We opera musicians are often confronted with a dilemma during a performance: If the singers onstage are not together with the conductor’s beat, whom do we follow—the conductor or the singers?
If the maestro on the podium is a venerable baton-wielder, with a world-famous reputation and a multitude of CD listings in the Schwann catalog, and the singer onstage is a soprano making her debut, or is relatively unknown in the opera world, the choice is obvious. On the other hand, if the maestro is a young nobody whose operatic experience consists of conducting a “bohème” in Bavaria and an oratorio in Budapest, while the soprano onstage is a trustworthy superstar who has sung the role at La Scala and the Met, then we glue our eyes to the score, our ears to the diva, and the unseen nonentity on the podium might just as well be waving his stick back in Budapest.
Yet what if both maestro and soprano are titans (or nobodies) in their respective fields, and a discrepancy in tempo arises? For instance, what if Cio-Cio-San is singing her third-act aria in Madama Butterfly, “O a me, sceso dal trone,” exactly as we rehearsed it, in an andante sostenuto tempo, while the maestro inexplicably accelerates his beat, and the soprano is suddenly lagging behind the orchestra?
The conductor may have personal reasons for hastening the final curtain. Perhaps he must catch a midnight plane to Milan. Maybe he is suffering an attack of dyspepsia or diarrhea? He might have a rendezvous with a voluptuous contralto waiting in a nearby hotel room, or a sudden craving for Chinese takeout food. Who cares?
The point is that at this moment an impatient conductor is inflicting an operatic disaster, a musical catastrophe, on an innocent singer, a trusting audience and a confused orchestra. Suddenly, every musician in the pit is confronted with a moral dilemma, not unlike the soldier in combat whose superior officer orders him to massacre innocent civilians. Do I blindly obey the lethal accelerando of the baton, like a well-disciplined orchestra musician, or do I heed the dictates of my inner musical conscience and mercifully accompany the lagging soprano, who, at this very moment, is casting a glance of despair towards the podium?
Futile individual acts of heroism by first-desk players may complicate matters even more. Our concertmaster will toss his head like a stallion and make sweeping up-bow strokes to pull the reins on the galloping conductor. That’s fine for the fiddles, but now, oblivious of the string rebellion, other principal players join the fracas from across the pit. The first-horn decides to help the maestro move the dragging strings. A rebel wind-player resists the baton, but he is drowned out by a stubborn principal flautist loyal to the maestro and introducing a new tempo of his own. Consequently, the conductor’s rushing is reinforced by some and resisted by others. The concertmaster’s valiant coup d’etat is overwhelmed, and the ensemble is even more disjointed than before.
The conductor is furious, but he is not a complete musical fool. He knows only too well that there are no heroes in an opera pit—only martyrs. Besides, he figures, why attempt to quell a mutiny on a sinking ship? At last, he slackens his beat and grudgingly begins to follow the soprano, but it is too late to save her. She has already been murdered musically, yet now the unfortunate creature is committing operatic hara-kiri—though she wishes she could plunge that knife into the conductor’s guts instead of her own.
When the ensemble of an opera begins to fall apart, the singers are faced with an even greater dilemma than ours. Should they follow the conductor’s baton, the dissenting orchestra, the prompter, or simply the other singers onstage?
Pity the poor tenor about to join a lagging soprano in a love duet. Caught in the terror of the spotlight, he hears a divided orchestra struggling to accompany the tardy diva. He makes his entrance, a shaky third below her constipated melodic line. From the podium, the conductor is frantically waving to them to move ahead, while from the footlights, in his box, the prompter is clucking his tongue, beating time with a finger, and hissing word cues at the distraught lovers onstage. Alas, the tenor finds himself getting slightly ahead of his lover, until the chorus mercifully drowns him out from backstage where, crowded in darkness, they are squinting at the uncertain beat of an assistant-conductor’s flashlight, himself on the brink of metronomic despair.
Tempo is not the only problem. Opera audiences and music critics are forever complaining that the orchestra is too loud and overwhelms the singers. Yet the solo artists complain that the orchestra—perhaps because of the pit depth and footlights apron—often sounds faint and distant from center-stage when they sing arias, particularly those full of pianissimos. They say they cannot hear the key tones for pitch adjustment and have to rely on the prompter’s index finger for cues that should rather be coming from the pit. Conductors have pondered this paradox for decades and come up with diverse, sometimes disastrous solutions.
A highly respected Mozart specialist, long deceased, used to begin each rehearsal with: “Gentlemen, opera is chamber music, CHAMBER MUSIC! Listen to each other, listen to the singers—if you cannot hear the words of the libretto, you are too loud!” So we find ourselves listening so intently to the singers at performances, and playing accompaniments to arias so softly, that the singers cannot hear us. Consequently, a robust tenor, straining his ears to hear our accompaniment to his aria, is cowed into singing more softly—and the critics have a field day finding adjectives to describe a sweet but small voice.
Yet another maestro, a true Wagnerian soul, insists that the music is more important than the libretto, and singers need to be hit on the head with pitch and instrumental cues. They need all the support they can get, he argues, so if singers are having vocal problems and you can still hear them, DROWN THEM OUT! Thus, when the poor tenor begins to grow hoarse from screaming his lungs out trying to be heard over the orchestra, we behold a desperate conductor, flailing his baton like a meat-cleaver while the pathetic mute onstage gamely finishes the act in mime. Then, while an understudy is summoned to take over, the artistic director will appear in front of the curtain before the next act and apologize to a groaning audience that a “sudden indisposition” has stricken the tenor.
Singers are by no means always the innocent victims of insensitive conductors. There are golden-voiced vandals who linger on short syllables and rush long ones, destroy elisions, introduce aspirate h’s where there are none, and breathe in the middle of a word. There are those who sing just sharp or flat enough to make the maestro wince and the musicians sneer, and then we have a few superstars who cannot count rests, make wrong entrances and often manage to sing just a wee bit ahead or behind the beat.
With artists like these, we pray for a decisive confrontation between singer and conductor at the dress rehearsal. A tenor may fling his wig into the pit and whine that a tempo is too slow for him. The maestro may then suggest that the artist go back to music conservatory or worse, straight to a hot subterranean place for sinners. Finally, after the obligatory operatic histrionics of shouting, threatening, hand wringing and tears, while the opera house director feigns a heart attack, a tempo compromise might be grudgingly reached.
Still, we have no guarantee that the agreed-upon tempo will be repeated at the premiere performance. Considering the increased adrenaline flow of the conductor, and the singer’s first-performance jitters, despite all the hugs and reassurances that ensued at the dress-rehearsal reconciliation, despite all the promises, despite the prompter setting a metronome in his box to confirm the tempo in question—all may well be forgotten, and once more the opera becomes a musical battlefield for singers and conductor, while we confused musicians are right back where we started, wondering whom to follow.
