Campbell Vertesi

Well well well - it seems that one of my favorite fellow bloggers, ACB, is working on Figaro as well!  Talk about worlds apart though: hers is for the Met, mine is for a tiny company in CA. :)

Anyways, her posts on the subject of Barbarina are fascinating to me.  She goes through some similar processes to what I do to get this kind of role prepared.   It's interesting to see the way she works on a role... not only do you get some insight into the differences in the way two performers prepare similar material, but you also get it on two very different levels of the profession.  This is how a beginning singer does it, and that's how a much more accomplished one does it.

I want to point out in particular the way she does her translations.   

"I find a copy of the libretto online and cut and paste it into a Word
document. After playing with the formatting a bit and getting my tabs
worked out (dork!), I type the translation, again paying attention to
the language. I’m not just typing English words at 70wpm; I’m watching
each word and it’s Italian counterpart, making them match up in my
mind. I do this for the entire opera, not just my parts"

 I had my opera characterization prof make us all do this last year.  We hated it.  But it makes you learn the show REALLY thoroughly.  I've always done this for my parts, and read the Italian, an English translation, and a Castel translation for the rest.  There's something to be said though ,for actually doing all the translation yourself.  You stand a much better chance of really remembering every obscure poetic word you encounter!

Anyways, go and have a read of ACB's posts about this.  Veeeeeery interesting.  I have pages of notes of the things I've learned about Bartolo, but you'll have to wait until I condense it and pare out the crap.

This morning I'm sitting at Panera in Charlottesville, taking some of my own advice about character development. My Sound of Music role was changed recently, to that of Gauleiter Zeller.

My first task was to look up "Gauleiter" - the leader of a province of the Nazi empire... and I plunged into various arcanities of the Nazi political and military rank system. Everything was very interesting and just fine, until a pair of other customers came and sat, sharing my table. They started speaking, and lo and behold, they happen to be Israeli! Here I am with an exposed notepad, with a fairly complete list of major Nazi war criminals and details of their foreign occupation. Eugh... awkward.

I pretty quickly switched the object of my study to something less topical. Like kittens. I'm studying kittens.

Time for Part II in our several part series, Building a Character for Opera.  Today we'll talk about external sources, from books to your own fertile imagination. 

When preparing a role, you must know off the bat about the sources for the opera.  Many operas are based on books (or series' of books, as in Don Giovanni). Some are based on historical figures and events.  Very few are completely original material.   This means that after you've strip-mined the score for character insights, there is a whole wealth of information out there for you to discover! 

Many singers skimp on this level of preparation. I urge you to do better! So much of your character is already created for you, and you never know what key information is left out of the score.  For example, I was an idiot and didn't do my history work until the second week of Giulio Cesare rehearsals.  Did you know that Tolomeo was a 15 year old brat of a king?  The fact of his age completely changed the way I played this villain character.

The book - or the encyclopedia, as the case may be - will give you plenty of new information about your character, and just reading it will do a lot of the "fleshing out" work for you.  This work never stops, though!  I like to go online, and take personality quizzes "in character".  These quizzes make you ask yourself all sorts of questions you would not normally think of... they're great for that!  And here comes the best part: when confronted with a question where the answer is not in the book or the score, you just make it up.

That's right.  Make-believe.  On a basic level, acting is really just a very highly developed ability to play make-believe.  Use that connection!  As you add detail to your character in response to quiz questions, remember to be as detailed as possible.  One of the questions I had for Colline was "what is the worst thing that has ever happened to you?"  Don't just say "my mom died when I was 5" and leave it at that!  Close your eyes and actually build that memory.  Imagine a specific place.  "Remember" the feeling of her hospital sheets.  How did she die? What color was her pillow?  The more detailed this fake memory becomes, the more realistic your character will be.  

This is where we start to get interesting.  Since there's no possible way that Colline's mom tragedy will come up during the opera; how is anyone in the audience going to know about it? They don't know about it,and they do on some level.  The audience won't be able to tell you about Colline's mom's pink pillow after the show, but they will get a sense of a REAL person, with REAL reactions on the stage.  If watching Mimi die (SPOILER ALERT! lol) makes Colline remember his mother, and you have that much detail in the memory, the audience will see you processing something quite complex and emotional.  Your responses will be specific, and your thoughts - as they read them on your face - will be clear.

I don't want to get into specific acting technique, but it's difficult to explain the importance of specificity in background work without it.  In fact, I'm just going to cut off here for now, to avoid hitting specific technical issues.  Next part: walking like an idiot!  Stay tuned!