All opera singers are predisposed to demanding the spotlight! Bel Canto (beautiful singing) is where many singers thrive and feel they are the center of attention. Opera singers prefer to get right to the point and bask in the gratifying adulation of their public. The singer’s job is usually to focus on beauty of tone. Singing accurately, fast, and with agility ascending to climatic top notes, while guiding their audience through a journey of a clearly defined arietta after which they expect thunderous adoring applause. More often than not singers even ignore the music composed for them and embellish in order to show off with added scales, high tones, and trills despite the composer’s admonishments to stick to the notes on the manuscript.
The entrance aria, the vengeance aria, and the lamenting aria in Handel’s operas can often stop the show. This music begs the audience to interrupt the performance with boisterous cheering. The audience needs this release to share their emotion and admiration. The public is even encouraged to show preference for one singer over another! The sports metaphors abound! It is just like the Olympic Games of old.
This does not happen in Wagner!
Wagner demands the audience wait on the edge of their seats for extended periods of time before they get to share their adulation. The cheers are equally for the singers, conductor, and members of the orchestra. In just over an hour Act 1 of Die Walküre comes to its climactic end of passionate longing and the delaying of gratification with a resounding climax. With the final chords we are ejected from our seats to cheer in unison relief and elation.
Wagner utilizes the singer as an instrumental member of the orchestra. Singers presuming to assail the rough waters of Wagner’s magnificent The Flying Dutchman must have stamina, acting ability, declamatory language skills, musical authority, and the research patience of a dramaturg.
Above all else to be a Wagnerian actor-musician-vocalist requires patience when opening the score. Richard Wagner will, when he is good and ready, allow you “joyful elation” only after he has kept you waiting a good long time. In other words? Singers and producers must accept that Mr. Wagner is the star of the performance.
J. Patrick Raftery’s debut was with the San Diego Opera singing Schaunard in La bohème with Luciano Pavarotti and he was The Richard Tucker Music Foundation Award Winner 1981.
After an international career as a baritone J. Patrick’s operatic tenor repertoire includes the works of Wagner: Tristan, Erik, Parsifal, Siegmund, and he has performed in four different Ring Cycles (Frankfurt, Liege, Wiesbaden, and Seattle).