Becoming a parent is one of life’s most exciting experiences, but it can also mean late nights, early mornings, and often, an intense addiction to caffeine. The decision to become a parent is one of the most challenging a singer can face. Having a child may mean spending several years away from the profession, so it is a decision that could have a heavy impact on a career. Some singers are concerned that if they become established and then take time off to have a child, the opera world will forget them. Singers who have yet to be established fear having a child will limit their possibilities for success while they spend prime singing years caring for a child.
Some artists, however, somehow manage to maintain thriving careers while also shouldering the formidable responsibilities of parenthood. Singers who can accomplish this feat are met with well-deserved admiration, but it is undoubtedly difficult to balance a successful profession and a child (or children) who are bent on exploring the boundaries of parental patience.
This month, Classical Singer sits down with three men (all, coincidentally, baritones) to discuss a situation familiar to many of our readers: juggling the responsibilities of singer and father. Mark Delavan is currently starring as Iago in Otello with Los Angeles Opera and preparing for his first Wotan in Das Rheingold with San Francisco Opera in June. Kyle Pfortmiller is fresh off performances of the Count in Le nozze di Figaro with Michigan Opera Theatre and is currently singing Frédéric in Lakmé with Tulsa Opera. American favorite Rod Gilfry recently appeared as Papageno in Die Zauberflöte with Opera Pacific and performs this month as Robert in Strauss’ Intermezzo in Zürich.
For Mark Delavan, life is best at its busiest. In addition to being an in-demand artist who appears regularly on the world’s biggest stages, Delavan is a father to four boys, ages 2, 5, 7, and 18. Given Delavan’s professional commitments, singers might wonder how he prevents the pressures of his career from dominating his life, but to Delavan, there is no contest.
“I don’t bother balancing my life, because the truth of the matter is [my family] is the priority,” he says. “I’m going to get arguments about my lifestyle, because it is extremely domestic. My wife home-schools the children. . . . This allows us to travel together without worrying about schoolwork—and the advantage is they are well ahead of the norm. What we’ve found is that being together alleviates a lot of the problems.”
Traveling together with children can be difficult, but Delavan explains the payoff. “The two worst days of a job are the traveling day and the day we have to come home—and the day we leave is vastly worse than the day we come home. The tradeoff [comes] when I’m traveling and my family is with me, I can forget my job, which means I can work better. A lot of guys I know will sit in the room at night and obsess over their work, but I have a pretty normal life on the road.”
Artistically, Delavan has been praised for his interpretations of fatherly roles, and he is quick to note how essential his real-life fatherhood is in presenting a father figure on stage:
“How can I possibly do fathers—all those Verdi fathers, or even Wotan, all of those really rich characters—without being a father? I’m not acting at all, I don’t have to act; I just live my life, and for those three hours on stage, I don’t care who it is, he’s my son! Alfredo, that’s my son—and I don’t care who she is, she’s my girl.
“I’m always a little overprotective of the Gildas. And even [in] the kind-of weird roles that I do, such as Sweeney Todd, I draw on being a father. Some of the strange roles, like Iago or Scarpia, some of those weird guys, even that. It’s not hard to draw on the experiences of fatherhood.”
Delavan also explains that being a father helps balance other parts of his life, including his head,
“Another thing is, I believe one of the most dangerous demons to deal with as a singer is complete self-absorption, and one of the best things for me as an artist to get out of my head is my own kids.”
Reflecting on balancing being a father and a singer, Delavan offers this advice to singers debating the challenges of the dual roles:
“The richness of a performance is directly correlated to the richness of my life, and I have a very rich life right now—extremely rich. The first advice is: go with your guts. If your guts say have kids, have kids. But when? Boy, that’s a tough one, and I have to say it’s much easier for men than it is for women. I have some real dear friends of 10 or 15 years who would really like to have kids and it’s too late for them. They busted their butts to be where they are, and now they’re past their child-bearing years and they’re regretting it.
“My advice would be: If you really want to learn about performing, have a kid; in fact, have more than
one. . . . I say that the really great performers are givers, and to be a good parent, you have to be a giver.”
Like Delavan, Kyle Pfortmiller and his family travel together whenever possible. The benefit for Pfortmiller is peace of mind on the road, and quite a few frequent flier miles for his 5-year-old daughter, Alana, who flew on 23 different flights before she was 1 year old. Now that she has begun attending a bilingual kindergarten program, traveling together regularly is no longer as much of an option, but Pfortmiller has found an answer to staying connected: the Internet phone system Skype.
“When I go away, we Skype for 20-30 minutes before she goes to school and another half-hour before bed. If she has Spanish homework, that’s my job, so I help her out with that via Skype. It’s a really cool thing, and rather than just be on the phone, we can see each other. It’s cool to meet someone’s eyes, even if it’s virtually, and [she can say], ‘That’s my dad, I saw my dad today. It was on the computer, but I still saw him.’”
