Ellen Rievman has been coaching singers for more than 10 years, but she is not your typical coach. She began coaching as a second career after 24 years at the Met—not as a singer, but as a member of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet.
In addition to her unique background, Ellen Rievman also stands out for her ability to help singers get to the heart of the meaning and drama of the music. For this reason, she is in demand as a presenter, giving master classes at, among others, Santa Fe Opera, the Metropolitan Opera Guild, the Utah Festival Opera, the Manhattan School of Music, Mannes College of Music, and the Juilliard School. Ms. Rievman is also a consultant with The Actors Institute, TAI Resources, Inc. and is on the faculty of Arlene Shrut’s foundation, New Triad, and Martina Arroyo’s summer workshop, Prelude to Performance.
Perhaps the words of a former student best sum up Ms. Rievman’s abilities.
“The most important gift Ellen has given me is the knowledge that auditions are performances. I find myself less concerned with ‘getting the job’ than walking into that room and connecting with my characters. This eliminates the ups and downs I used to feel from ‘rejection letters.’ Now I feel like singing auditions are the job. And that has made me a much more confident performer. I started attending her classes and immediately started getting offers for paid apprentice programs, and have worked my way into main-stage roles.”
Ms. Rievman met with Classical Singer last month in New York City to share more about her ideas—ideas that are changing the way singers connect with their music and view auditions.
Did you grow up in New York?
I was born here in Brooklyn, but I grew up in Miami. Beginning at 16, I had scholarships to study two summers at the National Ballet School in Washington, D.C. Then I received a Ford Foundation Grant to study and perform one full season with that company. I returned to New York when I was about 19.
I auditioned for the Met in 1969 and I was taken, but then the company struck. That was the big strike that set up the AGMA agreement that was the basis of most basic agreements for opera companies. They didn’t hire, and let me go.
The following year you couldn’t audition. So I was back in 1971. I auditioned and I was taken. From 300 people in the room, they took three of us. I was there for 24 years. It was just fabulous.
You have a very unique background. How did you go from dancer to singing coach?
When I left the Met in 1995, I knew that I didn’t want to work with dancers anymore. I wanted to do something different.
It was suggested to me that I start working with singers physically, to help them be more agile, more comfortable, more eloquent on stage. So that’s what I started to do. And people said, “Oh! You should give master classes.” And I thought, “I don’t speak on stage. I just dance. I use my body. I don’t open my mouth!” But I did some master classes—and what I realized within a short period of time is that I was working backwards. The physicality and eloquence came [to singers] so easily and naturally 95 percent of the time, when people knew what they were singing, and who they were, and how they felt about it. That made me realize that if I could work through the text and get ideas going about what they wanted to create and cause, then if anything was needed for physicality, I could add onto it.
But almost of all of that physicality sort of dropped in. It doesn’t mean that it’s ideal, but it means that it’s there. Then we can go deeper by asking: “If that’s what you mean, how can we make that richer, fuller, clearer?”
Rather than fixing the exterior, I address motivation.
I’m really interested in just having singers take a chance, know what they want to cause and create in the audience, and just be honest. Singers are always trying to satisfy so many different people that they forget they are the ones with something to offer. All those people out there adjudicating can’t put on an opera without you.
There are so many talented singers in New York, so singers feel they need to be perfect. Most of their emotion, and drama, and love of what they’re doing gets lost in that. They’re always involved with themselves. “Oh I didn’t do that well. Oh I, I, I.”
What about you [the audience]? What are you getting from this? What am I creating for you?
It’s changing a singer’s focus, in other words—sort of flipping it a bit. I tell my students, “You cannot manipulate an audience.” To say that you need to make them cry or you need to make them laugh—audiences don’t like to be manipulated. What you need to do really is be clear about how you feel, present it to them powerfully, let it land, and see how they feel about it.
You can’t make me feel the way you do, but you can certainly make it clear to me the way you feel. It’s so much easier than trying to take into account what everyone in the room needs: “She’s not smiling, she must hate me.” Or: “That person just looked at her watch, she must have to go. She hates me, too.”
Sometimes it’s handy to just deal with the facts. The person that’s looking at his watch doesn’t hate you and want to leave the room, he may simply need to know what time it is. The person yawning isn’t bored by you. She truly might have been up all night with a sick child. The fact is that person is yawning, the editorial is “they’re bored with me.” That’s the business we do here [points to her head].
Your teaching philosophy is: “Creativity is part of all of us.” Certainly some people feel they’re not creative. How do you help singers find their creativity?
People think they aren’t creative, but we all are. We just don’t uncover it all the time. Singers have great challenges that even an actor doesn’t have. An actor can take his own timing. An actor can sob, change his voice, or throw his voice in different ways. Singers have more guidelines they must follow.
Specificity is one of the most important things about being an actor, a singing actor. You have to make choices. If you don’t like them, you can throw them out and make other choices. But if you just try to generalize, we get a lot of people who have no ideas, who sound the same and look the same.
