A New Name, A New Day

First, the new name.

I had a very hard lesson this past week, which is maybe I'm not an "emerging pro".

Maybe I'm just a middle-aged woman (come on - you're 60, that's pushing it!) with a rather wild, undisciplined, large operatic voice, a truckload of diva personality, a minimum of musical training (I learn almost everything by ear but I do it so perfectly no one can tell), a sexy figure and a great hair dye job.

If anyone has been reading regularly, they will notice that I deleted the recent posts about Dialogues of the Carmelites. That is because I am planning to drop out. I booked an extra session today with the therapist I've been seeing for years, mostly to talk about problems with my partner's physical and mental health issues and how to deal with them and still have a life, to figure out the best way to do this.

Why am I doing this? It seems, according to this director, I can do nothing right, but I haven't a clue what he wants. I came there prepared. I knew my small role perfectly, I speak flawless French, and I sound quite lovely in the little solo secion (most of the bits of recitative are in my register break, which makes it hard to sound "lovely" in them, but I didn't think they were meant to be).

There is one other woman that this conductor has been bullying but at least she has a large role, so to her it's probably worth it.

There are two women singing the larger role that I had originally auditioned for, they are less than half my age, and one of them showed up at the first two rehearsals not even knowing how to speak the words to her part in time to the music.

Well, she's 25! Hardly the age of wisdom. When I was that age I hadn't even started studying singing seriously. It was the year I stopped drinking. And hardly the right age for the character she was playing. I can understand a director not wanting to cast me in a role like Erika in Vanessa (the first role I ever auditioned for for this conductor), but if this conductor thinks I'm too old for Erika, why would he want to cast a 25 year old as Mother Marie?

In any event, I am just no longer used to this kind of abuse. I might put up with it if the stakes were higher (if I were getting paid, or singing a large role that I was dying to sing) but for two pages of solo singing and a few lines of recit? No. This is not how I want to spend the first Christmas after my mother died.

I suppose part of me feels like a failure. This was my first venture in 30 years outside of being an (unpaid) choir soloist and singing in operatic concerts either that I produce myself or that someone else produces, in nursing homes or churches.

If this is what I can expect if I get a role I audition for, I don't think I want to go to any more auditions. This is a huge thing to say. It's a huge admission of defeat. Or maybe it's just that I have different values. Over the past several decades I have spent most of my time when I was not at work earning a living either in 12 Step programs or in churches (even though I have no birth religion, I consider myself a spiritual person) where regardless of what else is going on, it is woven into the organization's mission that people treat each other with respect and that there is no bullying or abuse.

For people who have read me at "the other place" I took quite a bit of abuse over the years from The Mentor Who Shall Not Be Discussed but I brought some of that on myself by falling in love with him and at least he did most of his bullying in his studio behind a closed door. And at least the whole thing started because he heard me singing from a hymnal in the back of a church and chose me as a protegee. I never foisted myself on him.

This doesn't mean I will never sing opera again. I am singing better and better thanks to those new exercises my teacher gave me and I have every intention of getting back to Amneris in preparation for the concert he wants to sing with me next year.

And I will still go to the meetups and aria classes where I can sing the music I love with a piano.

As for my new title? A few years ago I saw a play called I Am My Own Wife about a transgender man living in Nazi Germany.

So I can be "My Own Diva". One of my dreams has been to produce my own one woman show, a little chat interspersed with arias. Maybe that will find a market.

Off to Rehearsal

I'm off to my first Carmelites rehearsal. I now have Mother Jeanne totally memorized including the tough spot at the end where I sing (totally atonally) alone with Sister Constance. We will see if I can hold my own tonight. As I've said, I am not a natural harmonizer although once I get a part in my head I can hang onto it.

I also am going to seriously learn Mother Marie. She has to sing four high B flats but they're sort of "throwaway" notes in recitative, not big powerful notes that you have to hang onto like the ones in Aida.

I have been listening to her part of the recording and working on the French. As I'm primarily an "ear learner", if I keep listening to the recording I will know the part. Luckily French is an easy language for me because I grew up hearing my mother speak it.

I have to admit, unfortunately, that I'm not quite ambitious enough to get to rehearsal early to listen to the rehearsal of some of the Mother Marie scenes that I'm not in. I have decided to stop by my mother's apartment instead. But there's time. My goal is to know the part by the time we go on break on December 17. It shouldn't be hard because once I'm secure with Mother Jeanne I won't have to sing through it during my practice times at home - which I have to admit have not been as numerous or as extensive as I would like, as a result of all the copyediting (what pays the rent) that has come pouring in - and can work on Mother Marie instead.

More later....

The Payoff

Well, at last night's choir rehearsal I sang about 10 pianissimo high Gs in a way I never had before! In fact the choir director liked it so much he asked if I could please sing that anthem on December 5. I was flattered, but I told him I had to honor my commitment to my partner (and myself) that when I was rehearsing Carmelites I was going to take a break from choir if for no other reason than I owed it to her to spend Saturday evening and Sunday morning with her, as I would be really tired on Friday night, which is when I usually stay over.

