The terror of the solo performer

I think you’ve probably gathered that I sing.  Not in the bath, karaoke, or even cabaret. 

Opera.  The hard stuff.

I’ve done this for a long time, in fact it’s what I did when I went to college rather than something that would have been infinitely more useful in terms of a career aspiration.  But that’s another story; I want to witter on about performance nerves today.

There are times when I love performing; it’s the showoff bit of me that revels in doing something I know I’m fairly good at, at least compared to the man in the street.  Being able to sing can, oddly, be a rather good seduction tool at times.  People don’t expect it of me, particularly if they know the “me” that loves football, works with blokes and swears like the proverbial trooper.  It’s too incongruous for some people and they find it rather strange when confronted by “arty-farty me”, or even rather arresting if I’m having a good day.

But there are other times when performing can be hell.  I have a regular recurring dream about going on stage and not knowing any of the words, or being pushed unwillingly on stage to find it’s not the opera I thought I was performing at all.  I usually get this dream in the run up to a performance and wake up in a cold sweat, bugged by the thought that I still have a lot to learn.

The memory is the worst thing and the most difficult thing about opera.  Singing in a choir is comparatively easy; the music is in front of one all the time; getting lost can be reasonably easy to put right (unless it’s a difficult work; I still have student memories of an entire choir getting lost in the Libera Me of the Britten War Requiem and the whole thing nearly falling apart).

Memory in opera is a multi-stranded thing.  In addition to knowing your own words and music, you are required to know most of your co-performers’ words as well, how the accompaniment sounds, which instruments are providing the cues (for orchestral performances), production details (when and where to move), characterisation, what to do with props, stage layout and whether there are going to be any surprising special effects on stage.

The opportunities for errors are almost infinite - and this is frightening.  Professional performers learn a work intensively over a period of a few weeks, which is probably the best approach; everything is wedged into short-term memory, where it generally stays quite efficiently.

For semi-professional performers like me, rehearsals are often several days apart, giving ample opportunity to forget important details.  This doesn’t tend to use short-term memory very well and learning everything becomes more difficult.

And terrifying.  Performance nerves are a dreadful thing and they seem to get worse with age, not better.  Where I used to step on stage almost fearless, I now worry about not having enough stamina, not being able to get through the role, not having the breath control, making errors and causing others to make errors.  That’s a lot of fear to carry about and sometimes it’s crushing.

It nearly overwhelmed me a couple of years ago and I sought the help of a hypnotherapist, but the whole process of being hypnotised was rather odd and I’m still not sure whether it worked or not as it only seemed to provide a partial solution.  Sure, I can perform, but it’s still nerve-wracking and I sometimes feel that I managed to partially resolve some of the problems in my own head rather than hypnotic processes sorting them out for me.  I’ll never know the answer to that one, I guess.

The worries about stamina have a good basis.  Ten years ago my voice was nearly wrecked through bad teaching and although an expert unravelled the mess to restore it, it’s never been quite the same again and I’m aware that it’s not as strong as it used to be, easily tiring if I don’t apply and maintain the technique.  Lucky for me this year that Verdi is well-constructed, written with the singer in mind and not as a musical battleground, but the part I am playing is massive.

This year, owing to the utter upheaval in my life, learning something so demanding has been particularly tough.  No piano, no recording, little time and a mind that’s already too full of crisis management details to absorb niceties like music.  The last two weeks have been a complete panic of ramming Verdi into my weary skull during almost every spare minute; in the office, in the car, on the train, in the middle of housework, in the shower.

The memory function has to get to a stage of being a reflex action, then it’s possible to cope if something goes wrong; it’s impossible to be trying to recall words and music mechanically whilst moving around, portraying a character or even dancing (which, thank God, I don’t have to do in this production).

Performance time is upon me - literally, as last night I managed to survive the dress rehearsal.  Survive being the operative word as I had no technical rehearsal to help me along and had to figure out how to pace the set in ten minutes beforehand. 

Tomorrow night it’s all for real; three acts of Verdi, being Amelia, with little time off the stage in two out of three acts.  I am the leading lady, looking rather like something out of Liaisons Dangereuse.  Good job the eighteenth century look suits me, I suppose.