. When should this start, and how should singers go about it?
You have to start with a self-analysis—what we in the corporate world call a SWOT analysis. Assess your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Take it to your board of directors—a teacher, coach, friend, or general director of an opera company—and go over it with them. Look at where you would like to be in five years and base this goal on your self-assessment.
If you are completing undergraduate studies, your five-year goal might not be singing at the Metropolitan Opera. Set reasonable goals, look for the requirements for those goals, and put action steps in place to achieve them. For instance, if you want to be a Young Artist at one of the major opera houses, then your languages have to be flawless. If Italian is not taught at your school, you must strategize on how to get it. The Met isn’t going to care how you achieved it—just that you have it. Once a goal is checked off, it is time to look at your plan and revise it.
What is the most important thing young singers should know about this career before entering the field?
You have to want this more than you want to breathe. The field has so many more singers now than it did when I was beginning, and there are more staying longer in Young Artist Programs, leaving precious few slots from an already limited pool.
My friend, Jonathan Pell, of the Dallas Opera, once said, “A singer has an instrument that no one can see or touch and only they can play.” Each singer is individual and incredibly special. However, with that great gift comes great responsibility. If you’re not going to do it all—the technique, the languages, the commitment to text, the translations—then don’t do it. If you can do it all, the stars align, and that “animal” in you is bursting to get out, you will enjoy a wonderful career doing what you love. Just remember, everything goes better with a plan. If you put it off, there might come a time when it is too late to gain the experience you need in order to have a career.
