Ask the Opera Singer(s)...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
81

[QUOTE=Autolycus]
What are some good websites for singers?
[/QUOTE]

It depends - what exactly are you looking for? Laura Claycomb has the best section I’ve ever seen for young singers. For specific singers, it’s pretty easy to just google them. Some singers swear by the Classical Singer Community . Operabase is a site I find extremely useful for fans and singers. There are library sites which have different composers’ scores - Indiana, for example . Let me know if any of these are useful or not, and I can add to them if you need - I don’t use the net that much for singing, but I have colleagues who do.

Well, nowhere near as ignorant as I’m about to sound. I’ve never used a special name for it other than breathing… My teacher used to make me lie on the floor with the phone book on my chest. If the phone book didn’t move, you weren’t breathing deep enough. Then, standing, I’d put my hands on the bottom of my rib cage. Again, if I didn’t breathe deep enough to make my hands move out from my spine, it wasn’t deep enough.

This is exactly why one on one voice lessons are so important - 20 teachers are going to have 20 ways of expressing the same idea in words, and it’s impossible to tell if you’re getting it right without being right there in the room with you.

82

[QUOTE=Le Ministre de l’au-delà]
A toss-up between “The Bunny of Seville” and the Marx Brothers’ “A Night at the Opera”. The last time I was in “The Barber of Seville”, we were all on stage behind the curtain during the overture. Everyone was acting out “The Bunny of Seville” down to the last detail.
[/QUOTE]
Ooh, I wouldn’t have wanted to be pretending to be Elmer Fudd during that performance. Having a cartoon rabbit climbing on your head on all fours is one thing, a real person bouncing around on my scalp is another.

Good thread, I’m enjoying myself. I never went professional myself, but I still perform occasionally, and am hoping to get more into it in the future.

Enjoy,
Steven

83

Is there too much of an emphasis on a very few composers? Puccini and Verdi, for example. Add in Carmen, Strauss, Wagner, and Mozart and you’d think no one else ever wrote an opera. *Fidelio *and Boris Gudunov make a rare appearance.

84

[QUOTE=Le Ministre de l’au-delà]
my number one stereotype to get rid of would be the idea that opera singers and opera fans are pretentious snobs. Because of things like the Saturday Afternoon at the Opera/Met broadcast, opera is available to anyone who wants to listen. In Europe, lots of the houses have tickets for 5 or 6 Euros where you stand up behind the seats. I’m in the midst of a school tour of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ right now, and the biggest fun is the grade 1 -3 kids who don’t know anything about opera, they’re just enjoying the story, the music and the singing. I love hearing about people who listen to the Met in the afternoon and the hockey game that night.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t know of any discount ticket programs which are widespread in the US, but that couldn’t hurt. I bet a significant number of tickets go unsold. I know my wife and I have snagged EXCELLENT seats at the last minute for numerous shows, seats which would have been long sold out in most similar live performance shows. And it doesn’t help that opera tickets tend to be significantly more expensive than most concert/musical/play tickets and the unspoken dress code and such also tends to push people away. The price list for a 5-show package for my local opera company runs about $110 per seat per show on average . I have season tickets for a series of Broadway shows, in the same venue, and whereas those tickets cost me an average of ~$67 a seat, across seven shows, the exact same seats would cost me nearly double per seat per show for the operas. I love opera(and if my wife liked it more we’d go more, cost be damned) but this is a significant hurdle to overcome to make it more popular among the mainstream population. The WORST seats in the house, are over $35 each, and that’s with a season ticket subscription discount. Those same seats, for the Broadway series, clock in at ~$15. Those $15 tickets are what I used to get when I was a student and was the only member of my family who wanted to see musical theatre. Blowing $250 on one show(two tickets, undiscounted because they’re not subscription, and purchased through ticketmaster with all their attendant fees) and getting mediocre seats is not most people’s idea of a good time. And who can blame them? That’s very expensive entertainment. That’s a couple months worth of movie tickets for the whole family, or a month worth of tickets and snacks.

I don’t see opera losing it’s elitist image, in the US at least, until it becomes much more affordable.

