How Do I Make Myself Believe I Matter?

I'm taking a break from work now preferatory to trudging out in the snow to get groceries (I ordered some online but if I can't see what I'm buying it's often not the thing I really wanted) and feel a need to write.

I'm not sure about what, only that I feel I'm being pulled in two directions at once, in more than one sense.

Self Assessment

I know that I keep singing better and better, and despite my advancing age, keep getting stronger and stronger. With a few months of work for example, I probably could sing most of Amneris in public (giving a pass on the Triumphal Scene with the treacherous C flats).

I now have a respectable pianissimo high G and G sharp, and even an A on good days.

The new exercises my teacher has given me to learn to sing "on the edges of my chords" (AKA with that "heady" sound that so many sopranos and even mezzos come by naturally) have changed my sound dramatically (no pun intended - if anything I sound more "lyric").

On the other hand, the more I scour the backgrounds of people I meet, whether at group aria coachings, or whatever, the smaller and more comtemptibly irrelevant I seem. The other Mother Jeanne from the Carmelites production has her own web site, and quite a nice list of credentials including opera and symphony choruses in top venues and a few mid-sized roles with places that turned me down (one of them was where I sang "Acerba Volutta" and the auditor yelled "Brava" but never offered me anything).

So what do I have? A handful of roles that I don't sing any more at venues that I now know are a joke, that I sang over 30 years ago, some solos at churches that don't pay people, a few concerts in hospitals and nursing homes, and my big expletive deleted deal production of Samson et Dalila that I organized myself.

Self-Definition

Why can't I just be happy to be a nice (unBaptised) churchlady who sings? I remind myself of a character in a Margaret Yorke mystery that I read: an "old maid" who had retired from a management job to a small English village and sang contralto in a Bach choir (a lot of Yorke's novels use choirs as a setting) but did not take communion because she couldn't bring herself to believe in a lot of the church doctrines. Other than my lack of a birth religion, I fit right in there with the music-loving amateur choir singers with good intonation and good taste. Or I could if I squashed the diva in me who is always screaming. Be one of the best of the bunch. Not on a par with paid soloists of course (although I sound as good as many of them) but good enough to sing a church solo in a limited range (and with the breath control to sing anything Bach wrote without taking a breath in a wimpy place!)

As my partner said "I have a lot". I have a livelihood that doesn't require my going anywhere, a dream apartment that I pay very little for, and someone to love who loves me.

But I won't give up. There's a part of me that only comes alive when I sing Verdi and verismo or Carmen or Dalila, or, sigh, Mother Marie.

If I were, even, 40 !!!! I might matter to someone but at 60??? I don't even think I matter that much to my teacher. Even though he continues to compliment me on my overall progress (and nitpick at the things that are still not right) he has sort of let the idea of our concert drop. Maybe at the nursing home, he said. He and some other people do a free concert once a year in a big venue and when I asked about it (the mezzo who sang last time did not sound as good as I do and he even begrudgingly admitted it) he never offered me anything.

And I just have run out of energy. I don't mean I've run out of energy to sing, or even to keep practicing, but I've run out of energy to treat myself as if I matter.