To finish off my week of bemoaning what a pain this business can be, let me quote from Joseph Shore's book, Good Dreams:
People are always asking me why a voice like mine didn’t become a household name. They want to know why I didn’t become a mainstay at La Scala, the Met, Covent Garden, Vienna, or The Bolshoi. I am not hiding from the question. There was no way I could tell my story without also narrating the stories of bad things done to me. But I do not consider my career a failure, nor do I hold any of those administrators, singers, or agents responsible for the shape my career took. Let me explain this quite clearly. I am responsible for the shape my career took. No one was powerful enough to keep my career from fame and the limelight but me. Was my failure to become a household name a tragedy? Absolutely not! What is happening in Africa today is a tragedy. What happened to me was a shame, a big personal disappointment which was also a loss for the operatic world, but a tragedy? No. It was a spiritual failure for me and I have had to live with that. I was green at first like all plants and opera singers. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, but I knew I had a voice and a desire to use it and I was willing to learn what I needed to know.
Many people draw the wrong conclusions. They say, “Well you just must not have been good enough. You must have had delusional ideas about your level of singing. Surely, if you were good enough, you would have made it.” That is probably the most common thing I hear. Such people have no understanding of the actual inner mechanics of the opera world and no idea how someone makes it from a kid who can sing to a star. It doesn’t happen like a Mario Lanza movie.
Usually, a talented person of university age will audition for the School of Music of his choice in the performance division. I know this inside world having been a university professor for many years. Only the best will pass the auditions, the ones we think we can work with and move towards professional singing. Many fairly good singers end their career right here before it starts. In the first four years we hope to be able to make just a little improvement on them each of the eight semesters. They do a jury at the end of each semester for us to check their progress. When they graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree most of them are not ready to do anything professionally. We take them through their Masters degree and their Doctorate of Musical Arts. Many do not make it through the degree programs and their hopes end there. We hope that the DMA will put them at the level of apprenticeship, the professional entrance level. But many get their DMA and are really not ready for entrance level professional work. Those go on to teach. The more talented DMAs begin auditioning for professional opera companies to try to get hired as an apprentice artist. The levels for singers are: (1) student (2) Apprentice Artist (3) Young Artist, and (4) Artist. Thousands of singers audition for a few apprenticeships in opera companies in the United States and Canada. The biggest plum is still The Santa Fe Opera. As many as 10,000 or more professional singers will audition to become one of 45 apprentices. That’s the level where I entered, when Richard Gaddes picked me up from the Met Auditions at the Tulsa District level in 1974, offering me an apprenticeship I knew nothing about. This is also the level where a lot of very good singers fail. By fail, I mean that they do not advance any higher and their dreams of career end. Think how hard the process is so far already. Many of these that fail and never go any further have doctor’s degrees. That is just a little irony in the system. One may have a Doctor of Musical Arts Degree and still be unable to be a professional singer.
Apprenticeship lasts for two years, if you are invited back. Many are not. Maybe they didn’t make that good of an impression in their first year or perhaps their singing has not shown any progress in a year. Maybe the opera company just didn’t like working with them. For whatever reason, they didn’t get invited back for their second year of apprenticeship. It will be very hard for that group to go on and become artists.
You will learn most of your trade at a good apprentice program: fencing, stage movement, acting, stage make-up, voice lessons, and you will get to perform in order to learn. In Santa Fe I sang in the chorus, understudied leading roles, sang small roles on stage, and sang in apprentice scenes at the end of the season.
In the second season of your apprenticeship many people in the opera business will come and see you perform in the main season and in the apprentice scenes. If you catch on, somebody will hire you for your first role as an artist. Jim Sullivan from The Arizona Opera saw me and engaged me for his regular season as Tonio in Cav and Pag. You are now a professional opera singer. If no one picks you up in your second year of apprenticeship, your career may end just there, and the high point of your life will have been an apprentice artist at Santa Fe. That happens to a lot of this select group.
Jerry Hines told me that he researched AGMA, the union for opera singers, and found out that at that time in the early 1990’s there were 35,000 professional opera singers in the USA alone, and over 95 % of them earned less then $25,000 a year singing opera. Less than five per cent earned $25,000 a year or more, and less then one per cent made the huge salaries associated with stars of opera. In 1994 Hines reported that only 104 singers had made more than $25,000 singing opera. Only 104 out of more than 35,000.
So you are a professional opera singer now, one of 35,000 competing for a few roles a year in relatively few companies in the USA. You try to get an agent first or you will not be able to get auditions. The auditions for agents are usually for smaller agencies with little power, but they may be able to get you auditions. A few singers in this post-apprentice group may find a small agent that will represent them. Every audition you go to, there will be 50 singers with more experience than you. What do you have which will make the administrators look at you and hire you! A lot of young singers are weeded out at this point. They get discouraged and go back home to teach voice.
Let’s suppose that you have something distinctive in your singing and you are hired. Let’s even further suppose that you won some big competitions and noted critics compared you to Lawrence Tibbett, one of the greatest of Verdi Baritones. Now you have a monkey on your back, something no young singer needs. Now you will consciously or unconsciously think that you have to sing well enough so that people continue to think of you that way. This monkey-on-the-back business puts unneeded pressure on you and it happens in every art and in every sport.