When I work with a singer, we try to figure out who the character is, and what’s made her sing this at this time in this aria. We start looking at text and verb choices, language choices, where there are repeats, and how an idea can go completely over the bar line. I always have them do monologues of the text, because singers frequently don’t know what they’re saying. When you have music that’s strung out over several bars, you can lose the shape of what the thought is.
Why does Mimi talk in the third person in the “Donde lieta uscii?” What disconnect is there in that? Is it because she’s just learned that other people know she’s going to die, too? Why does Juliette sing to a waltz? What kind of a sensual young woman is she, wanting to experience love before she has to get married? She sees the loveless lives of her parents and doesn’t want that.
When you start to humanize the people, to really think about who they are, what their passions are, what their lives are like, then you start to bring your own experiences into it. That’s when you start to show up. I don’t want to hear somebody else’s interpretation, I want to hear you.
I also believe deeply in the connection in relationships. I always suggest that my singers look at their audience and their auditors. If somebody doesn’t want the gaze, move on. If I were talking over your head because someone told me to never engage you, what would you think? You’d think I was crazy! How do you sing over someone’s head?
These are really difficult things for many singers, who’ve been told for years not to make eye contact. So, in my audition workshops, we role play. I ask them to think what they would do if certain things happened. I believe very much in experiential work—not a lot of talking, but doing.
One of my students said to me that one of the most interesting things about working with me was that I ask so many questions. If I don’t learn from you how you feel, my ideas will become your ideas. I don’t want to force my ideas on you. I always guide if I think a student’s going off in a different direction with something that can’t be substantiated by future actions or by how the plot and the music develop. But I need to hear from the singers. I need to honor their ability to bring their ideas into the room, because that’s how we start to create.
I find too many singers don’t give themselves permission to have relationships with their ideas, the music, and the audience.
I do a lot of work with art song and have directed art song recitals. It’s losing an audience because, in many ways, it has become all about the singer and the singer’s experience, and not nearly enough about reaching the audience.
Without the characters and stories of operas, how do you help singers find the same depth of meaning in art song?
I think one of the greatest things to undemonize art song is the beauty and accessibility of poetry. Take a poem and read it out loud in a room of 25 people and then start talking about the imagery of the poem. Everybody will have seen something different, based on their lives, their imaginations, and their experiences. And every single idea has validity.
If you really let your imagination explore the color and sound of the language, and the images it creates, you will develop more ideas about the song than you ever had before. But it needs to be personal. It doesn’t need to be on a pedestal somewhere, because the pedestals don’t invite anyone else up there.
What do you think singers most often do wrong in an audition setting?
They apologize. The subtext is always: “Is this OK?” They hope they’re not taking up too much time. They’ll start before they have everyone’s attention because they’re sure they’ll get yelled at if they waste anyone’s time.
I find that most audition experiences are transactional, rather than relational. There’s no strong platform of what they feel they have to offer. Singers are afraid to make a demand on the people listening to them.
Audiences want to be engaged. They want to have something asked of them: “If you don’t think you have anything to offer, why should I?”
More than anything, you need to have a sense of who you are and what you can contribute. When you start feeling proud of your ability to create in the audition—to keep yourself in that relationship with your audience—auditions become a wonderful performance opportunity.
You’re going to live better in your ideas in an audition than in ideas that have been forced upon you, like somebody saying, “You haven’t moved in five bars of music. You need to move.” That’s when gesture becomes totally mindless and disconnected. It shouldn’t happen just because it hasn’t happened for a while.
Do you have a list of dos and don’ts for audition attire?
I think that you should wear the same thing to the callback that you wear to the audition. If it’s red or a beautiful cut, you enhance your recallability to the judges. Because they see so many people, it’s daunting to keep everybody straight.
Don’t wear anything too short or too patterned. The primary colors are the richest and most beautiful. I think black is beautiful and elegant everywhere.
Do you think it’s overdone?
No, I don’t think black is ever overdone. Pinks, and yellows, and pastels are less successful. They can disappear, or depending on what your backdrop is, they can clash. Light colors also show more of your breathing.
Have an idea of what your personal image is. What’s your elegance? What speaks to you? Start using that.
I think you need to speak clearly and always bring all of your materials with you, even if it’s been sent, because sometimes they forget to bring it themselves. I don’t think you should talk to people capriciously. I think you need to be nice to everybody because you just never know.
I also happen to believe that you should say, “I’d like to begin with…” assuming that you’ll be asked to present another song or aria.
Do you have any final words for Classical Singer readers?
I think that everyone can do this work that I encourage. I really do. I just think that most people haven’t tried.
People are frightened. They think they’ll be laughed at or people won’t like them. Start small—start with a short aria, and then just see what happens. Do it with people you trust.
Discovery is probably the biggest component of life that we have in opera. So if you allow yourself to discover, and don’t resist changing, you might actually find out some interesting things. But you’ll never know unless you give it a try.
Discover. That’s a good way to end it. Keep discovering.
Ellen Rievman can be reached at erievman@aol.com
