~24 years old + skinny and attractive + (BM and MM in Vocal Performance) famous conservatory + YAP + Connections2 + Luck2 = Opera Career
If asked the perfect formula to obtain a career in opera, many would give the equation listed above. The perception is often that if a singer has missed out on any of these factors, they have missed the boat. While master’s degrees, Young Artist Programs, agents, and youth can all be beneficial toward developing a career, none of them is required.
Perhaps you weren’t ready to sing in the premiere conservatories at 18 years old. Maybe you won’t realize your dream until later in life when you are too old to sing in the Met Council Auditions. Perhaps you didn’t get accepted to a single Young Artist Audition. The fact is that most singers in the business have successfully made it to the stage without going to Juilliard or Merola.
In higher education, we use the term “nontraditional student” for one who begins a college career later in life. Is there such thing as a “nontraditional singer?” There are many paths to a career, and they are as unique as the many voices heard on the world’s opera stages.
A Rockin’ Soprano
Not many operatic sopranos begin their careers as an accountant and lead singer in a rock band, but Katie Bolding’s road to performing is truly unique. Bolding sang in bands throughout her high school years in Oklahoma and showed a talent for music, so attending Florida State for music made sense. College, however, did not go smoothly. “To be honest, I don’t think I ever attended a music class,” admits Bolding. “I almost immediately got into the wrong crowd.” After a couple of “miserable” years, she dropped out of school and headed back to Oklahoma.
Bolding started a band with some friends and ended up being quite successful, playing a mixture of country, blues, and rock for about five years. “I think that being a rock singer is my first love,” she says. “It’s what I really wanted to do. Classical music wasn’t really my first choice. It’s just what came after. I loved the life of a rock singer. We had a lot of success and traveled.
“But with success comes the negative side, and that was that I was in bars every night of the week from 9:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. and then packing up the band and driving to the next town or getting home at 5:00 in the morning. Night after night, at some point I thought, ‘This [isn’t] fun anymore.’ I loved being on stage and in front of the crowd, writing songs—but the lifestyle got a little bit old.”
While still playing in the band, she went back to school at Oklahoma University, but this time in business finance. Eventually, the members of the band parted ways and Bolding graduated.
“I found myself looking around again at what else there was, taking some voice lessons with a teacher at OU.” Shortly after, Bolding and her mother attended a masterclass taught by soprano Mary Jane Johnson. Bolding’s mother told her she needed to study with Johnson, and so they approached her about lessons.
“When I met Mary Jane it gave me a purpose,” explains Bolding gratefully, “and helped me get ready for graduate school. I was 25 at the time, clearly much later.” Bolding drove from Oklahoma City to Amarillo every month for lessons and Johnson convinced her she had a gift.
“I was most interested in her voice,” says Johnson. “It was beautiful, clear, and one of the most gorgeous sounds I’d ever heard. I don’t know how she didn’t ruin her voice singing in the band. I never noticed any ill effects from doing this. She worked very hard and very seriously.” Bolding didn’t want to start all over again with a bachelor’s degree in music, so she attended SUNY–Purchase College, where she was able to earn a master’s in vocal performance.
“After grad school, I was so worn out from classical singing that I basically quit and decided the career wasn’t for me. I didn’t want to live in New York City. I thought, ‘What am I doing?’” She quit singing and moved to Dallas, because her family was there, and worked in the accounting department at an architecture firm. “I did the audition seasons in New York and didn’t get hired for anything because clearly I wasn’t ready or wasn’t hirable, [or] there was too much competition—I don’t know. At that point, I thought, ‘This is silly. I need to earn money.’”
Accounting paid the bills, but it was in Dallas that her singing career began to take shape. She joined the Dallas Opera Chorus and through that got the small role of the Countess of Ceprano in Rigoletto. She was given an opportunity again to audition for the Met and, after a couple of callbacks, was accepted into the Metropolitan Opera Extra Chorus.
“Once I got into the Met Chorus, I quit my job as an accountant and moved back to New York” Bolding says. “And since then, I’ve only worked as a singer. The last time that happened was with my band. Quitting my job and giving up teaching and my church job and all those things I was really holding onto out of fear of not being able to feed myself really helped me to let go and trust that it would happen.”
Bolding took the leap of faith again and moved to Germany to further pursue a singing career. This resulted in a contract with the Gera/Altenburg theatre in Thüringen, Germany, where she is now living her dream as an operatic soprano—a dream that came after a long road of struggle.
“It was a battle for me and the reason that I just kept quitting . . . there’s a sort of mentality in the music business that once you hit 28 or once you hit 30, you’re too old,” she says. “I didn’t even start until I was 25 and didn’t sing at any level that anyone would want to hear me until I was 30, so that was discouraging. I never got into anything after four years of auditions in New York, not a single thing.
“Even when I made the move to Germany, people said that I shouldn’t go because I was too old and would never get hired,” Bolding says. “That’s just not true! Those people who tell you that you’re too old or not good enough or tall enough or thin enough—it’s just a myth. People say that, I guess, because there’s a limit on Young Artist Programs, but there’s certainly not an age limit on many other options and many other choices. I certainly haven’t had a lack of things to do in the past several years!