It happened to my boyhood hero, who some call the last American hero, Mickey Mantle. Mickey Mantle had more talent as a young player in high school than most of the major league greats. It was understandable that the Yankees thought he would turn out to be the combination of Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio all rolled into one. That was an enormous monkey to put on the back of this young kid from Oklahoma, just out of high school. Mickey finally learned how to play like himself and he became one of the greats of the game. But he didn’t fulfill the Yankees dream of being the combination of Ruth, Gehrig and DiMaggio all in one. It ate at him through the years until he believed that he was a failure. I saw his last press conference before he died. He tearfully apologized to everyone for not being better. You could see he was in great emotional pain as he told the kids “Don’t be like me. Don’t take me as your role mode. I had it all, and I just…I just…” He couldn’t finish. I wanted to jump through the screen and hug him and say, “You were Mickey Mantle. It’s OK Mick that all those other things didn’t come true. It doesn’t matter. You were the Mick, and you did great. Way to go Mick.” There was something horribly tragic about one of the greatest players in the history of the game thinking he was a failure and finally apologizing to the world that he wasn’t better. In that moment, everyone who really knew Mickey Mantle loved him with all their heart.
This monkey-on-the-back business happens in art too. A new comer gets a few reviews that say he is the next great Verdi baritone and all of a sudden he is not just a new singer. He is a new singer with a monkey on his back. He sings the role that he won in the audition, but he is under pressure now. How will he perform? Another group of singers cannot take the pressure and quits here.
Now if you were successful you will feel great and you will sing other auditions, show your reviews and have a chance at another role. Unfortunately the odds are still against you getting it and you may go for months without winning another audition. Even more people quit at this point. For all of these people you could simply say, “They just weren’t good enough.” Opera is filled with disappointment, broken hearts and broken dreams. That’s one scenario.
Let’s look at another one. Let’s say that after your apprenticeship you got a good engagement with an opera company, excelled in that, and got another engagement and got fantastic reviews for that. You then got hired again and again, and again, for ten years, and in every case it could be said that you came through with great performances, because the reviews were great, and the audiences loved you. You listened to the tapes of your performances and you thought you were on the right track. Maybe by this time you had a few senior colleagues who would tell you the truth so you let them hear you tapes and they also thought you were on tract.
Let’s say that you got to sing with some of the greatest singers of the 20th century, many of whom became your friends and supporters, and they told you not to quit because you were world-class.
Let’s say you won major competitions, The Met Auditions, The WGN Auditions, The Bruce Yarnell Memorial Award, and other major awards. Let’s say you got even a lead in a New York premiere opera that was going to be highly reviewed all over the nation. Let’s say the national critics gave you the greatest reviews you could imagine, reviews like few artists ever get in their lifetime, and they came from the best sources; The New York Times, Newsday, Newsweek, New York Daily News, The Village Voice and fifty others. Let’s say you sang the great Verdi roles all over regional opera and received equally great reviews.
Now, whatever you might say about this singer and the career he has forged, you cannot say that he was simply not good enough! I am, of course, describing my own career. Those who say I was not good enough are uninformed or untruthful.
The audition process on which careers depend is, unfortunately, inherently subjective. There is no such thing as an objective listener. The observer changes the experiment. The observers, in this case the artistic administrators hearing the auditions, create their experience of listening and seeing out of their own consciousness, including their own past prejudices, preferences and conflicts. Remember that a lot of these people became artistic administrators because they had no talent. They really wanted to be singers.
I never thought I sang perfect. I was a ball of fire with a big monkey on my back--all those expectations that I would be the next Warren. I went for the best I could produce but I didn't think of myself as perfect. Apparently some people did, however. Hines told me that to him I "always sang like someone who wasn't human." What did he mean by that? He simply meant that I sang so much better than other baritones. My technique seemed perfect to him. I never made the kind of vocal mistakes that he expected everyone to make at least occasionally. Many times I sang a great audition only to find that the audition hearer had created for him/her self an unpleasant experience out of it. It startled me to find that there was no "objective" listener, that they all took my singing and recreated it into some experience their own minds wanted to hear. It seemed like a good honest, simple person would hear me fairly objectively, but the more complicated the person was the more s/he recreated my singing according to his/her own problems, prejudices and preferences.
My coach, Michael Fardink, also worked in many other voice studios in New York. Back in 1978, he was sitting in on some auditions for Chautauqua when Leonard Tresh was the director. Michael was sitting with Whitfield Lloyd, a stage director for the company, and herself a voice teacher. She pointed out to Michael which singers Leonard would be interested in. Many who sang very well did not interest him. Then Whitfield said to Michael, "Watch this next soprano. She has a good voice but consistent problems in the passaggio. That is the flaw that will allow Leonard to hire her." And he did. He had his own scenario worked out, apparently. He was uncomfortable with perfect singing. He needed a flaw to make him feel comfortable, perhaps to make him feel that he could help this singer. Who knows? I auditioned for them and they wouldn't give me the time of day, and I sang a "perfect" audition. It absolutely infuriated me that they would pass me over. I soon found that there was a certain kind of person who could hear my singing and get it, and other types who couldn't. I also found relief in an attitude that said, “You cannot control the audition. You can only control how well you perform. All the rest, they control and you can’t be responsible for them.”
This is the setup I, and all of my colleagues are up against in the opera industry. Do we like it? Not at all. But all the same, it's not gonna stop me. :)
