Today I got to walk with a cane for the first time, for my Bartolo character. I've never walked with a cane, or even seriously injured my leg, so it was interesting. In an effort to try and get some real sense memory for the limp, I stuffed a big ole' pine cone in my shoe.
Today I started working on the physical life of Bartolo. Unfortunately, without a cane in Cincinnati I'll have to wait until I get to California to work on the "walk." But there is much more than just a walk to a character! My favorite is figuring out the nervous tic.
Most people have a nervous habit they do, something they do when they get emotional, or angry. If this action is consistent throughout your character's physical and emotional life, it will help make the image of this person appear real in the audiences eyes. Unfortunately, it's easy to go overboard with this. If you're always doing your nervous "thing", it becomes pretty transparent and fake. The balance is a careful one. (think about Indiana Jones' little smirk, or any of Chris Farley's character's nervous physicalizations. These bring some color to the character, and an easy physical cue for the audience of his state of mind)
I decided that Bartolo's nervous tic will be with a pencil, or a pen perhaps. A little twirl, or some funny trick he does almost without thinking. I like this idea because not only does it give me a very personal prop to work with, not only does it give me a physical action that can keep me occupied while Bartolo thinks, but it's a very distinctive sort of action too. Plus, the possibility exists of Bartolo getting particularly worked up and breaking the pencil - that's good for effect, depending on how you play it.
Some other examples... my Colline folds the lapels of his coat obsessively, and I've always wanted to learn a few knife twirling tricks for Sparafucile.
Anyways, I'm spending quality time at pentrix.com - a very good place to waste an afternoon if you want to learn tricks with a pencil. :)
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.
Today is my only day off for the next week and a half, so I'm asking myself - what tasks do I need to get accomplished?
The big one is character development for the Ash Lawn opera scenes. The problem is, how much should one work on a character for this sort of presentation? Obviously, with time so short there's no way I can build a fully fleshed out character with depth for all of these scenes. So how far should I go? Which characters get precedence?
Personally, I'm giving preference to Bartolo first, then Leporello, then Sulpice. I give Bartolo first hit because I'll actually be performing the full character in the fall, so I need to get on that work anyways. This means reading the Beaumarchais play, and asking serious questions about this guy and how his mind works. Leporello is next, because it's a role I want to study in the next few years. By no means is it an easy role to sing, but it's a fun one, and one that gets a lot of play. Sulpice is last because when was the last time you saw Fille du Regiment? It's hardly ever done, and when it is it's a more buffo bass in that role.
I'm interested in comments here though - how much role prep should you do for a scene, or an excerpt? How much would you do?
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!
As a part of my research for La Boheme, I've been reading the source text: Scenes de la vie boheme (by Henri Mourger), upon which the opera is based. In the first place, it makes for fantastic reading. Once you get past the florid 19th century prose, the content of the book is really fun and lighthearted. It doesn't follow much of a coherent plot; rather, it chronicles the various adventures of the four friends Rodolphe, Marcel, Colline and Schaunard... in exactly the style that we hear in the first act of the opera.
The four men are witty, playful, and positively cheerful in their abject poverty. It's been something of a parallel of real life lately, though at least I haven't had to outwit any creditors!
Yes folks, we're back to considering doing laundry in the bathtub again. In all our efforts to save up money for Bryn's gig in Austria, we're really stretching to keep those ends meeting. Bryn is giving a fundraising concert on June 6th, in Carmel, Indiana. If you can make it, please do! In the meantime, I've added a donations feature to this website. If you ever feel the urge to support the arts, the singing Vertesis are a pretty good way to do it!
Wow, only the second day of the "post every day" regime, and I'm already onto stuff you guys probably won't find interesting...
Normally I would keep this sort of thing quiet in a notebook somewhere, but I thought I might share my character work for Sparafucile. Please comment, argue, offer input etc. This roughly follows my own thought process in developing a character on paper, so if you have ideas about the process, I'd be happy to hear those as well.
What we know from the score
My Backstory
Sparafucile grew up in Burgundy, the son of an assassin. As children, he and his older sister Maddalena were often used as bait (the same way Spara uses Madd as bait today). His father was a high-class assassin, frequently working for nobility. By 9, Spara would have been employed by his father as an apprentice... and his older sister would have started acting as bait in a sexual way. Something went wrong - his dad was publically exposed as an assassin in the murder of a prominent nobleman, and was killed. The children escaped, and had to flee France entirely (Mantua was controlled by the Gonzaga family at that time).
In Mantua, Sparafucile took on the family business. Too unknown and amateur to work in the noble circles, they would find clients in the seediest parts of the city. Sparafucile always insisted on preserving the code of honor taught by his father - be proud of your profession, and never sink to the level of a common thief.
His entire life, Maddalena has been the brains of the operation. He feels emasculated by this, and resents her terribly for it. She controls him, and he hates it.
How this ties in
Spara presents himself honorably to Rigoletto, as a man of the sword... but he shares his father's contempt for the social caste system, and enjoys the fact that he is capable of things that "higher" men aren't. Rigoletto (though only a jester) is miles above a peasant, and Sparafucile tells him about his work in gruesome detail. He enjoys watching Riggy squirm at the thought of Spara's job.
Throughout the opera, Sparafucile acts with the highest professional comportment towards Rigoletto. He clearly can't stand the Duke, and every comment towards the noble is made with a sneer.
In the storm scene, when Maddalena tries to plead for the Duke's life, Spara dismisses her comments as a way of maintaining control. She becomes insistent, and he yells at her when she suggests that he stoop to the level of a thief. She has pushed two of his buttons, by pushing Spara around and by suggesting that he violate his moral code. Maddalena keeps pushing though, and after being reduced to comments like "leave me alone!", he gives in a little. "if someone comes here before midnight, I'll kill him instead." There, are you happy? It's 11:30pm, in the middle of a raging storm, he thinks. No one will come, but this will shut her up.
Spara feels momentarily in control as Maddalena agrees to his compromise. When Gilda knocks on the door, he first tries to pretend it didn't happen (fu il vento!). When it becomes clear that this is the perfect target for his compromise, he balks (al quanto attendete). He can't believe that someone actually showed up. Now he is in a moral conflict - whatever he does, he will violate his word. Maddalena pushes him that last bit, and Spara gives in. She controls him. There is some frantic shouting as he tries to regain control of the situation, but in the end, he opens the door and kills Gilda to his own disgust.
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I welcome your comments. There's a lot more detail than this in my notes, but I don't want to bore you THAT much. :) I'm taking a personality test as Sparafucile tonight, for shits and giggles... if anyone's interested, I'll post the results, too.
Who is this guy? Campbell Vertesi is an operatic bass, of the very low sort. His fach is sometimes called "Basso Profundo" - that's Italian for "he sings really low." Even lower than most basses, which is a bit frightening. He specializes in bass roles like Sarastro (Die Zauberflöte), Sparafucile (Rigoletto), and Colline (La Bohème). This site chronicles Campbell's progress as he begins a career as a young opera singer. If you would like to know more, or wish to submit a complaint about any of the content posted here, please feel free to send him an email.
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