Everything about the setting of your famous aria, Caro nome, is an exploration of a rapt, ecstatic state of being. It’s axiomatic for actors that one can’t play a state of being; one must have an action. If Gilda were an even slightly more worldly woman, we might say that the action of this monologue is to reassure herself, to tell herself that this really is so, and shall remain so. But Gilda, a true innocent, already believes that; there has been nothing in her experience to tell her it might be otherwise. So all these musical (vocal) gestures, with their rhapsodizing of your lover’s name, their sending of your desire flying to him always, till the last sigh, and then the final sayings of the name again, over and over, until you enter the house and ascend to the terrace, are movements that keep you suspended, like a trill keeps us suspended. They stop time. But to stop time, you must remain active. You must search for the behavioral implications of each new movement. You are a very young girl in an ecstatic fantasy that you take for your new reality, and in effect in the privacy of your own room, where you may try out anything, give in to any impulse. In my experience, most singers get stuck in their search for poise, and the scene stops being a scene. Poise is by far not the point.

We will leave Gilda here. But the same process of questioning, of filling in the blanks and putting yourself in her place, will continue through the frightening episode of your abduction; your crucial offstage night with Gualtier-turned-Duke of Mantua, complete with loss of your viriginity (and how was that? how does it leave you feeling, physically and emotionally, especially toward him?); your painful confession to your father and his reception of it; the intrusion of Monterone (who’s that? what’s this about?); your father’s uncontrollable rage and thirst for vengeance; and the shocking, fatal events of the last act. (Q: how much time elapses between Acts 2 and 3? What has happened during that time?)

All this is, I emphasize, preparatory work, work that should be brought to the table at the first rehearsal, the first meeting with the director. Many things will change as the next phase of work begins and you must start to do what is commonly thought of as acting, i. e., having a physical life on the stage. But you will be coming from an assured place. When adjustments are required, you will have something to adjust from. In my experience, singers love doing this work when guided toward it, and are aware that it gives them a much fuller grasp on their identification with the material. But they sometimes complain that this is also work that is of no practical use in the processes of our operatic institutions, and very time-consuming at that. The director will only have some cockamamie concept that does not respect any of the boundaries and rules of evidence we’ve been using, and the conductor will actually not like the freedom of expression you have found, because it sometimes leads in different musical directions than his or her habitual ones, and even gives you grounds to argue your choices. And while still I defend such work for the reasons I’ve stipulated, I have to concede that at least in most performance circumstances, they’re right.