Gesamtkunstwerk

Attention, freedom, and the friction-filled oyster.

“Aren’t you glad you’re not part of the big machine anymore?”

My husband asked me this as we strolled through the thick Houston air on our way back to the hotel. I knew what he meant. I worked for big opera companies for more than half of my career, and he was there for all of it, the glory and the dirt, and above all the soul-eating schedule. These days, I sit on our porch every weekend to chat with him, to write, to rest, to dream up my own art. I don’t miss the day to day of the industry.

But we had just left a theater full of friends expertly singing and playing music written by friends, all in a space I knew intimately from when it was my workplace. My own heart had swelled as the team gathered onstage for their well-deserved and hard-earned ovations. I miss those people, and being part of the process and the payoff. I always will. And I’ll always be grateful to the big machine that brought us together.

Opera, though…it’s complicated.

It certainly is for pianists, or “assistant conductors” as we’re listed in the evening program. In general we enjoy better working conditions than many (maybe most) collaborative pianists in the vocal world. Conductors and singers rely on experienced opera pianists to “show them how it goes,” yet as long as we choose the piano bench over the conductor’s podium, it can be hard to gain status in the industry. We are by far the most poorly compensated of the full-time musicians in any opera company. In a work culture that still often shames performers for needing help, a lot of our collaborative labor is done in secret, and accolades for our contributions are more often private than public.

I’m at a conference this week, and had the chance to sit and talk with a colleague who’s pursuing both symphonic and operatic conducting in the early stage of his career. I asked him what he loved about both varieties, and his answer has stayed with me all day: “In opera, you have time.” These days it’s more likely to be two or three weeks from first rehearsal to opening night when it used to be four or five, and we olds feel that loss, but it’s still much more time than the three or four days of rehearsal leading up to a symphony concert. In an era where the gifts of time and attention seem ever more precious and less attainable, maybe that’s the pearl in opera’s friction-filled oyster: more time, more space to discover connections, to seek and create some shared resonance.

These days, I find that vibe in small art - me and a partner or two. But it didn’t start out that way. There was a time when the big machine seemed to promise a pianist - a young woman pianist - okay, me - much more freedom than the tiny, twee world of art song.

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I went hungrily into a graduate program in accompanying (this was way before it was called collaborative piano) having fallen hard for the intimacies of art song, of hanging my own breath and fingers on every beautiful word of a poem suspended in music and expanded on the exhalation of a friend. Performing that way felt so wide and free. Playing solo piano repertoire, I was stuck in my own noisy head, missing every present moment by obsessing on notes both already played and not yet arrived. My anxieties faded when I could settle my attention on the music making of a partner, and through that on my own music making too. Accompanying singers, I found the “flow” state, and I was crazy about spending time there.

But the mentorship I received in the accompanying degree program turned out to be considerably more restrictive than any of my piano training had been. My applied piano studio mates loved debating the stylistic choices of many different pianists. But in the collaborative world there were only a handful of accompanists represented on the recordings available to us, and we rarely heard anyone outside of our university faculty play the repertoire live. I felt like I was driving down an ever narrower road lined with just a few experts’ choices.

And then there was so much instruction around how to perform “accompaniment”- a.k.a. musical deference - onstage. When, after my first degree recital, the only note my teacher (a woman who performed in fabulous turquoise jewelry) gave me was that my dress was disrespectful to the music, I went back to solo piano. That world was macho af, sure - my applied teacher told that I wasn’t physically strong enough to play Rachmaninov and that by marrying I had ruined my chances for a real career - but at least nobody told me I was disrespecting anything.

(Fun fact: I bought that dress at Marshall’s because I could afford it, and I thought it was pretty. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that respecting the music required a bigger budget. Maybe that’s a future post.)

Around the same time, I stepped in to play opera rehearsals at school when someone else dropped out, and that instantly seemed to open up a different world. The director of the program, Sylvia Debenport, was a terrifying woman who took us all seriously. She was the first person in my whole university who spoke to me about career possibilities and gave me real advice. Hand to G_d, I ended up in the opera world because she took the time to tell me I could be part of it. True, I was also completely taken with the size and scope of the process, the chaotic fun of all those people trying to do the thing. But Sylvia was the first of a series of powerful, confident women who encouraged me in a way my many male mentors never had. Those men guided, critiqued, and praised me, and I count them as significant musical influnces, but they never offered professional advocacy. Sylvia’s advice led me to the Merola program, and opera seemed to me then to be full of women leading and advising from the piano. Kathy Cathcart, Susan Webb, Joan Dornemann - these were the fierce, generous north stars of my early years. They told me about Italian prosody, bel canto singing, and German ensemble structure, and never told me how to dress.

And the singers! These women, I learned, were divas, the Italian word for goddesses. They flung their voices into the room and their fur coats into the arms of waiting assistants (it was the early nineties, y’all, greed was good). Alternatively, they gave toothy interviews to Opera News about how they weren’t divas at all, just regular hometown American girls who happened to sing at the Met, accompanied by photos of them on balconies above Manhattan or with an expanse of Napa vineyards beyond their terrace. Like the musicians back at school, these opera folks loved the language of obedience and serving the music. But they did it in technicolor, with unapologetically open throats.

