I am expecting a baby any moment. In fact, it could happen before I get to the end of this column. I'll let you know. At my last check-up my midwife asked me how I was feeling emotionally - any doubts, fears, anxieties, any disturbed dreams? To which I happily answered, nope! Well, except for my completely reasonable doubts about childbirth in general (pushing a watermelon out of a lemon? Come on people!) And then, predictably, I woke in the middle of the night in a cold sweat with one thought on my mind: "I am bringing my child into a world where you can have a masters degree and STILL be unemployed! What is he going to do with his life? In a time of economic turmoil this was a VERY SILLY THING TO DO!" And worse: what if he wants to be an opera singer like his silly mother??
I must dissuade my child from a musical career and all will be well. And back to sleep I go.
Don't misunderstand me, I fully intend on encouraging my (status update: unborn) son in all cultural endeavours. I think learning a musical instrument is a wonderful thing for a child. He can learn as many as he likes! And maybe he'll have a lovely singing voice and join a choir and he'll have a fantastic, enriching experience. But should my son come to me at age 18 and tell me he wants to be an opera singer, I am going to say: "That's great, honey. Just have a back-up plan, ok?"
You can study classical voice at any one of the many prestigious schools in America, Europe and the UK; it will very likely be an enriching and rewarding experience and you will work alongside brilliant musicians who will inspire and motivate you; you will walk away with a fabulous Masters degree, and in considerable debt (Manhattan School of Music estimates fees and living costs to be US$55,000 per year, tuition fees alone at Guildhall in London for a foreign student - that includes New Zealanders - is £20,400). You will also walk away with absolutely no guarantees that this whole pricey and wonderful experience will ever earn you a cent.
Venturing into the real world, off to one of the 200 auditions you will probably do in your quest to find work, it quickly becomes clear that this is no territory for the faint-hearted. An acquaintance of mine went through 5 rounds of auditions for a position in an opera chorus, only to be told the company would not be hiring anyone. It is very hard to stand out from the other 1,399 opera singers you are competing against in say, the Neue Stimmen International Singing Competition. Even a run-of-the-mill audition for a young artist position with B-size opera house will see three full days of auditionees. The sheer numbers are frightening. 30 lousy rejection letters in a row from your last 30 unsuccessful auditions is bound to get anybody down. And the whole time, you're still practising. And trying to feed yourself. And temping. And teaching beginner piano to some neighbour's kid. And that's not even the worst part. The worst part is that you are truly talented!
I have to be completely honest and say that, as a New Zealand-trained singer it was pretty easy to get noticed - if you're a reasonably good, which I was (slash, hopefully still am). This lured me into a false sense of security 1) about my ability; 2) about the industry itself. I was a big fish in a small pond and I sauntered off to Europe expecting things to fall quickly and beautifully into place. The wake-up call that followed was jarring. There were many, many tearful phone calls home. There were many conversations with my partner about giving it all up and studying something else. Fortunately I persevered while others around me dropped like flies, and some might even say, I'm a relative success story. I actually worked as a singer and made enough money to get by. For years!
But is "getting by" really good enough? My friends from university who'd studied sensible things like finance, accounting, marketing, law and economics were raking in the cash in London, getting their house deposits together for when they returned to New Zealand. For me and my singing colleagues, the idea of owning something like a house - an actual asset - is laughable. It is so beyond our reality that we don't even let ourselves think about it. It's a waste of time when there is a Bach cantata to be learned for that gig that pays $150.
At the other end of the spectrum, the big bucks: I once went to dinner with an American heldentenor in his late 40s who was getting heaps of work all over the place. He was in Hamburg, where I living, to sing Calaf in Turandot at the Staatsoper. During dinner he had a phone call from New York - his agent. The tenor at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich had cancelled, and could he get himself to the dress rehearsal of Aida tomorrow? The fee for jumping in at the last minute? €35,000. I'm sure that young opera singers hear stories like this and their eyes grow wide at the prospect of such vast sums. But what they need to know is that this guy is the exception, not the rule. And while you have a real purty voice, you're not the exception.
In Fred Plotkin's article about singers and their finances, he lays it out plainly: most trained singers will not have big careers. The cost of becoming a singer is massive - not just the degrees, but the ongoing lessons and coaching, language classes, travel costs, performance clothing costs, recording costs when putting together an audition CD or DVD, paying the accompanists. Our debts are huge, but unlike medical students who also have great debts, singers will never make the kind of money that doctors do later on. The whole situation is so depressing it makes you think, why bother? And trust me, most of us have looked in the mirror at some point and asked that very question.