Enjoy,
Steven

85

[QUOTE=Mtgman]
I don’t know of any discount ticket programs which are widespread in the US, but that couldn’t hurt. I bet a significant number of tickets go unsold. I know my wife and I have snagged EXCELLENT seats at the last minute for numerous shows, seats which would have been long sold out in most similar live performance shows. And it doesn’t help that opera tickets tend to be significantly more expensive than most concert/musical/play tickets and the unspoken dress code and such also tends to push people away. The price list for a 5-show package for my local opera company runs about $110 per seat per show on average . I have season tickets for a series of Broadway shows, in the same venue, and whereas those tickets cost me an average of ~$67 a seat, across seven shows, the exact same seats would cost me nearly double per seat per show for the operas. I love opera(and if my wife liked it more we’d go more, cost be damned) but this is a significant hurdle to overcome to make it more popular among the mainstream population. The WORST seats in the house, are over $35 each, and that’s with a season ticket subscription discount. Those same seats, for the Broadway series, clock in at ~$15. Those $15 tickets are what I used to get when I was a student and was the only member of my family who wanted to see musical theatre. Blowing $250 on one show(two tickets, undiscounted because they’re not subscription, and purchased through ticketmaster with all their attendant fees) and getting mediocre seats is not most people’s idea of a good time. And who can blame them? That’s very expensive entertainment. That’s a couple months worth of movie tickets for the whole family, or a month worth of tickets and snacks.

I don’t see opera losing it’s elitist image, in the US at least, until it becomes much more affordable.

Enjoy,
Steven
[/QUOTE]

I don’t disagree with you that more discount tickets or inexpensive last minute tickets would be a good idea - more bums in seats is good for the show, and for most companies the ticket fare is a fraction of what it costs to put on a show, the remaining cost being taken up by a combination of philanthropic largesse, corporate sponsorship and government grants. Most companies want to sell subscriptions rather than single tickets, but audience development is a huge priority all across the boards.

I have to say, though, that I can’t afford even a single ticket to the Toronto Maple Leafs (NHL; the intercounty baseball team is free and some of the best baseball in town.) let alone a subscription. Pro Basketball, Baseball, Football, Hockey - all of them are out of reach for my family and yet no one calls these sports elitist. I’m not anti-sport, by any means - I’m just pointing out that the prices are similar.

My old friend Bud used to say “I paid for the seat; I can wear anything I like.” as he sat in the hall in whatever he’d worn to work that day.

86

[QUOTE=dalej42]
Is there too much of an emphasis on a very few composers? Puccini and Verdi, for example. Add in Carmen, Strauss, Wagner, and Mozart and you’d think no one else ever wrote an opera. *Fidelio *and Boris Gudunov make a rare appearance.
[/QUOTE]

I love seeing works that I’ve never encountered before, but I’m a fan and an insider. That’s an interesting challenge for an opera company - the most popular operas get the best response from single ticket buyers, the subscribers tend to want more variety. Balancing these two divergent trends is what season planners have to do all the time.

A huge part of why Verdi and Puccini are so popular is how well they wrote for the voice, and their good taste in librettos. But there are many other well written shows by lesser-known composers, or at least, composers who are less well known for opera.

An interesting site I found lists the most popular operas for the end of the twentieth century. I was surprised at how many Mozart operas were in the top ten (4), followed by Puccini (3), and one each for Verdi, Bizet and Rossini. I would have thought there would have been more Verdi than Mozart.

So, yeah, 10 of the top 52 for those years were Verdi operas, followed by 6 for Wagner, 5 each for Mozart and Puccini, 4 for Richard Strauss, and 3 each for Donizetti and Rossini. Gounod and Janacek had 2 each, and everyone else (Bizet, even though his one was in the top ten, Humperdink, Leoncavallo, Mascagni, Tchaikovsky, Offenbach, Bellini, Weber, Beethoven, Debussy, Smetana and Berg.) had only one each. For some of the composers with only one, some of them wrote only one, but some of them wrote many.

