Sometimes, despite all of your careful planning, rehearsing, and memorizing, things can go wildly out of your control. There’s nothing you can do to avoid this. No number of back-up plans or contingencies can protect you from that most dreadful of earthly problems: other people. This is the story of the only time my voice ever cracked on stage in a professional setting, and the events that led up to it.
The first problem, and if you run any sort of non-profit arts organization you will be able to identify quite readily with this issue, was what to do with the big donors who wanted things. Specifically in this case, it was donors/board members who wanted to be on stage during the opera. Of course you make them supers (characters on stage with no lines), and usually this works out okay if, like most humans, they are able to follow simple instructions in a coordinated way. But other times things take a horrifying turn for the worse.
To begin with, he stepped on the lute. The importance and value of the lute had been impressed upon us from the first day of rehearsals, even before we ever saw the instrument in person. We knew there was a lute. We knew it was a real lute. We knew it was an expensive lute. We knew there was no replacing the lute. The lute was to be revered and cherished above all other props, and to be handled with the utmost caution. As I was going to be “playing” the lute in the final act, I was the only one who ought to be touching the lute, aside from the stage manager who has supreme authority to touch all things. And to be fair, he didn’t actually touch the lute. His shoe touched it. As he stepped onto it and broke it. Even though it was leaned up against the far corner of the room away from where anyone ought to be going.
So I had a broken lute, but that was not my primary concern. My primary concern was my monstrous aria that opened the second act, which ended, after a long period of intensive vocal calisthenics, with a high Db, the highest note I had ever sung at that time. I needed total concentration. I needed to be 100% on my game. I could not worry myself about silly things like cracked lutes and rampaging backstage donors. All that mattered was that aria, the pacing of it, the breathing of it, and then that final high note. On opening night I stepped out on the stage in front of the curtain carrying two suitcases, having just been kicked out of the mansion by my uncle, and I was ready to begin.
The staging was as follows: I walk out sadly with my luggage during the intro music, I brace myself sturdily for the vocal acrobatics, and then after I blast out my kickass high Db, the butler (played by Oldthar, the Destroyer of Lutes) walks out and makes some shooing hand motions at me, at which point I pick the bags up again and slowly trudge offstage. It doesn’t get less complicated than that, people. A straightforward park ‘n’ bark. You would have to be some sort of (insert favorite insulting word here) to mess this up. You would have to be the kind of person who could seek out and destroy a hidden stringed instrument in the far corner of the room by stepping on it. Who steps in a corner?! Seriously!
So anyway, I am on stage and the suitcases have been deposited. I am singing, and it is going fairly well, except there is a slight problem, most assuredly the fault of the composer. This famous opera composer has made the huge mistake of dividing the aria into three distinct sections, thus making it completely impossible for butlers to tell when the aria is over, despite having been at rehearsals every day for the past two months, and having heard it and performed it exactly the same way dozens of times over. How on earth is anyone supposed to know that the aria is not over when there was clearly a cadence of some sort?! As I wrapped up part one of my aria, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Oldthar had, for some unknown reason, entered stage left.
As I began to sing the second section of my aria, I noticed that he was violently making shooing motions at me from the side of the stage. Thinking this odd, I tried to make a gesture that told him both “No, I still have more singing to do,” and “What the hell is wrong with you?!” Apparently he thought that I was now doing some improv with him, and was just acting in character in my attempts to not leave the mansion, because he then walked over to me and began to make the shooing motions directly into my face.
Surely, I thought to myself, surely he will notice at some point that I am still singing the aria and realize his mistake. There is no way he thinks I am suddenly making up a new section of opera, in Italian, on-the-fly, as a mistake. The accompaniment is with me. I am still singing. No one else seems concerned that this is happening. He will, at some point, put two and two together and leave me alone as I move into the third, and most difficult, section of the aria. Right?
He did not get the message. As I ramped up into what would be the end of the aria, Oldthar decided that he was failing in his mission to get me off of the stage, so he picked up my suitcases for me and tried to physically press them into my hands. I have no idea what the audience thought as the butler chased me around the stage whacking me with two suitcases in an attempt to bodily force me from the stage, but I can tell you that all of my thoughts were now turned to desperation. I was out of breath. I was under attack. I was still singing, I might remind you. I was being shoved and pummeled by the same (insert same insulting word here) that had broken my lute! And when it came time to sing that final note, I knew it wasn’t going to happen. I braced myself as best as I could, all the while still being pushed, and not gently, by a man who was determined to get me off the stage if it was the last thing he did (and it nearly was, let me tell you), and I let out, well, part of a high Db. And then I ran off the stage.
We still talk about that gig, my friends and colleagues and I, like war veterans reminiscing about a particularly bad day. We can laugh about it now, but I still bear the scars. I’ve never felt comfortable singing that aria again, and for the other performances I ended up taking the note down the octave, much to the conductor’s dismay. She assured me that I could sing the note, begged me to sing the note, but I just couldn’t. I was afraid. And I can sing a high Db now quite well…in other arias. But not in that one. Never again in that one. Although you will be happy to know that they did manage to glue the lute back together. Mostly.