4. Studio prep. This is closely related to the foregoing. The singer’s need for individual attention to get a role into his or her voice cannot be ignored, nor can the fact that this process already contains within it the seeds of “interpretation.” But assuming that our singer’s education has included preparation in musicianship, language, and stylistic recognition; that he has acquired reasonable technical security; that there is a reasonable match of voice with role, and that he has then come through a training program that has taught him how to engage with a character and rough in his route through the role on his own, the advance studio prep time can be significantly curtailed, and outside prep time (that is, advance work on interpretation with a coach not connected to the production) eliminated altogether, exclusive of purely technical work with a teacher. Assuming further that rehearsal has begun with some table work, in the course of which director, conductor, and designer have presented the overall concept to the performers and discussion and questioning has taken place, work can begin to discover the bonding of vocal, musical, and physical action that can emerge only through live interaction. The rehearsal structure must have plenty of day-to-day play in it, since one can only approximately foresee what particular issues must be addressed, which newly revealed interpretive paths must be pursued and, ultimately, either incorporated or rejected.

5. The hand of history. Operatic artists must dive into history in all the ways suggested by this category. By definition, the true integrated production automatically banishes the tiresome contemporization, the politicization and chasing-after of a surface “relevance,” that disfigures nearly all the opera we see. Such productions vanish in the puffs of smoke that is all they amounted to in the first place. Whether it excludes the time-of-composition update, the acknowledgement of Sir Peter Hall’s admonition that an opera should look like it sounds, is an interesting question with its pros and cons, and should be dealt with, I think, on a case-by-case basis. The most notable example is probably La Traviata, set at its premiere c. 1700 (against Verdi’s original wishes), and not brought forward to its contemporaneous setting for many years afterward. I suspect we would find it strange and distancing to see it returned to the customs and costumes of the earlier era. ^(I) But Traviata aside, the “look like it sounds” efforts I’ve seen, such as Peter Brook’s Met Faust or Hall’s own Glyndebourne Don Giovanni, have struck me as, at best, very partial successes. Granted that “look like it sounds” is, in a sense, a logical way to think about integrating a production’s elements, and that a well-chosen, well-directed update can play well, we must remember that the composer has written music that he believes summons the world specified in the libretto, those specifications including those of time and place, and that whether or not a director and designer hear it that way, it is not in their place to correct the perceived shortcomings, but rather to do all they can to consummate the creators’ vision. ^(II)  

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My five categories do not, of course, represent the entire content of a training program for the singing actor. There is, for example, what Stanislavsky called “plasticity,” which refers to the strength and discipline of the body as an instrument, or what we might now think of as the fulfillment of its movement potential, including its rhythmic component. One of the things KS noticed about his “genius” actors was their freedom from interfering muscular tensions. Among the exercises he created were a number directed at physical mobility and control, which he said should be practiced daily. His thoughts about rhythm derived from his early exposure to opera, and to the necessity of melding physical action with music in a way that is imperceptible to the audience. He spoke of the importance for the speaking actor of locating a character’s essential rhythm and the variations in tempo within scenes, and of learning to carry out all actions with artistic form, even in a play like Gorki’s The Lower Depths. That was something to be bred into the actor, irrespective of the style of a given work. “Plasticity,” unfortunately, became anathema among modern actors because of its association with the older rhetorics, particularly the “plastiques” of the influential system of François Delsarte, and after what we might call an Early Modern period of seeking aid in the techniques of modern dance (Laban, Duncan, Wigman, et al.), this whole area of work in opera tended to devolve, at least here in the U. S., to efforts at suppleness meant to make the performer putty in the hands of directors trying to create new forms, rather than consummate the old ones. But of the relevance of this area of work for opera singers there can’t be any doubt. We must remind ourselves that nearly all the canonical repertory was written with the older rhetorics in mind. Unlike the purely musical/vocal/stylistic aspects of a singing actor’s identity, that of bodily action cannot simply reproduce the old forms, even our inferential versions of them. Physical behavior, and therefore the credibility thereof, is too closely tied to its social models for that. So an accommodation must be found that preserves that credibility without cheating the idealistic demands of those older forms.