How Not to Prepare an Opera Role

I am leaving for Florida again in three days.  I should, by that time, have memorized my role, one would think.  I am close, but thanks to my lack of organization, there have been some challenges.

First of all, there is an issue with my score, in that it has different words in it than my libretto.  Now, we are doing this show, originally written in German, in English.  This creates the instant problem of multiple translations, which was solved, I had supposed, by the company sending an e-mail out, telling us exactly which translation to use.  I have the correct translation, however my score came in two pieces.  Since this is an operetta, it employs spoken dialogue as well as the sung bits, and for some odd reason, my score only contains the music.  I have a separate book with the full libretto in it, spoken dialogue and all.

I have been learning the music from the music score, and the spoken dialogue from the libretto, and thought it was all fine, until, quite by accident, I realized this week that the sung words in my libretto are often different from what is in my score.  Why this should be, I do not know.  They are, according to the title pages, the same translation, written by the same folks in the same year.  Of course, as it turns out, I have learned all the wrong words, and it is the stuff I was not aware of until this week that I will be performing soon.  Very soon.

To add to this confusion, now they want us to sing some of the parts in German, and the rest in English.  To be fair, they did tell us about this development like two months ago, but to also be fair, I forgot about it and learned those parts in English anyway.  So now I am trying to cram German into my brain where there has been no German previously. And in case I forgot to mention it, my score only has the English version in it.

Friends, this is not a good way to learn an opera.  I thought I was doing okay, but thanks to my own moronitude, I am now freaking out about having this ready to go when rehearsals start on Monday.  The good news is, we are starting with Act 1, and none of these issues happen in Act 1, so really I have until Wednesday or Thursday to cram this new information.  The other good news is, after running the show over and over again for a few weeks, I’m pretty sure I will be good to go on opening night, regardless of what I may or may not have thought I learned by accident.

The point of all of this is, even though I will be fine, it is making for a very stressful week, so when you are learning a role, be organized!  Don’t make the same mistakes I did, such as learning the show in the wrong language (this is actually the second time that has happened to me…), or learning pretend words from a pretend translation cleverly disguised as the actual translation.  No, you must double check everything!  And now, if you will excuse me, I have to go learn some music.  At least I know all my speaking lines.