Beaumont Glass—stage director, opera coach, and lecturer on Lieder composers—and his wife, Evangeline Noël Glass, soprano, continue to share their enthusiasm and affection for the art some 50 years after their careers began. Beaumont worked for Lotte Lehmann, playing for her star pupil, Grace Bumbry. Soon after, he spent 19 years as a vocal coach at the Zurich Opera House, and then 18 years as the director of Opera Theater at the University of Iowa.
He has worked with some of the most eminent singers of our time, and his recent book, Memoirs of an Opera Bug, shares those stories along with his wisdom, insight, and humor into the sometimes chaotic yet contagious world of opera.
Evangeline has sung in opera houses all over the world—including Naples, Cologne, Brussels, Geneva, Zurich, Bern, and Koblenz—in a wide range of roles, from Musetta to Isolde, Marschallin, Nedda, Santuzza, Marguerite, Thaïs, and Jenny. She remains active as a recitalist in the U.S. and Europe.
The Glasses maintain a coaching studio and give masterclasses at various universities. Each summer they team coach at the American Institute of Musical Studies in Graz, Austria. They sat down with Classical Singer recently to discuss how opera has changed over the years and how they’ve managed two opera careers, marriage, and family for more than 50 years.
How did the idea to write your memoirs come about?
BG:I went to the 55th reunion of my class at the Philips Exeter Academy, and that was the first time I had been back there since I graduated and went into the Navy in 1944. We were sitting at the table with one of my classmates, and I told him [what is now] the opening story of the memoirs, when as a child I staged a production of Faust, and we laughed so much that I got the idea of writing it down. That got me started, and I had a lot of fun writing it.
You have so many details in this book. How did you
remember it all?
EG: He has a pretty good long-term memory. I said, “Oh, I don’t want you to die and leave behind all this knowledge that you have.” We’re trying to get him a new project now in [returning to more] coaching. I’m right behind him, cracking the whip.
You both have managed a marriage and a partnership in the arts for the past 50 years. How have you made it work?
EG: I love him. And he’s been so supportive of me. I guess because, when we started out, he was my teacher. When I first met him, he was on crutches because he had been in this accident.
BG: My jaws were wired together.
EG: He had lost four front teeth, but he had this beatific smile and he was so kind that it went right to my heart. When we started working together, it was a friendship and a love based on our music. He always found the spiritual aspect, which fills me a lot. That’s the reason I wanted to be a singer. For me, music and art have always been a bridge to God, and he had that same feeling. To us, opera and Lieder transform all the human emotions—suffering, death, everything. That was the basis of our love. And, of course, I thought he was terribly handsome. We were both attracted to each other . . . and we wanted a child very badly. We were both ready. He was 31 and I was 26. In those days, my sisters had babies when they were 19, and so that was the first thing we wanted—to have a child.
BG: We wanted her to have a singing career and a baby, and they’re often incompatible.
In the book, you talk about the challenges of trying to raise a child and have a singing career. How did you survive those years?
EG: Well, we had our ups and downs. I would be away singing and then get a phone call that the maid was sleeping or was found at a hotel with a young boy. Another one was a drinker. And we got a nanny from England, and she wanted me to make her bed for her. We got through it, but it was very difficult. Our child went to Swiss schools and then she went to boarding school. We had days of despair and then the next day something would turn up and things would get better.
My husband is a very noble person. The reason we’ve been married for 50 years is because he is so understanding and calm. He understood what I was going through with my singing, with my motherhood, with my femininity. I was very fortunate.
For 19 years, you were at the Zurich Opera and then came back to the United States to work at the University of Iowa. What was that transition like?
BG: Well, for my wife and our daughter, I think they experienced a little bit of culture shock. But for me it was very good because in the last 10 or 15 years that I was in Zurich, I was being used all the time as a coach and I was not able to stage opera. I felt that I was working only on half my burners. In Iowa, we had a big theater at our disposal, a wonderful scene shop, and our own costume shop. For somewhere between $30,000 and $60,000, we could put on opera productions that would have cost $500,000 to do professionally. Everybody was on salary, so there were no costs to the budget for individual workers or individual time. We had a very fine student orchestra and the theater had great facilities, wonderful lighting, and sound systems. The young singers didn’t have to force their voices over the orchestra and still they sounded very natural. For me, it was a place to produce opera the way it should be done.
