Munich Installment Two

For some reason, I have let you hang, unable to tell the greatest horrors of this trip.

At the end of the week, on that Monday just before I came back to Pforzheim, I sang an agency in Munich. As I write and begin to tell this story, a bad taste is starting to form in my mouth, my dander is raised, and I am starting to get that slightly sick feeling. You guessed right, the audition was a bad experience, a really bad one. Someday I will trust my instincts as they told me before both of these auditions to run away and fast. I decided, somehow, for myself, that these were experiences that I needed to have in spite of their discomfort, and gave it the old college try even knowing, instinctively, before I even began, that they would be asses. I am not quite sure whether this was self-fulfilling prophecy or not To even consider I did this to myself is enough to “cook my noodle” at this point, so I will not venture into that void of voids.

I sang before a panel of four people. I sang through “Gott! Welch Dunkel hier” my flagship aria. I believe that I sang it acceptably, perhaps not the best of all of my attempts, but it was also not horrible. I knew something was awry when the initial response to this eight minute tour de force was “Do you have any Mozart?”

Huh? Mozart? Ok, for those of you out of the seen or not total music nerds, asking me, or any Heldentenor for that matter, to sing Mozart would be like asking a linebacker to improvise some modern dance version of swan lake complete with scarves. No one in their right mind would want to hear my voice sing Mozart. It would just be bad. Mozart is all about long, floating melodies, vocal acrobatics, diminuendos, that kind of stuff. Heldentenor repertoire, in contrast, is like a horn call, or drum beats. It would be like asking Metallica to give us their best rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon—yeah, they could do it, maybe, but who would want to hear it?

“Uh…No, I don’t. I have started to look at Tamino again, but no, I do not have any Mozart to present today.” With confused and somewhat blank looks on their faces, they asked me to sing Max’s aria from Der Freischütz. The lightest of the arias I offer.

I sang it well. Again, nothing to write home about, but I am sure it was not atrocious.

They called me down to the little, lone chair that sat before their exaggeratedly long table so they could give me the potential good or bad news. I honestly thought, especially considering they asked to hear a second piece, that they might have liked it. Dear J., you can be oh so wrong sometimes. The tag team verbal stoning started with one of the women. The following is an assortment of her comments. When reading them, imagine a sort of clap of thunder and lightning after each phrase. Maybe even the ornery laugh “the Count” from Sesame Street, but much more evil. No, think the evil, parallel universe “Count” who punctuates little phrases like “Two! Two bad arias.” With a sinister paugh and maybe a side of baby sacrifice. When I personally think of this woman, I see her stirring a huge cauldron of hate out of which pops each comment, in a bubble that pops and some Lord of the Rings voice stage whispers them while “witchy” simply stirs away, a permanent sneer and evil eye painted on her hateful face.

“You are not singing in the right Fach. You should be singing Mozart.”
“You are pushing your voice so much that it really hurts to listen to.”
“Your voice is over-worked.”
“You should just be singing in choruses.”

Then she said “you quite your job in Pforzheim?”
“Yes, I quit my job to go back to America and finish my doctorate.”
“And in which area is your doctorate?”
“Vocal pedagogy,” I say.
When I say this the other woman from the Munich office looks over at the guy from Stuttgart and apparently is having trouble holding back a guffaw of some kind.

My only reply was a stunned, and intentionally trailing off “Ok…”

She tags one of the guys, as I lay, helpless in the center of the mat. Yes, I gave a good fight against “Witchy Dominatrix”, but her final body slam left me momentarily motionless, the breath having been knocked out of me.

He jumps in and begins the pummeling without even a hello or how do you do. At least buy me dinner, bitch.

“If you keep singing like this you will lose your voice.”
“You are not a Heldentenor.”
“A real Heldentenor would have blown the roof off of this place. If he were singing next to you, we wouldn’t even hear you.”
And his crowning achievement, a statement that got permanently wedged in the broken record of my psyche, forever to played and replayed: “Honestly, I do not mean to be mean, but from a tenor to a tenor, I have to say that I am shocked, simply shocked by what I have just heard.”

Note: when someone says “I don’t mean to be mean” expect what comes next to be real, real mean.

I think this was the part when the ambulance was called and the doctors all rushed up to the ring where they determined that it was that last pile driver that had simply driven the life out of me. K.O. folks, and we all go home.

Run away…

It was on the trip home that A. called to see how it went. She was on break from doing a Walküre at the Staatsoper in Vienna and was in Berlin eating at her favorite Indian restaurant. She had an audition in Weimar the next day, and felt the stopover was worth it. That must be some awesome Indian food. Her words were very encouraging, saying that there are some very important people, including the Dream Agent that obviously believe in my talent and that I should just keep going. She said that she had had an audition just before she won her first role in Bayreuth where they also had told her she should sing Mozart. That helped to hear, especially considering how well she is doing now, NOT singing Mozart.

Now that you are either reeling from great Schadenfreude, or in the darkest of depressions because of honest-to-goodness empathy, I want you to know that things were not all that bad. They were balanced by some good news form that week, too.

The Dream Agent had recommended that I go have a lesson with this famous Heldentenor specialist in Munich. I did that. It went well. Very well. She was able to identify immediately the 3 or 4 things that I know I need to work on. She is confidant that these fine-tuning things will be relatively easy to fix and that our work will go very fast.

I got home to Pforzheim after the week in Munich to find a message on the answering machine from the Dream Agent, wanting to know how I liked the lesson. I called him, told him about the auditions, and let him know that I liked the lesson very much. He was soooo nice. He was very consoling about the auditions, and simply said that people just don’t know what they are talking about. He also gave me the best news that I have had in a while, that the teacher in Munich had immediately called him after my lesson and was very excited about my voice, told him that I have a great instrument, and that she thinks that the problems will be fixed very quickly. Then, in a great surprise, and as a sort of saving grace for all that bad that had happened in Munich, he simply said: “When she gives me the green light, we will start going about finding the right house for you.” Cool. Before, he had said that he was interested. Now, it is for sure. Very cool. That means I really have two agents now! And one of them is big time. Me: stoked.

I have already made the arrangements to temporarily move to Augsburg to begin my lessons and coachings. I found a very cheap place from a friend of Chris and mine. He is giving it to us at cost. So, all is well in Denmark and things are on the up.

No, this is not the way that I had anticipated that everything would develop, but I am open to what the Guy Upstairs is working on, and will do what I think is necessary in order to make it happen. I just see it as another step in my adventure. Imagine if I had done the auditions and no one had been interested? That would have totally sucked. I consider this a better-than-average place between complete failure and stardom. I hope you agree.