In the opera world, talent works like raw material. It is both the first requirement and the ultimate distinction between a star and a serviceable singer. But in between come long stretches of labor, seasoning, stamina and luck, all of which can intensify a natural gift, or ruin it.
Thomas Hampson, the baritone who began his career with a two-year string of first prizes, including the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in 1981, still remembers the time he didn't win. "A girl we all knew walked out and blew everyone right off the stage. We all shrugged and growled and drank our coffee and started thinking about second or third place.
And now I don't remember her name, and she didn't make a career." In the pop world, talent tournaments are a made-for-TV anomaly, since having a good larynx and knowing how to use it is helpful, but hardly necessary for stardom, particularly for men. (How far would Bob Dylan, 50 Cent or Kurt Cobain have made it on "American Idol"?
) Opera, though, runs on singing competitions. It's how the national supply of singers is located, channeled and refined. On Thursday, Corey Blix, a young tenor with a capacious rib cage and a bright spotlight of a voice, marched onto the stage of the Morgan Library auditorium in the finals of the George London Foundation Awards, and dove into the Prize Song from Wagner's "Die Meistersinger.
" As it happened, the same opera was just getting under way across town at the Met, and the serendipity pointed up just how ingrained in the history of music competition is. In the Wagner opera, Walther von der Vogelweide, a real mastersinger of the Middle Ages, wows the judges in a singing contest with an outpouring of tender, but rule-breaking, lyricism. Blix was not so bold: His performance was heartfelt and scrupulous, and it earned him an award earmarked for a Wagnerian singer.
The Met's National Council Auditions function as a farm system. Every year, voice teachers steer about 1,800 of their charges into a network of local cattle calls. Across the country - and often after several tries - winners rise up through the district and regional levels until they reach the stage of the Met.
On March 25, each of the 22 semifinalists will walk out onto that intimidating platform, alone except for an accompanist at the piano, and pit their voices against all that empty space. On April 1 come the grand finals, in which this year's crop will sing with the Met Orchestra. Then, boosted by that thrill, the laureled singers will return to the job of slowly cobbling together a living and a career.
Mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, who shared the Met auditions prize in 1988 with a field that included Ren e Fleming, Ben Heppner and Heidi Grant Murphy, points out that she didn't return to the Met until three years later - years she spent trooping around the heartland from one small opera house to another. "The greatest result of winning was that it increased my level of confidence," she says. "After every round, I would go to the pay phone on the street corner and call my voice teacher, and scream, 'Oh my God, I won!
' And she'd go, 'Mmnnhh, I knew you would.' And by the end of that process, I felt I could conquer the world. I didn't.
I'm still working on it." A few weeks ago, I attended the regional phase of the Met auditions, held in a tiny recital hall at the City University of New York. Coloratura sopranos, lyric baritones, heroic tenors - one after another, they marched onstage, gave a tense grin and launched into their chosen arias.
Most had good voices and stiff demeanors, as if their minds were on making a good legato rather than on their character's emotional life. An exception was Jeanine de Bique, a 25-year-old with a slender soprano, who painted a whole inner landscape onto Emily's aria from Ned Rorem's setting of "Our Town." Then, a few singers later, came Stephen Hartley, at 29 an elder statesman of this crowd, who crackled in an aria from another recent American opera: Jake Heggie's "Little Women.
" A tall man with a burnished baritone and a good suit, he seemed relaxed, comfortable with the pressure and with the aria's discursive style. Every syllable sounded clear and deceptively spontaneous. Hartley won the $3,800 first prize and the right to move on to the semifinals.
De Bique received a $1,000 encouragement award, the message of which is: We'll be keeping an eye on you. One judge's gimlet eye belongs to Gayletha Nichols, opera's mother hen, who makes her nest at the Met but flies all over the country to listen to 400 to 500 young singers every year and enter them into her database of promise. "What I'm looking for is future artists, and part of that is identifying people who have something to say," she says.
"None of these people is a done deal, ready to sing at the Met." And so De Bique keeps plugging and Hartley goes onto the semifinals, as well as back to his bank job in Manhattan. While the prize money helps defray the $1,200 that he and his wife, also a singer, spend on voice lessons and coaching sessions every month, even winning one of the $15,000 grand prizes might not liberate him from his day job.
Nor, he says, would getting cut be enough to derail him. "I want to put every ounce of my being and drive and focus into becoming a success. For me to stop for financial reasons - that's a long way off.
" In a world where even success can mean living in airports, postponing children, choosing which bills to pay and absorbing avalanches of rejection, that kind of doggedness matters at least as much as a natural vocal gift. "If you don't have the determination, you'll give up on yourself before others do on you," says Nichols. "You just have to be more miserable not singing than you are going through it.
" The flipside of passion is that many singers keep plugging away long after the expiration date on their dream has passed. "Art doesn't necessarily thrive in a realistic mind," Graham says. "Opera singers live in fantasy - they have to.
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