Has a stage director ever treated you as if you were a mindless puppet or a chess piece? Do you panic if asked to walk, run, kneel or lie down while singing? Have you ever lost a role to a singer who is more exciting than you are on stage even though their voice isn’t as good as yours? Have you ever gone out on stage insecure about your preparation and hoped even prayed for a flash of divine inspiration what would enable you to “get lucky” with a successful performance that night? Have you ever given a good audition performance and then ruined your chances by a careless remark or self-deprecating body language? Are you intimidated by the knowledge that today’s opera singers must perform with greater dramatic depth and comic flair than those of the previous generation?
If you have answered yes to any of these questions, you need to read The Third Line: The Opera Performer as Interpreter, and you need to read it soon. This important book holds the key to being completely in control of the impression you make on stage. Daniel Helfgot, director of production and resident stage director at Opera San Jose along with author, anthropologist (and bass/baritone) William O. Beeman has created a system of performance preparation that gives you everything you need to know to become a fully empowered performer. After studying this book, I was so impressed with the soundness and the creativity of the author’s ideas and with the clarity and practicality of their application that I asked Helfgot to give Classical Singer an interview. I am aware that my own genuine enthusiasm could make this interview seem like an “infomercial.” I want to state that my only vested interest lies in the hope of seeing a raised standard of operatic performance across the board and a greater level of ease and effectiveness in the work of the singers I cherish.
Daniel Helfgot: “I never intended to write a book. I am a stage director. I direct, I don’t write. But when I was doing one of those summer programs where you get together with twenty-some singers and work on scenes and operas, William Beeman became enthusiastic about the process he was witnessing. He saw the need to put this information down in one place. He was so impressed by the simplicity of this method of acquiring a score that he pushed me into writing the book. He became my collaborator, and I owe the organization and the mechanics of the chapters to him.
Freeman Günter: Opera is such a different ball game now than it was a generation ago. The bar has been raised so severely in terms of audience expectations.
DH: The demands of opera are changing rapidly. Interpreters will be expected to command more performance skills than their immediate predecessors ever imagined. Singers must find a way to train and equip themselves adequately for the increasing challenges of the profession. Singers need to acquire technique, and this is very expensive. How much of their budget is left to do the rest of the preparation? So they devote eight years to acquiring a vocal technique, then in eight days they want to do the rest. So everything gets wedged in instead of being developed at the same time, along with the vocal aspects. Of course, this is just part of the economics.
FG: It all works against the beautiful art.
DH: Exactly. But at least we have planted seeds. We named the book The Third Line for a very specific reason. When you get an operatic score, you buy two lines: a line of text and a line of music. This book allows you to create that third line, which is the answer to what the librettist and the composer propose. This is a parallel answer to the two existing lines, parallel throughout the entire score.
FG: Along with what the composer and librettist have provided.
DH: Along with! Nothing comes at the last minute from divine inspiration or from outer space to help the singer who hasn’t done his homework. It comes from opening the score and allowing the librettists and the composers to tell us what we are supposed to come up with in order to bring it to life. The interaction between these two lines gives you the answers. The moment you open this book that you bought, this score, the moment you open those two lines, you have to have the ability to understand that you must acquire the information about those two elements: textual or literature, and musical. How the composer shapes the text of the librettist, how the composer cannot write any music until there is a text that inspires that music. Understanding that process of the creation of the piece, the singer then has to reproduce it as an interpreter.
FG: The Third Line shows singers how to provide the motivations of their characters, how the character is feeling, and how to use gesture, movement and body language to convey these factors to the audience. The singers are not just thinking this for their own pleasure; these are things they can show to the audience. You stated that the more a singer stands still, the stronger his character will appear to be. Don’t just do something, stand there!
DH: Stand there, but mean something by it.
FG: The book certainly shows how to do this. Your distinction between focusing before one sings a phrase to show sincerity and integrity and focusing after singing to indicate a certain shifty quality is quite specific.