It wasn’t just the energy of big voices and personalities that grabbed me. The most profound liberty I found in opera came through the many daily acts of translation. It didn’t matter whether I was trying to bring eighteenth century words and ideas into my present day, or archaic Italian verbs into English vernacular, or the soundscape of an orchestra onto the piano in front of me. Opera required me to engage with my imagination first. I had come to see a musical score as a set of permissions and restrictions: if it’s in the score, do it, and if it’s not, don’t dare unless someone says it’s okay. But as a pianist standing in for an orchestra, for anywhere from 13 to 108 people, there was no way to look at a score and say, only this. Improvisation was demanded. Risks were a given. And the textual element helped me, as someone who already loved studying languages. There is no perfect translation from one language to another; the meaning of a text is so much richer than the literal translation of each word. I found it was just the same to realize orchestral music at the piano. I was finally unchained from the score. My choices, and my fantasy, had value - they were necessary.

It all felt like freedom to me.

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In opera, I found what I was looking for, the chaotic fun of my school days times a million. I found a wide, far-flung community of artists willing to open themselves up to good work and easy comradeship. I found companies of skilled professionals who took immense pride in their ability to steer a huge artistic ship. I found moments of unmatched generosity and genuine support. And, in time, I started to see some other things as well.

Opera’s limited repertoire has many more roles available to men, so women singers had to work harder and be better to gain a foothold in the business (still do). The women I so admired, the divas who made it, were criticized for being too competitive and career-hungry.

In my own corner of the business, I often saw that women pianists who attained success as assistants to powerful men were rarely backed by those men if they decided to step out of their supporting roles.

There’s a trope of the woman who steps out of bounds and Must Pay; opera loves stories like that. Two of the most popular operas are always Traviata and Butterfly, whose central characters are sex workers who dare to pursue status and are punished for it. Opera fans love to take a diva to the heights and then trash her, life imitating art imitating life. I saw what happened when several of my “north stars” decided they wanted to be conductors instead of assistants. By this time I was an opera pianist who could - and often had to - show a new green conductor “how it goes” through my playing. My much more experienced women mentors were granted no such learning curve or grace period.

Gender dynamics were bad in opera, but the hardest things to overcome were driven by the money. The chaotic fun of my school opera experience became something different when one conductor, one director, and a few singers were making 10-20 times more than most of us. That pay structure absolutely determined our relative value and treatment within our workplaces, and it affected the way we treated each other as well.

In one crazy month during my assistant days, I was verbally attacked by a celebrity guest conductor in front of multiple colleagues including my immediate supervisor. No one said anything while it was happening. When it was over, my supervisor found me, grabbed me in a big hug, and said, “I’m so sorry that happened, you didn’t deserve it, but of course you understand there’s nothing I can do - it’s Maestro X, we all just have to live with it.” A few weeks later, I announced I was leaving to take a new job, and my big boss said breezily, “I can make that go away with one phone call. We need you here.”

Every musician’s career is built on trust and relationship; skill is imperative, but it doesn’t mean much if you’re all by yourself. Community is everything. There are many communities within the big space of opera - orchestras, choruses, tech crews - but both pianists and solo singers can be pretty lonely. Our status relationships to one another, then, begin to take on disproportionate importance.

I had found myself doing the dance of deference all over again. So I started a new search for freedom, for some place in the big machine with more light and air.

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That was almost twenty years ago.

There’s been plenty of opera since then. I have found a variety of different ways to interact with the art form and stay in relationship to the big community. Opera’s been generous in that way, and I’m grateful.

Here’s to an art form with a lot of moving parts; there’s always something to grab onto.

As I write these words, my stories feel so ancient to me, and I think that’s mostly internet-related. It’s easy to sneeze at social media, but people use it so effectively to come together in ways that shame and fear used to prevent. Certainly that’s true for collaborative pianists, in or out of opera. Who cares what the industry says about us when we can open our own page and write our own story?

The music staff at the company where I experienced the “crazy month” referenced above now celebrates its own amazing accomplishments freely and lavishly on Instagram, and this garners public praise and support from all corners. It’s so beautiful to see. Nobody gave this to them. They created it.

I have a lot of worries about opera as the “big machine” breaks down - here I don’t mean music staff IG pages, I mean the end of the 19th century patronage funding models. But I find myself engaged and inspired by a community that can connect and thrive more and more without the consent or approval of the big machine.

It’s changing, right?

It’s changing.

Right.

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So thanks, opera, for being so loud and bold, for encouraging me to go rogue at the keyboard and for requiring me to pay attention to so many things. You lifted me up, you shot me down, and you have never failed to have cool stuff for me to do. You are so freaking dramatic, which is fun and exhausting. Bigger breaks from you feel good.

The journey you sent me on changed my relationship to music. You turned me into a feminist. You made me brave enough to start fighting. I still believe in you, because you still blow me away.

But, in answer to your question, yes, my love. I’m so glad.

Thank you to Alex for liking the big conversations. Thank you to the great Alan Smith, in whose memory Elvia Puccinelli exhorted us this week to reach out and thank our “north stars.” This piece is a tribute to those north stars whose lights guided me and so many other little boats on the roughest of seas. Thank you now and forever to Kathy, Joan, Susan, and Sylvia.