At this point the expectation is for me to write some soulful words about why we artists do what we do - how it fulfills us spiritually, emotionally, gives us our sense of purpose in the world, all we want to do is bring joy and beauty to the world - yeah, yeah, yeah. You've heard it all before. It's actually a lot simpler than that. Opera singers have either a) been training to do this since we were sixteen and neglected to study anything else so now we're completely unqualified to do any other job; or b) while we did have the foresight to get some other skills we'd prefer to keep at the singing thing cos it is a freakin' hard and yet totally awesome thing to do. So whatever this kid of mine (yet to make an appearance) decides to do with his life, all I want is for him to be happy. The big bucks aren't everything.
I must dissuade my child from a musical career and all will be well. And back to sleep I go.
Don't misunderstand me, I fully intend on encouraging my (status update: unborn) son in all cultural endeavours. I think learning a musical instrument is a wonderful thing for a child. He can learn as many as he likes! And maybe he'll have a lovely singing voice and join a choir and he'll have a fantastic, enriching experience. But should my son come to me at age 18 and tell me he wants to be an opera singer, I am going to say: "That's great, honey. Just have a back-up plan, ok?"
You can study classical voice at any one of the many prestigious schools in America, Europe and the UK; it will very likely be an enriching and rewarding experience and you will work alongside brilliant musicians who will inspire and motivate you; you will walk away with a fabulous Masters degree, and in considerable debt (Manhattan School of Music estimates fees and living costs to be US$55,000 per year, tuition fees alone at Guildhall in London for a foreign student - that includes New Zealanders - is £20,400). You will also walk away with absolutely no guarantees that this whole pricey and wonderful experience will ever earn you a cent.
Venturing into the real world, off to one of the 200 auditions you will probably do in your quest to find work, it quickly becomes clear that this is no territory for the faint-hearted. An acquaintance of mine went through 5 rounds of auditions for a position in an opera chorus, only to be told the company would not be hiring anyone. It is very hard to stand out from the other 1,399 opera singers you are competing against in say, the Neue Stimmen International Singing Competition. Even a run-of-the-mill audition for a young artist position with B-size opera house will see three full days of auditionees. The sheer numbers are frightening. 30 lousy rejection letters in a row from your last 30 unsuccessful auditions is bound to get anybody down. And the whole time, you're still practising. And trying to feed yourself. And temping. And teaching beginner piano to some neighbour's kid. And that's not even the worst part. The worst part is that you are truly talented!
I have to be completely honest and say that, as a New Zealand-trained singer it was pretty easy to get noticed - if you're a reasonably good, which I was (slash, hopefully still am). This lured me into a false sense of security 1) about my ability; 2) about the industry itself. I was a big fish in a small pond and I sauntered off to Europe expecting things to fall quickly and beautifully into place. The wake-up call that followed was jarring. There were many, many tearful phone calls home. There were many conversations with my partner about giving it all up and studying something else. Fortunately I persevered while others around me dropped like flies, and some might even say, I'm a relative success story. I actually worked as a singer and made enough money to get by. For years!
But is "getting by" really good enough? My friends from university who'd studied sensible things like finance, accounting, marketing, law and economics were raking in the cash in London, getting their house deposits together for when they returned to New Zealand. For me and my singing colleagues, the idea of owning something like a house - an actual asset - is laughable. It is so beyond our reality that we don't even let ourselves think about it. It's a waste of time when there is a Bach cantata to be learned for that gig that pays $150.
At the other end of the spectrum, the big bucks: I once went to dinner with an American heldentenor in his late 40s who was getting heaps of work all over the place. He was in Hamburg, where I living, to sing Calaf in Turandot at the Staatsoper. During dinner he had a phone call from New York - his agent. The tenor at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich had cancelled, and could he get himself to the dress rehearsal of Aida tomorrow? The fee for jumping in at the last minute? €35,000. I'm sure that young opera singers hear stories like this and their eyes grow wide at the prospect of such vast sums. But what they need to know is that this guy is the exception, not the rule. And while you have a real purty voice, you're not the exception.
In Fred Plotkin's article about singers and their finances, he lays it out plainly: most trained singers will not have big careers. The cost of becoming a singer is massive - not just the degrees, but the ongoing lessons and coaching, language classes, travel costs, performance clothing costs, recording costs when putting together an audition CD or DVD, paying the accompanists. Our debts are huge, but unlike medical students who also have great debts, singers will never make the kind of money that doctors do later on. The whole situation is so depressing it makes you think, why bother? And trust me, most of us have looked in the mirror at some point and asked that very question.
At this point the expectation is for me to write some soulful words about why we artists do what we do - how it fulfills us spiritually, emotionally, gives us our sense of purpose in the world, all we want to do is bring joy and beauty to the world - yeah, yeah, yeah. You've heard it all before. It's actually a lot simpler than that. Opera singers have either a) been training to do this since we were sixteen and neglected to study anything else so now we're completely unqualified to do any other job; or b) while we did have the foresight to get some other skills we'd prefer to keep at the singing thing cos it is a freakin' hard and yet totally awesome thing to do. So whatever this kid of mine (yet to make an appearance) decides to do with his life, all I want is for him to be happy. The big bucks aren't everything.