DH: In many ways, this book came out of my own frustration as a director. I have directed some 146 productions, and every time I start to rehearse, I run into the same issue: The voice, the voice, the voice! The voice should be the vehicle and not the goal. When you learn to drive a car, you have to be aware of the clutch and the first gear and the brake. But when you are actually driving, if you start thinking about the clutch, you are in an accident. You do the clutch and the gears and the gas automatically, because you acquire a technique for driving a car. In order to go to the first rehearsal of an operatic production, that technique of singing has to be behind you. Then you create. That’s what singing is all about: Making the trip, not technique.
FG: You write such interesting things about truly understanding the entire mes en scene of the performance. In Rigoletto: how a deformed person in that society would feel. What his life would be like, how he would protect a beloved daughter, how she would live under such protection.
DH: If you don’t create a scenario around yourself, you cannot expect a miracle, that some powerful director will give it to you in a week and a half. When I say create a scenario, I mean put yourself under the skin of the role you are interpreting. What kind of costumes they wore, what was their social stature of the age, what was the relationship to the people around this character, on stage and off. What is the weather in the place where this occurs because that means that you are going to walk in a certain way. You create a scenario around yourself and then you are ready for anything. If you go with “I know how to make sounds,” then you are good for a voice lesson, but not good for a performance.
FG: Performers who complain of being treated like chess pieces must counteract this by knowing as much as the director. They can’t just react as egos on the line. In order to be taken seriously, they must have real opinions about the work.
DH: If you want to express that you are uncomfortable with something that the director suggests, then you have to have an argument. You have to have ammunition to create that give and take. Of course sometimes you are going to run into narrow-minded people who are going to say, “This is the only way to do it.” If you are a professional, you just adjust. Otherwise, it is teamwork. In order to have really good teamwork, each person has to bring his own understanding of all that is involved. In many cases, directors start to move singers around like puppets because singers come to the rehearsal process as puppets!
FG: They have that blank slate that they, themselves, haven’t bothered to write anything on.
DH: Even if you have a great idea about how to portray your character, you have to realize that your other colleagues in the cast may have great ideas, too. Ten different great ideas do not make one good production. If everybody is pulling in their own different directions, you don’t have a production. That’s why stage directors have been invented, in order to unify the criteria, for better or worse. Otherwise, you have anarchy. No focus, no goal. It is all in the score.
FG: And in the research. If you are going to sing Figaro or the Countess, it behooves you to read Beaumarchais.
DH: It doesn’t mean that you are going to become a scholar. You are just doing your homework. Because the more you know, the more comfortable you are going to feel with your character and with the entire performance. That’s what the whole thing is all about. Just look at the subtitle of the book. This is a la Rossini: He calls his opera The Barber of Seville, ossia, The Useless Precaution. The book is called The Third Line, or, The Opera Performer as Interpreter. I say the opera performer, not the opera singer, because you sing in order to be a performer. The goal is not to sing, the goal is to perform, to tell the story. That’s why I insist on going to the score to fill your imagination and then come up with an interpretation.
FG: New to me was the concept that one should learn an opera from the full score, not the piano reduction.
DH: It is completely different. If you have an oboe line underneath, or if you have a cello line. That will give you the texture and the knowledge of what world is surrounding you. You know the world of sound instead of clinky-clinky of the piano, which is the means of putting things together, but not the final product. You have to learn it with your context, the final product in mind.
FG: This is not hocus-pocus or magic. Rather, it is a sound, practical method that fills in the considerable gaps in the education traditionally available to singers.
DH: Opera is not magic. We create magic as the ultimate goal. But magic is for the audience. For us, it is hard work. Singers that are more difficult to guide, who are constantly opposing what a director tells them, are usually the singers that come least prepared. Because their concept, their knowledge of the character is so fragile that they don’t have the flexibility to accept guidance. The more you explore the character, the more you know about the Rigolettos and the Gildas, the more comfortable you are going to be with exploring different angles of the personalities of those characters. The less you know, the more narrow minded you are going to be, the more intransigent you are going to be. That’s why the rehearsal process collapses. And that’s why we all become enemies instead of a team working towards the same goals.
