Opera’s hidden, offstage drama

Here’s a line to make a teenager’s parents blanch: “Mom, Dad, I want to be an opera singer.”

What a budding lyric mezzo may imagine as years of hard, honest work, rewarded with velvet cloaks and bouquets hurled on stage, her elders may foresee as a youth of failed auditions, temp jobs and tears.

Yet thousands of young people do become opera singers, at least for a while. They go to conservatory, get graduate degrees, work the church circuit and doggedly pursue auditions before finally deciding that music is not really meeting their needs for praise, spiritual sustenance or health insurance. The system is slower than ever at weeding people out, which lengthens the hoping years for those who have not yet broken through, making the disappointment that much harder to take if they never do. It also produces rookies whose peers are paying mortgages and having third children.

“I can think of no other career where the word ‘young’ is used so generously,” says Robin Thompson, associate artistic director at New York City Opera. “People who are just starting out, who have gotten out of school and gone into young-artists programs, they’re pushing 30.”

There was a time when the American opera world relied on Europe to finish its trainees. After graduating from Juilliard, a young American singer would make an audition tour of Germany or Italy, hoping for a three-year stint in one of the many state-supported regional companies there. Temporary emigration was the only way for singers to be fully employed and provided the additional benefit of honing their languages and permitting them to imbibe Mozar’s or Rossini’s style at the source. Americans acquired a reputation as well-prepared, versatile, quick and ready for whatever high-concept antics the stage director had in mind. The best and luckiest would return home with greater stature and a sheaf of major roles they had sung many times.

But the appetite for opera has grown dramatically and so has its infrastructure: More than half of the 136 companies in the United States and Canada were born in the last 30 years, and they have done their best to keep the talent here. Many have started apprenticeship programs modeled on those at the Metropolitan and San Francisco operas, which provide a handful of singers with a small salary, benefits, plenty of coaching and a chance to take a minor role onto a major stage. (L.A. Opera has a less-ambitious Resident Artists Program.)

There are so many more companies, Thompson says, that the talent to feed them has become scarce. “These programs need fresh bodies every year. If a baby Verdi baritone or baby lyric tenor has surfaced, there is huge competition to get that individual into a young-artists program. Board members look upon them as part of the family. They’re cute, you can have them over for dinner. The mid-20s singer is in the drivers’ seat.”

That is not necessarily how it feels to the mid-20s singer, for whom a smile from a conductor or the first phone call from a manager can feel like a seraph’s touch. But it is true that fewer freshly minted singers feel the need to get exposure overseas. Now the best emerge more slowly because they come under the protective tutelage of people like Gayletha Nichols, the mother-hen-like director of the Met’s Lindemann Young Artists Development Program.

“There’s an obsession with youth out there,” she grumbles. “A singer who is 24 or 25 and has a great voice may not even know how to sing yet, but some company manager will come to her and say, ‘I think you should sing nine performances of ‘Carmen’ next year in our house.’ ” That, Nichols makes clear, would be unwise and shortsighted.

The willingness to let performers mature in adulthood also means that many singers come to the art form late. Morris Robinson, a 33-year-old bass who is one of Nichols’ current charges, spent his college years playing football at the Citadel and was selling plastics for Exxon when he decided to try putting his voice to work. He auditioned for the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston; within a few months he sang the King in “Aida” at Boston Lyric Opera. Last month he made his Met debut as the Second Prisoner in Beethoven’s “Fidelio.”

Nichols is part of the army of teachers, vocal coaches, managers, administrators and conductors who listen with an ear to the future. Whenever they hear an audition, they are also trying to divine what that singer will sound like three, six and 10 years from now. Partly, that helps satisfy an immediate need: The largest companies cast their shows several seasons ahead.

Most voices get darker and heavier over time, so a soprano who sings sparkly ingenue roles in her 20s may eventually move into the wailing women of Verdi. But singing too much or plunging prematurely into strenuous dramatic roles can be disastrous over the long run.

“Before you’re 40, you shouldn’t really be singing Rigoletto,” says Pamela Rosenberg, general director of the San Francisco Opera. “Everyone wants too much too soon.”

The notion of a protective network of experts anxious to keep singers from burning out seems attractive, but there are downsides. The system’s critics -- even critics within the system -- say that it shelters young performers too much and for too long. “If model A for a career was ‘You have a big, exciting voice, so let’s get you on stage and singing “La Gioconda” at 21,’ model B is ‘Let’s keep watching, training and observing you until you’re almost 30,’ ” says Brian Zeger, a pianist who works with singers at Juilliard and the Met. “It makes you very self-conscious.”

The Met program gets high marks from everyone, but some people feel that all the years of supervision can also produce performers who fret so much about technical perfection that they forget to communicate. Singers emerge from their chrysalis with beautiful diction, the ability to sing on demand in Czech, and a repertoire that ranges from baroque recitative to music that was composed last March. What they lack is personality.

All that emphasis on versatility, so the argument goes, produces singers who are professional but bland.

There is general agreement that American training for singers is the best in the world. But a system that rests on the educational trinity of caution, technique and versatility does not produce many artists steeped in the subtleties of any one historical style.

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Justin Davidson is music critic at Newsday, a Tribune company.