Birth and Death of a Conductor, Part One

     In a couple of earlier posts, I mentioned my jaunt as an opera conductor—very briefly, as my jaunt was indeed a brief one. But I'd like to expand upon it now. For one thing, a friend and former colleague of mine is making her debut as a conductor even as I write this, and my thoughts are very much with her. For another, I am almost constantly plagued by the question of how properly to use—or perhaps not to use —the gifts with which God has seen fit to bless me. I don't mean to boast when I say that he has given me many gifts, none of which I deserve, all for which I am truly thankful; but I have to choose among them, if for no other reason than I am a very poor manager of time and resources. How to choose is the question.

     In 1990 I spent my third and last summer at the American Institute of Musical Studies (AIMS) in Graz, Austria. One of my mentors there was a coach from Germany by the name of Heinz Sosnitza. Herr Sosnitza was both beloved and feared by all at AIMS, as he not only loved music with the burning passion of a young lover, but as a coach was unflinchingly frank and did not by any means suffer fools gladly. I'll never forget one afternoon when I was looking for an available practice room in the Studentenheim (dormitory): I passed by the closed door of one practice room wherein I heard a young baritone singing the Count's aria from Figaro. As I rounded the corner, I came face to face with Herr Sosnitza, flannel nightshirt (I assumed he'd been napping) draping loosely over his copious belly, and a dark scowl knitting his heavy gray brows.

     "Grüss Gott, Herr Sosnitza," I began, but he cut me off with,

     "I hear someone singing the Count and bellowing like a bull!  I must help him!" And off he marched like an avenging Santa Claus. My mouth twitched in amusement, but I wasn't the least surprised. Having known him for three summers, I was by then used to his well-meaning, if blustery, forthrightness.

      Anyway, I digress.

     Sosnitza was the first ever to suggest I try conducting. "I know many women conductors," he told me, "and none of them are anything special. But you can be."

     I nearly burst into tears, I was so touched—and flabbergasted. Never had the idea of conducting, not even the palest shadow, entered my head. But, respecting Sosnitza's opinion as I did, how could I dismiss it? I owed it my most serious consideration, though I admit to having equally serious qualms.

     At the end of that summer I returned to Houston for my very first year as a full-fledged member of the music staff, after two grueling but exhilarating years apprenticing in the Studio. I requested and was assigned conducting lessons with HGO's Associate Conductor at that time, Ward Holmquist. Ward has a very clean, clear baton technique and proved to be a wonderful teacher. I not only enjoyed my lessons immensely, but actually began to believe I could be a conductor, a belief further encouraged by Ward's enthusiastic "You're a natural!" Nevertheless, I was ill-prepared for the memo I received near the end of that season: one of our shows, Grétry's Beauty and the Beast, would be touring in the summer; Daniel Beckwith, who had conducted its run that spring, would lead it for the first week of the tour, then the last two weeks would be conducted by ... me.

     I felt nauseous. Couldn't I start out with something smaller, a scenes program with piano, for instance? No—my first time wielding a baton in public would have to be in front of an orchestra, leading an entire opera.

     Fortunately, due to a plunge in finances, the tour was cut to just a single performance in Galveston. Since I was cheaper than Daniel Beckwith (in other words, I was on staff and my services were therefore gratis) I was to conduct the single performance, with just one orchestra staging rehearsal the afternoon of the show. How well I remember that drive to Galveston with Mark Trawka, the principal coach! I kept asking him, "Can we turn around? Do I have to do this? Can we just go back to Houston?"

     I remember not one thing about either the rehearsal or the performance. All I know is we all got through it unscathed, and I managed not to throw up on the podium. But I vowed that I would never again conduct in public.

     Right. If you want to make God laugh, tell him what your plans are.

     To be continued ...

Handel and a Turning Point

     The San Antonio Festival's production of Handel's Saul (sometime in the mid-1980's; I can't remember exactly when) was an invaluable learning experience for me. Although I had already played recitatives in performances of Mozart and Rossini operas, Handel is another animal altogether, and I had zero experience with him going into rehearsals. Nor was I well-informed at that time about the world of Baroque scholarship and performance practice, or about the musicians who specialized in these things. Nicholas McGegan, who was to conduct Saul, was simply a name to me; I had no idea that he was and is one of the world's foremost Baroque specialists. I suppose being ignorant of this was better for my nerves.
     He had no quibbles about my playing of the arias and other set pieces; Bach was one of my specialties as a solo pianist and this helped me in playing Handel. But I was playing the recitatives (recits) as I would have played Mozart recits. McGegan taught me the correct way to do Handel recits: play chords only where indicated, no adding extra chords or improvising; the chords should be short and solid, or rolled quickly, or rolled moderately slowly, depending on the text and dramatic situation. They should never be sustained for long, and your cellist sustains the bass note only as long as the you sustain the chord. I have never forgotten this teaching, which served me well when years later I played continuo for such luminaries as Christopher Hogwood, Craig Smith, Patrick Summers, and once again for McGegan himself.
     I should say that the woman who sang the role of Michal was a still unknown Lorraine Hunt (later the great Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson, whose too early death from cancer left a deep void in the music world). That production of Saul was the beginning of her long, successful collaboration with McGegan and her reputation as a specialist in Handel, though she sang anything and everything with uncommon grace. I remember being particularly impressed, even at that early "soprano" stage of her career (she became a mezzo later on), with her liquid legato and warm, unforced sound.
     It was around the same time as Saul that I began serving as coach/repetiteur for Opera Theater of San Antonio. One season, we did The Barber of Seville and our Rosina was the delightful Stella Zambalis, who at that time had recently completed two years with the prestigious Houston Grand Opera Studio. She was impressed with my playing, and told me I should consider auditioning for the Studio, which trains coaches as well as singers. Being a master procrastinator and all-around yellow-bellied chicken, I mulled over her suggestion for a few years, meanwhile continuing to freelance. Despite Stella's confidence in me, and the encouragement I received from my teachers and elder coaches at AIMS (the American Institute of Musical Studies in Graz, Austria, which I attended for three summers), I myself was still unsure about my abilities. In my own mind, I was merely a big fish in a very small pond. The thought of testing the waters of a much larger pond, i. e. the Houston Grand Opera, brought out my extreme fear of drowning. Was I a good enough swimmer?
     On a particular day in the late '80s, around tax time, I was organizing the piles of receipts and paycheck stubs from all my freelancing jobs, when I came across a note from a coach whom I considered to be a mentor. This coach, who during the regular season served on the music staff of Lyric Opera of Chicago, was one of my teachers and my sounding board during the first of my three summers at AIMS. At the end of that summer, she left a note in my box which closed with, "You should have a great career in opera, if you want it."  I read the note again, sitting on the floor that spring day, surrounded by receipts and check stubs, and thought of all the piddly little jobs I was doing in order to scrounge up some sort of living -- a living which mostly got eaten away at tax time. I thought of all the tedious hours I spent coaching voice students who had little or no talent, who certainly had no hope of ever making a career in opera. I thought of all the miles I drove from job to job, burning up tankful after tankful of gas, grabbing fast-food lunches on the way. And I said to myself, "What the hell am I doing?"
     When annual auditions for the Houston Grand Opera Studio were announced later that year, I sent off an application.