A Hidden Talent Comes Through on Cue

Help Wanted: Must speak and read several languages, constantly fend off near-disasters, soothe inflated egos of international superstars, read music and play the piano expertly.

Must also be available to work nights in a cramped, coffin-like environment.

It’s a job that suits Jane Klaviter perfectly as she clambers up a ladder through the orchestra pit onto her chair in the tiny prompter’s box at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

One of four full-time prompters at the Met, Klaviter keeps singers from straying off the score, while monitoring the orchestra through two closed-circuit televisions in the tight confines of her hooded enclosure.

Her wavy blond head peeping out from the box is visible only to the singers, who rely on Klaviter to keep vigil over every note and word. Holding eye contact with the singers, she whispers, or sometimes shouts, the first few words of an aria to cue a performer a half beat before a phrase begins.

Perched on a hydraulically controlled chair in the prompter’s box, Klaviter uses a kind of international prompter’s sign language to convey her message to performers. She points a finger upward to direct a singer when a pitch is flat. A finger downward means it’s sharp, tune it down. She claps her hands, snaps her fingers or holds out her palm to warn a singer to stop.

A duet or ensemble on stage gets trickier, as Klaviter swivels her head back and forth from singer to singer, reading lips to ensure each person is on target.

“I consider prompters to be somewhat like being two or three traffic controllers at the same time,” she said. “You have to have a knack for juggling things.”

In addition to the closed-circuit televisions, the minuscule hideaway below stage has room for speakers and a telephone but little else, other than the 5-foot 7-inch Klaviter. A perceptive opera-goer might detect the hood of the prompter’s box jutting out a foot or so at the front of the stage, but scenery sometimes camouflages the small hump.

Some opera superstars won’t perform without a prompter, including Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti, who always requests Klaviter when he appears at the Met.

Not all opera companies employ prompters. Neither the Los Angeles Opera nor the New York City Opera Company uses them, for example. But they’re a common feature in most European opera houses and in several U.S. cities such as San Francisco, Chicago and Dallas.

A good prompter boosts a singer’s psyche during a performance with applause and smiles, and the pep rally continues during intermission, she said, when she visits singers’ dressing rooms.

“You’re there for moral support, even if sometimes it didn’t go so well,” she said. “A lot of it is psychology. In a way, you have to be a little bit like a therapist. If they’re out of sorts, I know it’ll be a rockier night.”

Although she maintains the rigid confidentiality of a priest in a confessional in refusing to name names, Klaviter admits that some singers need more help than others.

She’ll never forget the Italian tenor who would seize up with fear as the curtain rose, even though he sang flawlessly during daytime rehearsals, coached by Klaviter.

“I know a couple of singers who would actually drink to calm down,” she said.

During tense moments of extreme stage fright, Klaviter said, she has been known to jostle singers by yelling, “Wake up!”

“You have to have nerves of steel to be able to relate to singers who are world famous and under great stress themselves,” many of whom arrive jet-lagged, she said.

Her tools were more rudimentary years ago, during a stint at the Dallas Opera House, where two rear-view mirrors plunked on the stage just outside the box offered the only view to the conductor’s baton.

The low-tech approach worked just fine until one performance of Wagner’s “Flying Dutchman,” when she temporarily lost her lifeline to the conductor as the mirrors bobbed up and down in tandem with a chorus of dancing sailors.

“I had to reach out and grab the mirrors so they wouldn’t bounce off the stage,” she said.

All the stress takes a toll, Klaviter said. At the start of her career she had trouble sleeping after a performance, and would drag herself back to the opera house for rehearsals after only a few hours’ rest. Those were the days when she would polish off a whole box of chocolate chip cookies or potato chips and still not gain weight.

Nowadays, although she’s still pumped with an adrenaline rush after a performance, the 53-year-old prompter lays off the junk food. Instead, she turns to reruns of “Frasier” or the latest Harry Potter book.

Becoming an opera prompter was a fluke for Klaviter. “I don’t know of anybody who in high school went to their guidance counselor and said, ‘I want to be an opera prompter,’ ” she said.

While working as an assistant conductor and vocal coach at the Dallas Opera House in 1980, a newly hired Italian prompter couldn’t speak German, a requisite for the “Flying Dutchman.” Klaviter was asked to step in.

“I did and I had a natural talent for it,” she said.

Since then, she has prompted more operas than she can remember, moving from Dallas to the Chicago Lyric Opera in 1982, then to the Met in 1986.

In addition to her prompting duties, Klaviter is founder and director of the Bel Canto Institute, a summer session in New Paltz, N.Y., that instructs young singers and coaches in Italian operatic traditions.

This year she’ll be prompting six operas at the Met: Mozart’s “Idomeneo,” Verdi’s “La Traviata” and “Falstaff,” Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel,” Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville,” and Puccini’s “Tosca.”