Working and living in Germany: managing your time and resources

Part 2: Managing your time and resources

Time management is not sexy.  I had a day job for a few years as the music administrator for a downtown church and, in addition to proofreading, event planning, payroll, and general budgetary accounting, I'd say that managing the time and spaces of the department took up a substantial chunk of my time.  My husband, also a former administrator (but at the executive level), would often say that administration is such a thankless business because it goes unnoticed if it's done correctly but, if done incorrectly, it's a disaster.

What does any of this have to do with singing?

When you're in a Fest situation, you're contracted for a (theoretically) fixed number of performances for any Spielzeit.  Let's say that number is 40.  Does this mean that you do one show a week for 40 weeks?  Dream on.  I would hear horror stories and cautionary tales from friends and colleagues about how a Fest can "wreck your voice" by making you sing all kinds of different roles at once and rehearse multiple shows at once and people just end up blowing their voices out.  Can this happen?  Absolutely.  But it doesn't have to.

Last season, I had a pretty light fall/winter.  I was in a new production of Un Ballo in Maschera that had two weeks of rehearsal in late July, just before the six-week summer holiday that every opera house takes, and then went back into rehearsal in early September.  The director was wonderful.  He knew what he wanted, he was good at expressing his ideas, he was excellent at managing large rehearsals with lots of people and chorus and extras.  The show was running like a Swiss watch by the end of the 2nd week of the Spielzeit, so by the time we got around to orchestra rehearsals, there had been plenty of time to play with character and physicality and movement (and even some singing-related things).  I made a decision to sing out in rehearsals starting a few weeks before the performances, just so I could be sure my stamina was where I wanted it to be, come showtime.  Done and done.  Right after that show opened, I went to the Studienleiter and said I wanted to start work on the Händel opera.  It was my first major Händel role, something like nine arias and a massive duet, and the biggest whack of recitative I had ever even considered.  He was quite shocked that I wanted to start so early - late October for a show that didn't rehearse till January - but I was adamant.  I didn't need to coach Flute for the thousandth time, but I wanted to know every single ornament and optional appogiatura and inflection and have all of my da capos and cadenzas with choices to spare.  So we began.  Three times a week, recits only.  And inbetween, I was singing performances of Ballo, and guesting Flute at a house about an hour away.  By the end of December, the Händel role was memorized, my guest Flutes were done, and I felt like I was in really good shape.  Even did a few auditions for new agents.

And then January came.

I jumped in for a colleague on the New Year's Day concert.  I jumped in for the same colleague for a recital four days later.  We began musical rehearsals for the Händel.  We went through the revival rehearsals for Flute.  And I got sick.  Not anything big or serious like bronchitis or the flu, just your regular run-of-the-mill sick.  I missed a few days of rehearsal, I missed the first Flute performance, and after about four days of awful sniffly sneezy wheezy, I dragged myself back into rehearsal because, while I couldn't sing yet, I could do the movement, which was a huge part of this Baroque-movement-highly-choreographed production.  We had almost six weeks of staging/music rehearsal for the Händel, during which I also had a few performances of Flute, and I think a Ballo.  I sprained my ankle in the dress week of the show, so I did those shows with a big boot-splint thing, cleverly hidden under my enormous period skirts.  We did five performances of the Händel (six, if you count the general dress, to which they sold tickets) inside of a week.  And about a week and a half after that show closed, I had auditions at three different opera houses in three different cities, inside of 3 days.

I'll skip the in-depth description of the preparation process for the next shows I did - (four roles in two French shows, single-cast) and cut to the nightmare week I had in June.  Five performances in seven days: part of a French recital, a Ballo, a Flute, and two performances of the French double-bill.  It was hot, it was humid, there's almost no A/C in Europe, I was NOT feeling well, but there we were.  It was what I had to do.  I didn't stay out late, I didn't drink (even socially), and almost every spare moment of time I had was spent taking a nap in my Garderobe or flopped out on the sofa.  And by the time the end of the Spielzeit came, in the midst of performing those last shows, I had been in musical rehearsals for Rosenkavalier so we could go into a fast-paced revival staging rehearsal at the end of July, to resume in the first week of the Spielzeit because the show was going up nine days later.

What what WHAT is the point of all of this rambling about overlapping rehearsals and performances?  You have to have a sense of your whole season.  You have to know how long it takes you to learn a new role.  You have to know which roles you can take off the shelf, dust off, and put back on their feet, and which ones will always need just a little bit of review - I have post-its flagging certain pages of Rosenkavalier so I can review those two pages of the big crazy Act 2 ensemble, just so it's absolutely fresh in my mind on the night of the performance.  You have to know how much sleep you really need - not how much sleep your 19 year-old self needed, because those days are GONE, my friend - and how to make the most of your brain capacity.  When you can't practice because your body is too tired, you can still sit on the sofa/tram/in the practice room and talk through the scenes.  You have to know your physical limits, when to say when, and when to say no.  Beyond all of this, you have to be on a first-name basis with your technique.  Before my makeup call, I get a key for a practice room and have a bit of a yodel.  If I'm on at the top of the show, I show up earlier so I can have a solid half hour to do some breathing exercises, buzz my lips a bit, go through some exercises, and go through any little twiddly bits of the piece BEFORE my makeup call.  Usually, once I'm in makeup, it's straight into costume and then straight onstage, and I prefer to have my yodeling done so I can chill and collect my thoughts before I get called to places.

Time management is about managing yourself.  It's about knowing yourself.  What do you want out of your performances?  What do you want out of your career?  Yes, there are those mad geniuses who can function on next-to-no sleep and deliver brilliant performances of roles they just picked up three days ago.  I am not a mad genius.  I am of above-average intelligence and above-average work ethic, with a solid technique and a very decent instrument.  But the thing that keeps me from going stark raving mad when the schedule spins out of control and I get a head cold and, in the eloquent words of Kurt Vonnegut, "the excrement hits the air conditioner," is that I know how to prep myself.  I know that if I show up an hour before makeup, clear my head, do my exercises, work through all the hard coloratura stuff in the Ravel and that one nasty cadenza in the Stravinsky, sing the end of Amor, sing the middle of Zerbinetta, the runs in the first Queen aria and the triplets in the second Queen aria, my voice is ready to go to work for just about anything and, by the end of all that, so am I.  I can sit in the makeup chair and let them paint my face and pin the wig to my head and still have fifteen to twenty minutes before it's time to get trussed into whichever costume it is, and I can use those fifteen minutes to review the post-its in my score - three bars between entrances here, only two there, don't wait for the chord because the conductor is anticipating me at that rest, review the dialogue before the second aria, anticipate that the stage is going to start turning as soon as my last note is done - bend your knees!  I can do this because I know in my bones that I have these roles down cold and even on a low-energy day, my body and my brain have been prepped to do this thing I do.  Because it is my job.

Know thyself.  Manage thyself.  Your career and your colleagues will thank you for it.