What changes did you notice in the U.S. opera scene?
BG: When we went to Europe, it was because there were so few opportunities to work in opera in the U.S. in 1961. There was the Met, San Francisco, Chicago and, in the summers, Santa Fe. Well, when we came back in 1980, I was amazed at the amount of opera. Every middle-sized city had some opera—in Des Moines, Kansas City, Springfield (Ill.), Tulsa, Minneapolis, Milwaukee. It was amazing.
And, now living in the U.S. and returning to Europe each year, what changes have you found on the European stages?
BG: Europe is presenting eurotrash on the opera stage. Stage directors are deliberately creating a break with tradition because they’re so afraid of doing anything that anybody ever thought of before. Now it’s all done in the hope it will have relevance. I think the opera houses are desperately trying to entice young people. They think that young people only understand blue jeans and t-shirts. All the operas are updated to our own boring century—men sitting on toilet seats for A Masked Ball, for example. Everything is sort of ugly and drab and miserable. In one production, Aida takes place at an Egyptian wing of a museum and Aida is the cleaning woman mopping the floor.
EG: Some of the stage directors don’t pay any attention to the libretto and others don’t understand the language of the music. But the music and the words together give you the basis of the truth, and if you get away from that, it’s like going into a museum and putting a mohawk on a Rembrandt. That’s what’s happening to opera.
In your career, you have placed a great deal of emphasis on text. In fact, you’ve produced seven volumes of the great Lieder composers’ song texts.
BG: It has to mean something to you in your unconscious mind, and that meaning has to come out when you perform it, when you try to communicate what you’re singing.
You credit the Navy with helping you to learn the principal languages of opera.
BG: They sent me to Italy, France, and Germany—those lands where the main languages of opera were spoken. I think that it’s essential for everybody who’s interested in performing opera to have a speaking knowledge of at least those three languages. These days, Russian and Czech are also in demand. I tell my singers, take the time, take the trouble to learn the principal languages that you want to perform in—especially for Lieder, because if you want to do Lieder, you’re dealing with poetry. You have to have a very fine sense of the language to appreciate poetry. And for opera, too. They don’t have to speak it fluently, but it’s not enough just to know how to pronounce it like a parrot.
EG: We always insist that [singers] go over the text first. You have to know the text exactly. Then you write underneath each word what every word means. Then you transfer from the head to the emotions. You must get to where it’s internalized.
What’s the best way to “internalize” a song?
EG: Go home; don’t go out. Stay home and look out the window. Look at the sky. Look at the trees. Take your music, and take one phrase at a time and just repeat it. Get the words right, and get the diction right. Then you’ve got to internalize, and you can do that only by being quiet and not just trying to squall out notes all the time. When they go to their singing lessons, it’s all about technique. The teacher says, “Get your tongue out of the way. Do this. Do that.” Then they get petrified and they come in and they’re just screaming and not saying anything. The expression and the notes have to go together, but that can [happen] only if you spend time feeling it.
How do you balance technique with the internal process of connecting to your emotions?
EG: You always have to think of technique when you’re singing an opera role. I mean, there are times when you have to watch the conductor and you’re concentrating on a million things. But if you’ve got this thing going in your inner-most being that keeps rolling with the phrases, then when somebody says, “Go here, do this, do that,” it’s like a beam of light that keeps you on the track.
BG: [Singers] have to be expressive, especially with their eyes, always. Lotte Lehmann said that after the voice, the greatest tool of the singer is the eyes. We can tell right away if they mean what they’re saying just by looking at them.
How can singers get the most out of their coaching sessions?
BG: I am happy if they come and start working on their aria or song from scratch with me. If they start learning it themselves and get a lot of mistakes in their head, it’s very hard to get the mistakes out again. I like to be in on it from the very beginning so it goes in the right direction. I think it’s up to the coach to tell the person to get the right style, get the right expression, get the right words, get the right feeling for the piece. Singers should know what went on before, what went on after, and how it fits into the opera. They [should] read the story and have an idea where their aria fits in.
