When Carl DuPont came to Germany in September of 2009, it was because he wanted to take a break. Which, truth be told, was a little odd. At 25, he was right where he should be. After finishing degrees at Eastman and Indiana University, he’d finished his first year in the DMA program at Indiana, but wasn’t happy. So he put his studies on hold and, reasoning that German was his weakest language, bought a ticket to the Vaterland to audition for whatever he could.
His goal, like so many other singers before him, was to become a soloist at a German house. After singing for the state-run agency, he was encouraged to focus his attention first on auditions for choruses and young artist and studio programs. He flirted a bit with the idea of working in musicals, but decided against it. Shortly after his audition for the new The Color Purple musical in Vienna, and just days before he was to leave Germany, the Oper Leipzig Opernchor gave him a call and offered him a full-time job. Given 24 hours to make the decision, he decided to say yes to the chorus.
So the following August, he boarded a plane in New York with two duffel bags on a one-way ticket to Leipzig. I met him shortly thereafter, when we were in a new production of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide. Carl is one of two Americans and one of 10 non-Germans in the chorus. He’s also the only Black American employed by the Oper.
I’ve socialized with him on a number of occasions and I like him a lot. I certainly would like to see him more often, but the fact of the matter is, Carl works a lot. More than I do, in fact. I have weeks or months each season where I’ve got no free time—but Carl and the Opernchor have been busy since the first day of the season and they won’t stop being busy until after the last day of the season. In addition to the 84 opera and 13 ballet performances, they also do concerts with the Gewandhausorchester (although they play for the opera, they have a full concert program of their own) and they put on additional concerts two or three times a year.
As I write this, Carl is in rehearsals for Aida, Elektra, Von Weber’s Der Freischütz, Weill’s A Touch of Venus, and Mahler’s Eighth Symphony while doing performances of Così fan tutte, Die Meistersinger, Carmina Burana, and the first staged production of Brecht and Dessau’s Deutsches Miserere. That’s just this week. But that’s how it’s been all year. No matter if the chorus appears at the tail end of the opera (as in Elektra, for example) or is on stage for the duration of the performance (the Brecht/Dessau oratorio is a compelling tour de force for the chorus), they’re there an hour before the show starts and they always take a bow at the end of the show.
The men of the chorus recently returned from a guest engagement in Hong Kong, performing Tristan und Isolde. A free trip to Hong Kong sounded like a great time to me, until I saw the schedule: full days of rehearsals and performances, with almost no time off. They rehearsed the day before they left and, after two weeks away, had just one day to recover from jet lag before their hectic schedule started up again.
Chorus work is not to be taken lightly, and contrary to what a lot of students of singing may think (I certainly thought so during my college days), it’s not somehow less acceptable than being a soloist. Chorus singers work really hard, all the time, and very rarely get any of the glory. In Germany, they are generally as well trained as any other singer on stage and have just as many musical opinions as any other musician. Truth be told, although we all study to be soloists, some of us aren’t going to be. There just aren’t enough jobs out there. And the life of a soloist certainly isn’t for everyone: life outside the theater is pretty boring if you have to worry about singing Violetta and Fiordiligi on a regular basis. I was surprised at how many chorus members used to be soloists but gave it up for various reasons, such as burgeoning families or too much stress and pressure.
Back before the Berlin Wall fell, voice students in the former East were quite lucky: if they passed their audition and were accepted at the conservatory, it meant they were guaranteed a job upon graduation. After the first two years, they would sing and exam; based on that exam, they then concentrated on becoming a soloist or a chorister. After graduation three years later, soloists would go to Berlin to audition and be assigned a position somewhere in East Germany, and choristers would go to Weimar to learn their fate. Upon being given a position, you’d move to that city and work there until you retired. Back in the 70s, the Leipzig Oper played seven days a week. Into the 80s, they cut back to six days (Mondays were dark). Nowadays, with money scarce and budgets tight, we play no more than four nights a week; some weeks are completely empty. But what hasn’t changed is that the chorus is still there six days a week, for four hours in the morning for rehearsal and four in the evening for rehearsals or performances, for as long as the season runs.
I asked Carl what it was like when he first came to Leipzig and took up his post nearly a year ago. His first show, Die Meistersinger, was a life-changing experience: Germans revere this five-and-a-half-hour masterpiece, and the Leipzig Opernchor was no different. It was amazing, he said, to see how much they respected the opera and paid close attention to every musical detail, making sure they were delivering their best every night. Sure, sometimes individuals would phone in a performance, but by and large, they take what they do very seriously, every time they go on stage.
He admits that he has had a few difficulties. Racism persists in opera no matter what continent you’re on, and Leipzig is, unfortunately, no different. But more than those incidents of ignorance, it is life outside the opera that has been challenging: he didn’t know anyone in Leipzig except his coworkers in the chorus. They were nice, he assured me, but they weren’t eager to have him over for dinner. Luckily, he found some friends in his apartment building and was able to build a social life not based on work (which is much more common in Germany anyway).
Although his contract was extended for next season, Carl won’t be sticking around. He wants to finish his studies (although now he’s looking at choral conducting instead of vocal performance) and he wasn’t ready, at the age of 27, to commit to Leipzig for the rest of his life. When I asked if he’d do it all over again, he said he wasn’t sure: just like not everyone’s cut out to being a soloist, it turns out that not everyone’s cut out to be a chorister.
