Phantoms of the Opera: These Teachers Nurture Big Dreams

Opera is big.

Big joys, big tragedy, big plots, big acting, big costumes, big voices, big egos.

But behind the scenes there are dramas that are very small. Every day, in a handful of homes scattered across the San Fernando Valley, voice teachers meet with students who want to enter the world of opera.

The students, both young and old, meet to practice, rehearse and nurture another “big” inexorably associated with opera--big dreams.

“Portamento!” commanded Hernan Pelayo over the booming bass voice of Philip Redon.

Redon, 29, sang “Yo, Yo, Yo, Yo, Yo, Yo, Yo,” gliding up and down a practice scale in the music room of Pelayo’s North Hollywood home. A tall, strapping man, Redon has a voice so resonant that the dozens of plastic skulls, religious figurines, photographs, records and assorted mementos that line the room were vibrating.

Redon finished and Pelayo, who is somewhere in his 70s, rose from behind a grand piano. He gestured toward his student with a hand adorned with two rings, either of which could have done real damage if it had made contact with anything in the room.

“This young man,” stated Pelayo, “is going to go to the Metropolitan auditions. Next year, we are ready!”

Redon, a recent immigrant from Chile, blushed and took his seat. “Thank you, maestro,” he said quietly, with an accented voice.

“When I came to this country in 1984,” Redon said later, “I had to take any job to survive. I was dishwasher, cleaning the bathrooms, delivering newspapers. Now, I paint houses. And I take my lessons with Mr. Pelayo.

“Maybe someday I sing on stage.”

Redon and everyone else observed in teacher-student sessions either once had or now have a dream of singing a role with a major company. But because opera is not exactly a booming business, especially in this country, and because a lot of people share that dream, the competition is tough.

“The rewards of an opera career--both artistic and financial--are very great,” said David Scott, a professor of music and director for 25 years of the opera program at Cal State Northridge. But a career in opera is only for a very few.

The CSUN program has turned out a handful of singers who were able to make a living in classical singing and one star, Carol Vaness, who will sing Fiordiligi in the Music Center Opera’s upcoming production of “Cosi Fan Tutte.”

“It’s like basketball,” Scott said. “There are a lot of kids out there playing the game. But how many of them make it to the Lakers?”

The students keep coming, even though they are warned. “I tell my students who want to have a career in opera that they should either plan on getting a degree in something like computer science or marry wealthy,” said Joyce Fizzolio, who teaches voice in Canoga Park and is a past president of the local chapter of the National Assn. of Teachers of Singing.

“They have to have something to fall back on,” she said. “The unemployment level for singers in general is 85%. For opera singers it’s even worse.”

Henrietta Carter has managed to stay in the business, but she knows the pitfalls. As a promising student growing up in a Boston suburb, she began voice lessons at 16 and continued her training at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. She learned early that she didn’t have what it takes to sing major opera roles.

“For opera you have to have a very big voice,” Carter said, “and I just didn’t.”

She did sing in the chorus in some operas, performed with chamber ensembles, did some musical theater and, after moving to Southern California in 1968, sang for the sound track of “Lost in the Stars” and other films.

Most recently, Carter has been teaching music and voice at Golden West College in Huntington Beach. But two years ago, just after she had won a place singing in the chorus of Pacific Opera in Orange County, she began to have vocal troubles. A medical exam revealed a goiter pressing on her vocal chords.

After surgery she arranged to study with Mary Grover-Gaffney, a voice teacher whose lessons are primarily based on the Alexander technique of body alignment.

On the wall of the music room of Grover-Gaffney’s house in Woodland Hills are framed photographs of highlights from her own career: singing with Robert Goulet in a 1968 TV production of “Carousel”; singing the lead role in the West Coast premiere of the musical show “Candide”; singing in a Chicago supper club with Tony Martin and acting on “Love, American Style.”

Carter’s weekly class started with a session on a body work table. Grover-Gaffney had Carter lie flat on her back and then directed her to twist into various positions and begin vocalizing.

“The singer needs to be well-aligned and relaxed,” Grover-Gaffney said as she worked on Carter. “We want to release tension. Tension anywhere in the body can produce tension in the larynx.”

Later that morning Grover-Gaffney had another student, baritone John Hamilton, get down on all fours and sing while crawling back and forth. It was supposed to help him release tension. Hamilton said he felt it worked.

Using the Alexander method for voice training is not universally accepted. One voice teacher, who asked that his name not be used, dismissed the technique by saying, “Any good teacher teaches posture. That’s just about all the Alexander technique is.”

But Carter, who travels once a week from her home in Orange County for her lesson, swears by it.

“It has been a tremendous help,” she said. “I’m now at the point where I can demonstrate vocal exercises for my classes. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to ever do that again.”

Pelayo’s methods are more traditional, even if his life style is not.

On Sundays Pelayo becomes “Dr. Krishna Khanda, the man who came from the stars,” according to promotional brochures on his piano. He teaches meditation and “the power of crystals.” But an afternoon student recital at his home was more rooted in the 19th Century than Khanda’s “New Age of Aquarius.” Pelayo repeatedly stressed “the principles of singing” as laid down by the famed vocal instructor Giovanni Battista Lamperti (1839-1910).

“If you do not have the principles of singing, then you are nothing,” the effervescent Pelayo told his students. “It is the great tradition in singing. Like it says in the ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ song.”

Pelayo, who still has a trace of an accent from his upbringing in Chile, segued into a short rendition of “Tradition” in a baritone voice impressively strong for a singer in his 70s.

During the recital, he referred frequently to a picture of a larynx in a pop-up anatomy book as he made his points, and he talked about his own career during which, he says, he had roles at La Scala and with the New York City Opera and extensively toured South America (a picture on the wall shows the president of Chile, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, greeting him.)

Pelayo had his students sing arias to the accompaniment of the London Philharmonic on a series of tapes called “Arias Without Voice.”

Tenor Richard Smykle sang an aria from “Tosca” with great confidence. He was the most experienced of Pelayo’s students at the recital, having first sung professionally in 1959. He sang with the Metropolitan Opera and New York City Opera choruses before giving up music to pursue other careers.

Now in his late 40s, Smykle owns a nursing service in Newhall.

He began taking lessons with Pelayo just two months ago. Would he want to go on stage again?

“It’s just a hobby, now,” he answered with a smile. “But if Dame Fortune gave me the opportunity, who knows?”

Nikki S. Udkovich, 39, no longer harbors hope of having an opera career. A student of Fizzolio’s, she once dreamed of majestically strutting across the stage, singing of undying love and unlovely death.

Now, she is a workman’s compensation lawyer in Tarzana.

“I started in music at the age of 14,” she said, “but a little later on I made a detour.”

Asked if she regretted not following her young heart and pursuing a singing career, she answered quickly.

“Oh, yes. But I had parents who believed you had to have some practical way of making a living. They didn’t want me to be a flake.

“Maybe they were right. If I had made it as a singer, I’m not sure I could have had the family life I now have.”

Just a few weeks ago, Udkovich gave birth to her second child.

“In music you live or die by the last performance you give,” she said. “I have something solid in my life that is always there.”

And she does have music. She studies with Fizzolio once a week and sings several times a year at recitals given at retirement homes.

“I love the performances, even though they make me think about what could have happened to me if I had gone on in music. But you have to make choices in life. And my life has a lot of balance.

“Little by little, the regret goes away.”