A big thing about these popular operas - many of them (not all!) tend to be what you would hope a first-time opera goer would see. If someone’s first opera were something more obscure, more aggressively modern, had an illogical plot, etc., they might end up turned off the form altogether instead of just thinking ‘Well, that was dumb - what else is there?’. I’m a little surprised to see “Pelleas et Mellisande” on that list, for while I think it’s stunningly gorgeous, it’s a strange libretto with not a lot of action.

A great company in Toronto is ‘Opera in Concert’, which specializes in presenting operas which are less well known. Often, you can point to specific reasons why opera X is not done that often, and yet, it has beautiful passages - witness ‘Lakme’ or ‘The Pearl Fishers’, known almost exclusively for their beautiful duets…

87

[QUOTE=Le Ministre de l’au-delà]
I don’t disagree with you that more discount tickets or inexpensive last minute tickets would be a good idea - more bums in seats is good for the show, and for most companies the ticket fare is a fraction of what it costs to put on a show, the remaining cost being taken up by a combination of philanthropic largesse, corporate sponsorship and government grants. Most companies want to sell subscriptions rather than single tickets, but audience development is a huge priority all across the boards.
[/quote]
Heck, I can afford to be be an associate sponsor of a season for less than the cheapest season tickets to see it!

I’m not sure this comparison makes sense to me. Professional sports are accessible to the mainstream because they’re televised. The actual cost of being a sports fan is pretty minimal. Most sports fans don’t go to the games in person. A $60 a year premium add-on to your cable package to get the NFL network gets you far more exposure to your sport for the buck than a $550 five-show opera season package. Sure, some fans go in person, and that gets expensive, but the entry level is to watch it on TV and it’s not until you’re hooked that the expensive stuff starts coming in. It’s about the entry level costs. If all sports were pay-per-view and you couldn’t watch one without paying ~250 for your first one, I’d imagine we’d have a lot fewer sports fans. You may be able to find a local group doing amateur opera for less, and you can always watch some of the videos or tv specials, and classical radio gets you a distorted version of the experience, but for the most part the barrier to entry is much higher for opera than professional sports. Many can’t afford it, so they never even try it.
[QUOTE=Le Ministre de l’au-delà]
My old friend Bud used to say “I paid for the seat; I can wear anything I like.” as he sat in the hall in whatever he’d worn to work that day.
[/QUOTE]
Can I still make fun of my 12 year old when we go and she’s wearing a ragged pair of army surplus shorts, fleece lined boots, and a nice blouse? Cause she looks funny as hell sitting next to people dolled up for the evening. I don’t make her change because, well, that’s who she is at this point in her life, and a few awkward stares won’t kill her.

Enjoy,
Steven

88

[QUOTE=Little Plastic Ninja]
How would you suggest a person look for one?
[/QUOTE]
As has ben mentioned, many opera singers supplement their income with teaching, either at a university or giving lessons. Check out your local university’s music department for how to contact voice coaches, or even high schools. I found a good coach I worked with for a couple years this way, and had opportunity to train with another that I passed up(to my regret). I didn’t continue my individual voice training through college, but I was part of the chorale and they had some good instructors there too.

Enjoy,
Steven

89

[QUOTE=Mtgman]
I’m not sure this comparison makes sense to me. Professional sports are accessible to the mainstream because they’re televised. The actual cost of being a sports fan is pretty minimal. Most sports fans don’t go to the games in person. A $60 a year premium add-on to your cable package to get the NFL network gets you far more exposure to your sport for the buck than a $550 five-show opera season package. Sure, some fans go in person, and that gets expensive, but the entry level is to watch it on TV and it’s not until you’re hooked that the expensive stuff starts coming in. It’s about the entry level costs. If all sports were pay-per-view and you couldn’t watch one without paying ~250 for your first one, I’d imagine we’d have a lot fewer sports fans.
[/QUOTE]
I think Ministre has a point, though. I live near Detroit, and I know lots of people who would jump at the chance to pay $120 for two mediocre tickets to a Pistons game at the Palace, but who would also say “$40 a seat for an opera – gah! that’s so expensive!!” You’re right that no one has to go to a live sporting event to be a sports fan…but people definitely like to do it.

ETA: It gets downright ironic when you’re sitting in a $100 seat at a Pistons game drinking a beer out of a plastic cup that says “Blue Collar” on it! :dubious: