The tip of the iceberg is an old image. But it certainly applies to singers and opera. There are long lists of credits for opera productions. But even those lists don’t tell the whole story.
The repetiteur – the pianist who plays during rehearsals – will get mentioned. But the ones who prepare the singers even before that won’t. Fitness trainers won’t, either, not even those people whose job is to ensure the health and wellness of the vocal cords, those complex, fragile skeins of tissue without which singing is just not possible.
Tara Erraught performs at opera houses around the world. But the Irish mezzo-soprano, who is from Dundalk, Co Louth, hasn’t forgotten her roots, and she’s on a mission to fill some of the gaps she herself had to deal with through her project Celebrating the Voice, which is billed as a professional development programme for singers.
She ran it for the first time in Drogheda in 2020, just before the Covid clampdown; this year she’s bringing it to the National Concert Hall, in Dublin, where she is an artist-in-residence.
She’s as interested in reaching the support networks of families and friends as the singers themselves, and she has lined up a number of experts to make presentations, including the director of Paris Opera, a financial and tax consultant with special experience of the arts, and a leading artist manager.
Two of the experts have professional profiles that are not quite as high or well understood: Paul Kwak, who is an American vocal-health and ENT (ear, nose and throat) specialist, and Morgane Fauchois-Prado, a French pianist.
Kwak, it turns out, trained at the Juilliard School, in New York, as what he calls a “collaborative pianist”, with a “kind of a view to pursuing a career in medicine, but I didn’t know quite how it would come together.
“But that’s where I fell in love with the voice and where I fell in love with opera. And then I pursued the path of becoming a doctor and then a voice doctor. So I live and breathe singing and voices now all day long.”
It’s a good time for his kind of work. “I think in the 21st century the advance of scientific research when it comes to the anatomy and physiology of the voice is making for some increasingly multidisciplinary and fascinating conversations about singing: how we take care of singers and then by extension the culture of performance schedules down to things as minute as rehearsal schedules, the breaks people should have, how you take care of a house, how you ventilate an opera house, things like that.”
The big challenge, he says, “distils to the truism that every singer is as different as the body in which they come. My job would be much easier if I could look at a pair of vocal cords and make a determination about what to do, or determine that by what role the singer is singing. Or how old the singer is. Or what race the singer is.
“You could take five sopranos who are singing Mimì in La Bohème. You could give them the same food. You could have them sleep the same amount. Keep them on the same medication regimen. Have them study with the same teacher. Do the same exercise regimen. And their vocal cords may look completely different.
“And that is because the way that the vocal cords respond to challenge, to inflammation, to stress, the ways that they recover, is very much rooted in the individual inflammatory pathways and wound-healing pathways of each body.
“What that boils down to is that my work is ultimately as much art as science, if not more art than science. Because I’m making decisions that have to incorporate not just the pathology but the schedule. What are we trying to get to? Is the performance that’s three days away most important or is it the performance that’s 14 days away? What are we going to tell the house? Each clinical encounter is about much more than just the sum of the vocal parts.”
There are things about the profession that Kwak would like to alter. “I would change perhaps back to a de-emphasis of the physical appearance of the singer and emphasise the primacy of the voice and the vocalism.
“The advent of live and HD cinema transmissions has caused a bit of a skew toward people who look the part rather than sound the part. I hear what people say about not believing that a Mimì who has tuberculosis and on her deathbed is going to be 400lb and can’t move around the stage.
“But I do think we’ve gone a little far in the other direction and perhaps showcased voices before they were ready, voices that weren’t necessarily right for the vocal role just because they looked a certain way.”
If you have to build a shield to protect yourself from malevolent people ... that’s the most challenging
— Morgane Fauchois-Prado
Fauchois-Prado started piano at the age of seven and, like Finghin Collins, ended up studying with Dominique Merlet in Geneva. “I like the piano,” she says, “because you can do anything on it. You don’t depend on anyone. And then I realised that, while I was self-sufficient on the piano, it wasn’t enough. I was already playing with fellow singer students, and I enjoyed it immensely.”
So she did the vocal-accompaniment class at the Paris Conservatoire, “and my main teacher there told me, ‘I think you have a thing with opera, so you should try the opera studio at the best opera.’ And I got in as a trainee repetiteur.
“But before that I used to make a living playing in the restaurant called the Bel Canto with singers disguised as waitresses. So I read through a lot of repertoire there, and then I got into the opera studio. It was like a calling. I finally felt at home. I’m a team person.”
Her best advice for anyone pursuing a musical career in opera? “Choose the repertoire wisely. I think that’s the most important. It’s like being true to yourself. So I was being true to myself when I chose to work with singers. For singers it has to do with knowing your abilities and your limits, and it has everything to do with the repertoire choice.”
A hard call if you’re young and the role you’re offered is not one you’re comfortable with.
Fauchois-Prado talks with great passion about working on Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and Debussy’s Pélleas et Mélisande, and is hugely fired up about bringing younger audiences to opera. “I’m a strong believer in everything that has to do with presenting operas in schools, having schools come to rehearsals and talk to the artists.”
She is frank about the worst of the challenges she faces as a vocal coach and repetiteur. “I guess having to work with people that you don’t feel a connection with. When you work in the field of arts and living arts, it’s all about the people. So if you have to build a shield to protect yourself from malevolent people, someone that you have no artistic connection whatsoever with ... that’s the most challenging. Because you have to do it. You have to work and you have to rehearse and you have to coach singers even if they don’t want to.”
She talks about working with a singer “who spent more time telling me about her love affairs and misadventures than actually working”, and about a conductor who was “a complete asshole. Sorry, excuse my French. There’s no other word. It was really hard.”
Celebrating the Voice, with masterclasses, presentations and concerts, is at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, from Monday, February 10th, to Friday, February 14th
