I think you know what I am talking about! Sure. I am guilty of it, you are guilty of it, we are all guilty of it. Being "catty" with other human beings is natural; all humans from all walks of life in all professions have done it before. It is futile, however, to deny that we in the "performing industry" are particularly prone to this sort of behavior.
Recently I stumbled across a video on YouTube entitled "Pavarotti gets laughed at! (Spirito gentil, live 1974)." Below is a link to the aria; I encourage you to watch it, it's fantastic of course! However, I digress; watching this video kick-started a nearly hour-long binge of watching "opera fail" after "opera fail" by simply continuing to rummage through the "Suggestions & Related Videos" found on the right-hand side of the screen. Okay, so everyone has heard the famous "Tenor Crack", correct? However, it is not often people take time out of their day to watch demigods the like of Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti mess up on stage!
I will admit that the singer inside of me—for a brief moment—chuckled at the sound of the great Pavarotti's folds fumbling over one another for just a moment, or perhaps Joan Sutherland's classic "fly-swatting" impulse when she screws up a passage in Les Contes d'Hoffmann:
Even, perhaps, singers from a more "current" generation such as Renée Flemming flubbing a coloratura passage might induce a chortle—as my generation describes it—"out loud":
However, my time spent watching these videos lead me to a somewhat obvious realization: it happens to all of us. Instrumentalists and vocalists alike all make mistakes. Chances are, if you're anything like me, you probably feel like yours seem to ALWAYS be worse than everybody else's. Of course, this—more often than not—is usually a personally-conflated exaggeration we create in our own heads because we all tend to be WAY too over-critical of ourselves. Regardless, we all know what it is like to be on stage and make a big mistake. One thing we may know even better than making a personal mistake, however, is the feeling of being on or off stage and witnessing another fellow artist make a mistake. It is innate to react in some manner whenever a musician on stage makes a mistake and thus must deviate from the original plan. When you or I observe a mistake made by someone else in the very moment it is happening, our instincts will activate and—without much thought—we will take some sort of immediate action or have some sort of impulsive response. If, perhaps, we do not react at all then that in-and-of-itself is a reaction (the very act of inaction is a reaction... make sense?) However, regardless, all of these "initial instincts" will vary from person to person. In an instance of great stress (i.e., a mistake on stage) the human body will release a catecholamine (the most famous of which is adrenaline) which activates our body's famous "fight, flight, or freeze" response and these moments are what define us--not as artists--but as a colleagues.
On February 17th, 1983 the late, great Joan Sutherland was performing Violetta in a performance of Verdi's La Traviatta in Genova; conducted by her husband of (at the time) nearly twenty years, Richard Bonynge. Despite this production having the Dame Sutherland as the lead diva, this production's famedom happened because of a completely different reason. The lead tenor, Lamberto Furlan, began to show vocal fatigue as early as the first act and—as a famous recording shows—continued to get worse as the opera progressed further. By the final act, Lamberto Furlan's voice was so tired he was no longer able to avoid cracking throughout the famous "Parigi o cara" duet, and this caused outrage and disorder from within the audience in attendance. Decades later, Sutherland is able to recall this very incident with great detail, about which she details in her own autobiography, "After a very slight crack of the tenor in act 1, the audience voiced its disapproval momentarily. The opera proceeded without further interruption until the last act duet "Parigi o cara" when catcalls and booing erupted from a portion of the house..."
(Above: A recording from 1983 in Genova of tenor Lamberto Furlan and
Dame Joan Sutherland singing "Porigi o cara" from Verdi's "La Traviata"
Note the audiences reaction, for I shall return to this innate impulse for audiences to react in such a way later on in this article. However, I shall first turn my attention to how the other performers within the opera company reacted. After the audience drowned out the performance with an uproar of booing and hissing, Sutherland escorted Lamberto Furlan off stage and the two of them were met by her husband and maestro, Bonynge, in the wing. After a brief discussion of how they should proceed, Sutherland and Bonynge decided in a fit of outrage decided that the show mustn't continue. They did not come to this conclusion because of the Furlan's level of fatigue, however. They concluded that such an audience does not deserve the satisfaction of viewing the completion to Verdi's "La Traviata." In her autobiography, Sutherland continues, "Lamberto had done nothing to warrant such an outburst and I said quietly to him "We don't have to try and sing against that - come on", nodded to Richard and the three of us returned to our dressing-rooms." What parallels—if not surpasses—the importance of the audiences reaction is Dame Sutherland's response. Rather than curse Lamberto Furlan for causing an end to this performance right in the middle of one of Violetta's big scenes and—as we all know as performers, risking the possibility of tarnishing her image with the inevitable public backlash from one bad performance—Sutherland took it upon herself to nurture and support her fellow cast member. In an ever increasing generation of stage-hoggers and back-stabbers, Sutherland transcended natural inclination to act up and instead stood up.
The important "moral" of this story is simple: support your fellow musicians. We are all in competition with each one another; this is no secret and we all know this. As we stand in line outside of an audition or competition, there is ample time for our brains to remind us quite well on their own that every other singer standing next to us is our competition. The last thing any of us need is another artist reminding us of this fact. There's an old adage that states, "What matters is not how you fall off the horse, but how you get back up." A very real and true statement, for we do need to find the inner strength to cope with stress when accidents like these happen onstage. However, I feel there may be a second sentence to this adage that perhaps has been dropped over the years for the sake of brevity, and it says, "What matters is not how your fellow man falls off the horse, but how you help him get back up." When a fellow musician makes a mistake with us on stage or in front of us as we sit in the audience, our reaction defines us as artists and even as humans. What's even greater than that: our individual reactions contribute to the definition of the art as a whole. Classical music is failing. It's disappearing. Art as a whole is struggling. Audiences are finding it more and more difficult for themselves to justify paying the money and spending the time attending the arts in today's economy, and as we continue to head down this "sterilized" path of perfect studio recordings (which is a whole other topic that needs to be addressed at a separate time and place) it's becoming easier for audiences and even singers to forget that any given production may have hundreds of little unseen—and often perhaps one or two rather easily seen—mistakes. They expect perfect performances like "that one recording they heard" or "that one YouTube clip they saw" and when it isn't delivered they may often feel cheated or ripped-off. Criticism of the arts is as high now—if not higher—than it has ever been; especially from the common populous. The last thing we need is unnecessary criticism from one another! There is a very real possibility that by the time my generation of artists "grow up" and step into the field, we, as the performers, may also be the only supporters of the arts. We may very well become the only patrons attending each others' shows and funding each others' opera companies, symphonies, art galleries, and theaters. If this unfortunate dystopian society ever comes into fruition, we would need to know that our fellow colleagues would be there to support and lift each other up rather than to harshly criticize and be "catty" towards one another.
On that note, I would like to leave you with yet another video of Dame Sutherland; this time in a dress rehearsal for a 1984 production of Les Contes d'Hoffmann in Sydney, Australia. We have all been here, and they are friendly reminders that mistakes will continue to happen throughout our entire career. Enjoy! =)
Keep singing,
-Jerron
