It turns out, singing opera requires a lot more than someone believing in you. It requires work. Lots of it. It's work of the grinding type, more like going to the gym than jamming with friends. Opera is a culture of perfection, to every single consonant of every word. It's exactly where your tongue sits in your mouth, exactly where the pulses of air hit your hard pallet after they pass through your larynx, which itself is in a precise position, informed by the specific way you breathe. It's contorting the walls of the cavern that is your mouth into precise different acoustical dimensions with strategic intentionality for each sound you make, altering slightly with each change of pitch as to master the resonance that lies waiting in the spaces around your skull. It's doing it all so naturally that it doesn't feel like contorting at all, but feels entirely the opposite, like the most natural thing in the world, as effortless as talking and as expressive emotionally as laughing with a best friend. It's doing it in multiple languages, and understanding and meaning every word that you and everyone else sings (no, you don't just memorize the sounds). It's doing it effortlessly on stage while people watch you, tethered to you, accessing their own emotions through your projection.
It's impossible, really. How can it be possible?
Well, I set out to try anyway. After my new voice teacher told me she thought I could do it, I spent a whole year studying the form, starting from no formal vocal training and a lifetime of singing. What I wanted to find out was the answer to the same question you probably have--is it true that I could actually do this, or just a fantasy? There are a lot of what I might consider to be “predatory compliments” in the arts business, where people or businesses say nice things in order to sell you something. But sometimes the feedback is honest. Which was this? I trusted what my voice teacher said, felt there was nothing to lose by trying, so went for it, with a specific goal and a defined jumping off point.
The Goals
As tempting as it is to work on nothing but vocal exercises forever (he says sarcastically), I knew to stay motivated we'd also have to work on real songs, so we set a goal to learn five complete arias (which is an opera term for what most of us would just call a song), including ones in Italian, German and French. I would spend a year working on them, practicing almost every day, then assess at that point whether this was all real or not and either wrap it up or move to the next step.
The culmination of the year would be singing the arias for a person who was essentially the teacher of my teacher, an opera singer/teacher who has performed in some of the finest opera houses in Europe over her career and who has trained many professional opera singers over decades. She's also a straight shooter. To be clear, that is not to suggest my own teacher wasn't also quite accomplished. She has performed leading roles in countless operas, even written them, and has taught very successful musicians across many genres. She's an incredible soprano. But opera singers, even ones who teach, often still have teachers. That's part of opera culture and practice.
The Path
So I set off, spending months learning lyrics, learning how to hit notes I didn't know I could hit, finding lower frequencies in my voice that I didn't know were accessible and resonance that I didn't know I could create. I spent a year thinking I figured something out, only to discover soon afterward that I had no idea and totally sucked. It was a year of building up, tearing down, building up: like a little pig learning how to build a house that the wolf couldn't finally destroy. I would record myself along the way to check back on progress, sometimes with pride, sometimes with despair and disgust. Turns out that voice in your head isn't the one people hear in the crowd.
I pushed forward anyway, sometimes hanging on by a thread and sometimes in a confident march, my vocal teacher playing the role of encourager in times when it got hard and humbler on days when I wasn't recognizing how hard it was. In addition to practicing I'd watch countless operas trying to learn the people and their techniques, watching productions, streaming and discovering. Eventually the year was almost up, the five arias were learned, my Spotify Wrapped was all opera, and we invited the special guest to listen to my performance.
That's a night I won't forget. I knew going in that after a year I still wasn't ready for prime time, but since the conversation had just been between me and my vocal teacher so far, I had no idea to what degree, positive or negative. Was this real or fantasy? Do I still show talent or was that a mistake or worse? Eventually my teacher takes a seat at the piano and her teacher takes a seat off to the side on my left, and the first song began. Here we go…
The Verdict
I think she let me sing the first song all the way through, which was kind. It was an Italian tune from Don Giovanni by Mozart, and I recall her tapping her feet a few times, seemingly enjoying the performance which got me kind of excited. That excitement lasted until I got to the end, where I think she said sometime like, “Well, that didn't sound like Italian…” I had spent a year trying to learn it. From that point we went back to the beginning of the song and she methodically observed the mistakes that I had made, which were plentiful and almost on every word. No, I was not an opera singer yet. I'm still trying to figure out the line between when you're an opera singer instead of just some person who sings opera, but on that night I was the latter. There were some good things happening for sure, but her main message to me that night sounded to my ears a bit like this:
“There are no shortcuts. Perhaps you wanted to learn that there are, but there aren't. Every sound of every word has to be right. Every form of resonance has to be right. Every pronunciation of every word in every language has to be right. If it's not exactly right, it's wrong. And right now, for you, it's wrong. You probably need about two more years of work before you're ready to start performing…and even then, at the bottom, not the top.”
…
What Then?
I took no offense--she has a kind way of delivering the truth, and this was the goal after all. I thanked her and my teacher for their time, and went home for the night. When I got home to share the news with my wife and kids who were all quite anxious to learn how this night would go, the truth is I felt more pride than disappointment. Yeah, sure, it was disappointing to learn that the wildest of my fantasies had not come true, that I had not jumped to the head of the class and surprised everyone with a breakout, door-opening performance; but I couldn't stop feeling pride for the simple fact that I knew I had worked as hard as I could and stuck with something for a year, which put me in the position to have an experience that most people would never have. I had to work so hard for that! If I called it quits right then and there, which had been one of my options all along, I knew I could hold my head up having achieved my goal, taken risk and fully explored my potential with opera. You regret what you don't try, and there would be no regrets here. In some ways, my biggest feeling that night was relief, being finally able to let go of a target that had weighed on me for months. Then I just slept on it.
It took me several days to figure out what to do next. Most likely I'd just be done. People have a thing about quitting, like it's equivalent to failure, but I don't think so at all. Quitting can be an act of wisdom, and in this case I had achieved what I set out to achieve. I wanted to learn five arias--not just the words, but the technique required to sing them--and even though they wouldn't land me on the Met stage, I did it, feel great about it and am super proud and fulfilled to have done it.
But over some days though I realized I missed the thought of not singing opera anymore, and with all the recordings I made over the year it was clear this the progress was real. At some point my vocal teacher gave me a call and we had a talk. That belief that she had in me before? Still had it. I'm not going to go into the details of our conversation here, but in what I viewed as an act of incredible, heart-warming commitment, my teacher kind of traded me to someone who she thought could better provide the specific guidance I needed at the moment, assuring me that I could get this and that she was the person who could get me there rather than herself. Belief. And in fact that new teacher was the very person who tore me down the other night.
Tearing down, building up, tearing down, building up. It's a process.
Next…
In the beginning I kept trying to find shortcuts, but over the course of the year it became clearer that there aren't any. I swear to you that I can feel and deliver emotion through opera, as straight a path from my soul as I can hope to find. But I learned, and grew to accept, that my boat is far from ready to set sail. The mechanics are not there yet. There is some potential. Patience is needed. But I'm still carrying on. When it comes down to it, I LOVE THIS.
After a few more weeks I'll tell you how it has gone with my new teacher. We started in December.