Although I still don't think it's sunk in with her that no, I'm not cancelling this commitment. I will find plenty of time to do the work (copyediting work for pay)that has been pouring in as well as getting enough rest! And because the rehearsals are in Brooklyn, if I have to I can stop by my mother's apartment. Although I think I have done the right thing in letting an "apartment dismantling" company handle most of it.

Today I sang through the treacherous ascending phrase in Aida and it really went well! I didn't start too far back in the scene because there wasn't time. I must get a handle on those last two pages of Carmelites!! They're the hardest. The final section is me alone with Sister Constance and it's completely atonal (this for a gal who's never studied music theory and basically has always just winged it).

It's interesting. I was realizing that I have become totally inured to all the guillotine sound effects (which used to freak me out). So I see how people can become inured to the sights and sounds of certain kinds of violence and they might lose the potential to shock. I hope that never happens to me.

Back "Into" Singing

I think I am finally "into" singing again. I still don't have a lot of time. Even though I've made a decision to turn the task of dismantling my mother's apartment over to professionals (which means that when their fee plus the rent and utility payments on the apartment are deducted from the gross sales it will zero out)I still seem to be busy busy busy.

I think I finally do have enough work to keep me busy for 30 hours a week, I just need to be left alone to do it! So as singing breaks no longer naturally occur (breaks like running out of work until the following morning or the following Monday, or, in the old days, coming home from the office) I need to take at least one a day on days when I'm not rehearsing or having a lesson.

My small role in Carmelites is coming along. I can't believe how hard it is to memorize two bits of extended recitative and a choral section that mostly repeats itself over and over, on the other hand it is totally unfamiliar (unlike, for example, excerpts from Carmen, which I've had in my ear for over 40 years!)

My solo yesterday went well. One of the other singers there, who hadn't heard me for close to a year, told me I was sounding good. I said I had been working hard and she said she could tell. I just wish I were 20 years younger (I'd kill to be 40 again, never mind 28) so that I could do something with all this.

Saturday I gently broke it to my partner that I would be in an intensive rehearsal period and she wasn't thrilled but didn't do something ugly like refuse to have Thanksgiving with me, which she might have. It's sort of like here's where I came in 35 years ago - arguing with her about making time to sing.

What I haven't had time for is work on my big pieces, like the Amneris/Radames duet. That went very well at my last lesson, but I see I have a lesson tomorrow and I haven't touched it. Well, maybe that's for the best. I made a note in my 2011 calendar that in February, after Carmelites is over and after my mother's apartment is empty and "broom clean" (we promised the landlord to be out by January 31) that I need to start planning the concert with my teacher, the Carmen with this guy, and the Amneris/Aida duet, which I am planning to sing in one of my evening classes.

Opera, Dickens, and the French Revolution

Since I'll be doing a (small) role in Dialogues of the Carmelites, I have been immersing myself in the French Revolution.

First, I bought a recording of the opera. I wasn't all that familiar with it, only having seen it once, at the Met, years ago in English.

I am going to be playing Mother Jeanne but since I had originally auditioned for Mother Marie, I want to sort of learn her part too (I don't really sightread, but I have a superb ear and can learn music pretty quickly if I listen to it over and over).

Well, after listening to the opera about 6 or 7 times I must say it really gave me the creeps! At the end you can hear the guillotine and at the very end it actually cuts someone off mid-sentence. Then there's just silence. Eerie.

To get myself in the mood I read a novel that I found in my laundry room (where there's a book freecycle) called A Place of Greater Safety. It's loooong, and huge sections were boring, but you really get the flavor of the period, including all the executions.

Then today I spoke to my mother (I'm glad we had a nice talk - we hadn't been getting along all that well, she's 93 and housebound but as domineering as ever) and she said the movie of A Tale of Two Cities was on tv so I turned it on and watched the end and cried buckets. I remember my mother taking me to see it when I was a teenager.

In fact before I fell in love with opera I fell in love with Dickens. It started with my seeing the musical Oliver! and then with my mother reading Oliver Twist to me when I was 12 and had the flu (with a very high fever). After that I read all of Dickens. I just loved the denseness of the plots, the mysteries, the secrets....so unlike my sterilized High Modernist life in a New York City apartment where what you saw was what you got, and where embarrassingly frank talk about everything from sex to politics showed that you were "enlightened".

Actually, Lady Dedlock in Bleak House would make a great operatic heroine. She sort of reminds me of Violetta but without the TB. Deeply depressed and disaffected because what? She had sex outside of marriage 20 years before the story began and had a child? That she was damaged goods. Sort of as if Violetta had married the Baron and lived sadly ever after.

Now I'm listening to Andrea Chenier just to continue the theme. It's got an execution at the end but it's not as gory as Carmelites.