“I guess I’ve just always sort of been like that. I’ve always felt like the rules don’t apply to me, and half the time it gets me into a lot of trouble. The other half of the time it’s been really good because I just stopped believing that I had somehow hit a barrier to go any further in life. Ever since then, more doors have opened to me. I continuously am amazed that I’m an opera singer. I love my life and feel like I’ve finally found what I’ve been chasing.”
Dramatic Success
Mary Jane Johnson turned out to be possibly the best teacher for Bolding because she had experienced a similar path to a career. “I never did a Young Artist Program!” exclaims Johnson. “I got married my senior year in college, got my master’s at West Texas A&M about five or six years after my undergraduate, and I just taught voice. I was a mezzo and made the switch to dramatic soprano. Then, I went to work with Harold Heiberg, and he suggested I enter the Metropolitan Opera audition—and I did and won. Then, I won the very first Pavarotti competition. I didn’t make it into the Young Artist Program at Santa Fe, but two years later they hired me to sing Rosalinda. Often it comes at a certain age. It’s not when you graduate from college, necessarily.” Johnson continued this path all the way to the best stages in the world, including the Met and La Scala.
Finding Your Technique
“This is an important idea, that not everyone’s path is the same,” says baritone Kim Josephson, “especially because a lot of bigger voices take more time to develop. I went through two degrees and really hadn’t found the teacher that could take me to the next level.”
Josephson’s story is a little different because he was singing professionally right out of school doing some smaller roles with smaller companies. One day he heard a young tenor sing beautifully, so he asked who the tenor’s teacher was. He found out that this tenor was formerly a baritone and felt that if this man had learned to sing so easily in the top of his voice, then his teacher could probably help Josephson with his high notes, too. He sang for the teacher, who told him that his voice wasn’t connected to his breath and that it wasn’t just his high notes that needed help but his whole voice.
Josephson knew the teacher was right, so he stopped singing and just began to study and rework his voice. “Like I say, I had two degrees and had some success making money as a singer,” Josephson continued, “but I knew that connecting to the breath would set my voice free and bring in the top, allowing me to do the things I wanted to do.”
He found this breath connection after some work and then took his wife and family to New York to pursue his dream. He knew that if he didn’t at least try to reach his dream, he would turn 40 and regret that he had never taken the chance. “We made that choice, and God opened up all kinds of doors for me and allowed me to do unbelievable things.”
While working at a UPS depot at night, he was singing auditions during the day. “I had a family with three children and here I was really going at it,” describes Josephson. “Little by little, I began singing in different places and winning competitions. It was all because I retooled the voice and found a real technique. It was probably six years from the end of my schooling until things really started to take off. I began getting regional work, and by the age of 35 I was singing at the Metropolitan. After the retooling, the success came fast.”
To those singers who may feel like they have missed the proverbial boat, Josephson offers the following advice, “The path is different for everyone. The difference between our generation and this current generation is that the opera world has shrunk by about a third with the closing of so many theatres and compression on schedules and fewer performances in fewer venues. There were a lot of smaller houses around for young singers to have a shot in and they just don’t exist anymore. Kids are forced into these Young Artist Programs where, when I was coming up, the Young Artist Programs weren’t what they are today.
“In the Met Council Auditions, I never did better than an encouragement award, but the end of the story is that I sang at the Met for 15 consecutive seasons in over 250 performances of about 30 roles. My late blooming led to my dream. Singing at the Metropolitan was my dream from the get-go. No one gets there by themselves. People will be interested in you and your voice and try to help you, so everything that you’re hired to do, you need to be 100 percent there and ready to do it.”
This total commitment to a career seems to be a common theme in the stories of those climbing the ladder. Bolding counsels, “For a long time I thought, ‘Well, I really wanted to be a singer, but instead I’ll be an accountant. I really wanted to be a singer, but instead I’ll direct a children’s choir and teach piano lessons.’ Those are all really good careers but my heart told me that I should be a singer. Once I finally started to trust that and let go of all of those other things I was holding onto, I’ve had nothing but success. Look, if God put the dream in your heart, he’s going to make it happen. Quit telling yourself you can’t do it because you can’t afford it. That’s stupid. Quit telling yourself you can’t do it because you’re too old or because you’re too tall or don’t have a solid high F. Those aren’t good reasons to not be a singer.”
“If your technique is faulty, if you don’t have the goods, then you can’t play,” says Josephson. “That’s all. You have to get that straightened out first. However, in our field, it’s important that you don’t compare with others. My advice is that you’re not a voice, you’re a person. All that you are and all that you feel colors every note that you sing and everything that you say. If you begin to compare with other people, you’ve missed the entire point: for you to be you and be really you. With all of you in it, it demands that you don’t compare, you just create. Just be who you are, because you are unique and special.”
All of these singers had something special to share, but the stereotypical path didn’t work out for them. Their desire and perseverance allowed them to find their own way to an operatic career, which it seems is more the rule than the exception. Very few “make it” immediately out of school, but countless singers know by experience that their dream came about as they continued to follow it. Perhaps “nontraditional singers” are actually the rule rather than the exception.
