The Metropolitan Opera: From Author Ben Bryant’s Hollywood Memoir, “Three Stages”
- Posted on 27th January 2015
- in Entertainment, entertainment books, Hollywood memoirs, Metropolitan Opera
- by Ben
This excerpt doesn’t quite fit into the Hollywood Memoir mold but in chapter 10 of Three Stages you’ll find the story of my brief career at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, known globally as “The Met”. Ever since my voice matured I’d been told that I should be an opera singer but while I loved the music, the operatic world seemed stuffy and unappealing. In ’66 I met an opera coach who turned me around on the subject, coached me on credit and, after several months of intense work, arranged a Met audition in 1967. On the spot I was hired for the Met Studio, their “farm team” of young singers. The first gigs were traveling, with a soprano and a member of the Opera Guild, to high schools who’s kids were scheduled to see a Met performance of Tosca. We would sing the highlights and one of the ladies would fill in the story. This was fun and we got paid. Then the next summer…
Excerpt from the chapter:
“In late spring or early summer the Metropolitan Opera Studio was holding a workshop for several young conductor/pianists from all over the U S and Tosca was the opera they were going to work. They asked me to sing the leading tenor role, Mario Cavaradossi. Wow! This was an opportunity not to be missed.”
…
“I worked diligently with [my coach] Sam on the parts of the opera I hadn’t learned and on the appointed day at the Met I was ready to rock and roll, as it were. I arrived at the rehearsal room to find Dr. Schick, [#2 man under Rudolph Bing and the supervisor of this event] seven or eight young musicians and the rest of Tosca’s principal cast, all Met Studio members. It worked like a rehearsal with rotating (excellent) pianists who were all conductors and coaches as well. (About half of them were arrogant jerks.)
“We started from the beginning of the show and sang our way through with occasional comments from whichever guy was playing at the time. (They were all guys except for Paulette Haupt-Nolan.) … Sometimes Dr. Schick would comment. It proceeded that way more or less as an actual rehearsal until we finished the opera. Then we broke for lunch, came back and did it again.
“Opera singers work under the traditional illusion that, like pitchers in baseball, they can only go full out two or three times a week. It’s no doubt true for pitchers but not for singers and I was laboring under no such illusion. It’s my experience that if you really know how to sing you can do Tosca eight times a week. Bob Weede did Happy Fella eight times a week and said it was tougher than Rigoletto. Having been relegated to mostly character roles in musicals I was really enjoying singing the hell out of Puccini and I went at it full bore every time. This did not make me popular with the other singers, who were ‘marking’. I could not have cared less, I was having the time of my life and singing my ass off!
“At the end of Cavaradossi’s first big aria, Recondita Armonia … there’s phrase, ‘Tosca, se tu’. The word ‘Tosca’ is three notes, To-oo-sca with a high b-flat (my money note) in the middle. Most tenors take a breath after that word but, as an actor, that seemed wrong to me. So after the fortissimo high note I feathered down to a pianissimo on the last note of the word and went into ‘se tu’ without a breath. One of the jerks stopped me and ‘corrected’ my phrasing. I explained to him that it was a sentence, ‘Tosca, it’s you’ and should be performed as such. He turned to Dr. Schick and said, ‘Why does he do that?’ Dr. Schick looked at me, smiled and said, ‘Because he’s an actor and he can.’ ”
I loved Dr. Schick.
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