JMOTI

with Johanna Meier

At the beginning of June, I arrived in Spearfish, South Dakota, to participate in the Johanna Meier Opera Theatre Institute.  Johanna Meier is from Spearfish and enjoyed a wonderful international career as a dramatic soprano.  She not only sang at New York City Opera and The Met, but she was also the first American to sing the role of Isolde at the Wagner Festpsiele in Bayreuth, Germany.  In her retirement, she started an annual opera program to help young, developing singers in their craft.

I was one of 22 participants in the 2012 program, so I had the opportunity to spend 2 weeks at Black Hills State University.  Although we did have a lot of free time, most of our time was spent in musical or staging rehearsals, working one-on-one with a vocal coach, or taking movement classes.  Every other day Johanna herself would spend an hour with the singers, teaching us "tricks of the trade," so to speak.  Okay...mostly it was along the lines of "you better learn this stuff if you want to survive in this business!"  But it was helpful information, nonetheless.  She worked with us on how to walk like a noble person, how to walk with a cape or train on your dress, how to sit down in a chair while you're singing, how to fall down and die, and so on.  All these little details are not things one typically focuses on when preparing a role, so it was great to have an encouraging environment to try out new tactics.

At the end of the first week, each one of us sang an aria in recital.  I chose "Il est doux, il est bon" from Massenet's Hérodiade.  In the opera, Salome sings this aria to express her emotions after seeing John the Baptist.  She is not quite sure what her feeling mean, but she knows that he is kind and good, which differs from her everyday home life.  He seems out of her reach and she is desperate to see him again, wondering how she can live without him.  To watch my rendition of the aria, click here.

the dramatic ending

At the end of the second week, we put on two performances.  Friday night was scenes from Ariadne auf Naxos by Strauss, in which I sang in the nymph trio.  The three of us had fun running on and off stage providing entertainment in the background to the actual plot.

Saturday night was a unique blend of the same story in two different operas, Merry Wives of Windsor by Nicolai and Falstaff by Verdi.  The staging director took songs and dialogue from the two operas and mixed them together to create a shorter version of the tale.  In that production, I sang in the chorus as well as a ladies octet, where we pretended to be fairies.

Overall it was a great experience, and I thought it was well worth my time and effort.  Not only did I pick up a few insights into the opera world, but my confidence was boosted knowing that I am capable of doing this professionally.