My rehearsals start in less than a week. I am prepared. I have my music memorized and every day I go over it again anyway. I sing it in the shower. I listen to a recording. I pour over the pages of the score. And I am terrified.
Maybe not terrified exactly, but I am kept up at night by the stupidest little things. Like:
What if I missed a part that I am supposed to sing? What if I show up and they say, “Ok, ready for Act 3?” and I say that I am not in Act 3, and they say, “Well, what about those two lines on page 297?” and then I look and see that I have, in fact, totally skipped over one of my entrances and not learned it at all.
What if they are taking bizarre tempos that do not match either the score or the recording? Maybe I will get there, ready to sing my line, and they are taking it double time and I can’t get the words out. Or maybe they will take it so slow that I run out of air in the middle of a word or a phrase, having never practiced it at that speed before!
What if I get lost on the way to the first rehearsal? What if I can’t find the right door, or the right room, and miss the rehearsal entirely? This is not completely irrational, as it has happened to me before. My first rehearsal with the late Baltimore Opera was in what looked like, to me anyway, a crumbling down abandoned warehouse that I drove by about 10 times looking for the rehearsal space. Eventually I gave up and went home, leaving increasingly desperate messages with the rehearsal department. For the second rehearsal I had a friend from the chorus lead me there personally.
What if I am just completely terrible and not what they want at all? Yeah, I know they heard me sing and then hired me anyway, but what if, when I get there, they don’t like my interpretation in the slightest? I suppose if that happened they would just tell me to adjust some things and it would be fine. But I don’t want that to happen! First impressions are very important! I want to be awesome right away!
I don’t know why I am worried about these things. I tell myself not to be, and when I sit down and really think about it, none of these situations are that likely, and even if they do happen they are probably not the end of the world. As long as I am prepared and do my homework, I can be reasonably sure that I have not missed any parts to sing in the score And I can go super early to scout out the rehearsal location. I try to practice at varying tempos anyway, just in case, and if they don’t like me, well, there’s nothing I can do about that anyway. So why doesn’t telling myself that make me feel any better?