Pfortmiller and his wife, Laura, who is also a singer, knew that having children would come at a price, but they were willing to pay it. When it came time to make the tough decisions, Pfortmiller explains that there wasn’t much of a contest:
“Eventually we said, ‘This is what we do; it’s not what we are.’ We’re not any less passionate about what we do . . . but we decided [that] if we didn’t start trying now, we’d be in a time crunch at 40. It wasn’t ‘to hell with the consequences,’ but we’ll deal with the consequences when they come. And Laura said very clearly, ‘I’m probably going to be the one to take the hit in the career,’ and she said, ‘I love doing what I do, but if I have to give it up, I will.’
“We didn’t want to go through life without children and this is the way it had to go. I’m not 100 percent happy [but] it’s the way it is—I love doing what I do, but Laura loved doing what she did. It’s hard because she comes to my shows and she sees singers we’ve both sung with, and [says], ‘You know, that’s great. I wish I could be up there with you guys!’”
Pfortmiller also says that yes, an opera singer’s schedule is a lot more hectic than most, but cites a tremendous upside. “When I am home, I’m home. If I have a month off, which we often do, I get to take [Alana] to school, pick her up, and help her with her homework.” Additionally, Pfortmiller can take advantage of certain parenting luxuries, such as volunteering in school and tagging along on class field trips, pleasures he knows would not be possible if he held a “normal day job.”
When it comes to advice for singers aspiring to be parents, Pfortmiller says, “Becoming a parent is a huge sacrifice, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to sacrifice your career. You sacrifice sleep and time to yourself. . . . I remember my first Eisenstein. I did maybe 14 performances, and I don’t think I did any of those performances on a full night’s rest!
“What I find now is there is a certain freedom and a responsibility. When I go to an audition, I can say, ‘I am more than what these people think of me.’ At the same time, there’s a responsibility to be better than I’ve ever been because I need this job to feed my family! It’s a strange dichotomy: I have the freedom to know I’m bigger than what I’m doing, but what I’m doing is now much more important.”
Rod Gilfry wastes no time searching for the secret to his success. “I have to give my wife all the credit for making it work,” he says, “because it would have been impossible if she wasn’t always willing to pick up the slack.”
Gilfry has three children: a son, 18, and two daughters, ages 20 and 22. In 1987, Gilfry, his wife, and their then two children moved to Frankfurt, Germany for two years, where he had a Fest position. For the following five years, the Gilfry family lived in Zürich, Switzerland, where he had a similar situation, before moving back to the United States in 1994.
Gilfry says his time in Europe created quite a bit of stability for his family, thanks to the short travel time between European locations and a schedule similar to that of a normal day job. “The idea was to maximize the time at home and make quick travel times, and that worked pretty well. That was a big part of it, being in a situation where for the first couple of years, I was mostly singing in one place.”
Gilfry acknowledges his reputation as a dedicated father, and he recognizes the negatives associated with his career.
“There is no free lunch. There is a price to be paid for having any kind of a career that takes you away from your family a lot,” he says. “I mean, we’re all happy, we have a very functional family . . . but it’s been really tough sometimes.”
Gilfry discusses another difficulty—the temptations of life on the road—and he has a message for male singers. “You’re in romantic situations with sometimes very attractive women—and everybody puts on their best face in rehearsals, and you don’t have the pressures of home. It’s really easy to get literally seduced by the environment. . . . Temptation is there, but you have to have emotional control and discipline.”
Whenever he returned after an absence of more than a month, Gilfry always noticed that his children had changed in some way.
“I went to Israel for two months in 1986, so our youngest one was only a year old,” he said, “and when I came back, she didn’t know who I was. And she had grown so much, that when I saw them drive up in the car to pick me up, I thought it was someone else’s child, and that was heartbreaking.”
Despite his commitment to his family, Gilfry has often had to miss many of his family’s important functions. He recalls the story of when his fifth-grade daughter was going to sing “O Susannah” in a school concert. Gilfry, singing an hour away from the school in Los Angeles, rushed from his rehearsal to make his daughter’s performance, arriving only moments after she sang. “I walked in and she saw me—and she completely broke down crying, standing in the choir. . . . That happened a lot, I missed birthdays and I missed all kinds of stuff.”
Asked to offer advice to other singers seeking to negotiate a career and a family, Gilfry had two major thoughts:
“I’d say, don’t try to fit your life into somebody else’s example. You have to find your own way, and you have to consider what your spouse is willing to do. That’s really important, to be really accommodating to your spouse. They’re sacrificing everything so that you can have your career. I mean, that’s a huge sacrifice!
“My final remark is ‘love conquers all.’ Love your wife
. . . and that means sacrifice for her. Love your children—do the same thing for them. And if everybody truly loves each other—in the sense of the verb ‘to love,’ not just the noun of love—then things will have a much better chance of working out.”
