The End of My Operatic Career
The end of my operatic career began on a plane. I had just finished a run of concerts with the Edmonton Symphony and was settling in for the long flight back home when the intercom crackled with an unwelcome announcement: our plane was suffering from mechanical issues and we would be delayed indefinitely on the tarmac. Three hours later we took off for Toronto, turning my four-hour flight into a seven-hour ordeal. Of course, I stepped off the plane feeling a little stiff.
One should not generally expect to feel bright-eyed and bushy-tailed after a cross-country flight, but there was something different this time. The pain was sharp, more definite than your run-of-the-mill travel soreness, and its tendrils radiated from my spine outwards through my entire abdominal area. The pain had not subsided the next morning. In fact, it seemed sleep had only exacerbated the problem. By midday, lower-back spasms had crippled me so badly that my wife brought me to the ER. After some x-rays and a consult with a physiotherapist, I learned that I suffered from degenerative scoliosis.
I’ve had intermittent back issues for much of my adult life. The most dramatic instance was a herniated disc shortly before a matinee performance of Händel’s Messiah. I was carried out the stage door on a gurney, leaving the conductor a full half-hour to find a replacement baritone soloist. Other issues have arisen over the years, from mild discomfort on a raked stage (higher upstage than down) to cancelled rehearsals due to spasms. But there was nothing regular, and I failed to connect the dots and see the pattern. In retrospect, the diagnosis shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
“I prepared every role like the proverbial bull-in-a-china-shop, recklessly giving everything I had, both vocally and physically. ”
For most of my performing career, I operated with an air of physical invincibility. I prepared every role like the proverbial bull-in-a-china-shop, recklessly giving everything I had, both vocally and physically. Using this process, I could kinaesthetically grasp what worked and what didn’t, and pare down the action where necessary in order to create a realizable performance. I am fortunate to have a strong enough athletic background and decent enough vocal technique to have made this a viable approach in the past. Habits are hard to break, and I bull-rushed my post-diagnosis performances with the same gusto I had grown accustomed to bringing to every role. The pain did not seem to affect my performances much at first, but back injuries tend to be cumulative and it wasn’t long before I realized something had to give.
Up to this point, my vocal approach could be best described as “brute force.” I very rarely marked and almost never suffered from vocal fatigue. I can’t say if it was a result of lucky genetics, healthy technique, or a combination of the two, but I was aware of my limits and took full advantage of my good fortune. In the practice room, I would fine-tune difficult passages through endless full-voice repetition. In rehearsals, I made a habit of singing out as much as possible to ingrain every vocal nuance into muscle memory. I subscribed to a “muscular” philosophy of vocal technique. A good performance was like a full-body workout, and it was not uncommon for me to feel a bit of lactate burn in my quads, glutes, and abdominal muscles after a show. I was commonly criticized for “giving 100% all the time”, and I won’t argue the point. A part of me was always aware this approach was likely to come back to bite me, but I was having a good time and making money, so consequences be damned.
Scarpia, the villain in Puccini’s Tosca, was my vocal turning point. It was an ambitious and unlikely role for me, but one of those “bucket list” roles that you just can’t turn down. Scarpia is a dream role every young baritone toys around with in the practice room, and I bellowed my way through the iconic Te Deum many times before I was remotely mature enough to sing the entire role. This music was so familiar that I fooled myself into thinking preparation would be a breeze, but it quickly became obvious that something wasn’t lining up. Puccini’s long, dramatic phrases felt overly laborious and I often found myself struggling for breath. After some experimenting and introspection, it became clear that I was using my core muscles differently, resulting in reduced breath control. A few technical breath control exercises should have addressed the problem, but each time I thought I had it, a shot of pain would wrap around my abdomen. Fascinatingly, I was unconsciously adjusting my breathing and support system to mitigate pain. Abdominal tension irritated the muscle damage caused by my spinal curvature. I had to make some adjustments if I were to make it through this role.
“In accommodating my condition, I made both technical and dramatic breakthroughs that I doubt I would have achieved otherwise. ”
Through the years, most singers compile an individualized “bag of tricks.” Anything that a singer finds helpful can get thrown into the bag, from vocal exercises incorporated into rep (e.g. “sing that phrase on a lip trill!”) to physical adjustments (e.g. “sing that phrase while hanging upside down!”) to a teacher’s simple metaphors. I plunged deep into my personal bag of tricks while confronting the issues Scarpia had raised. One of my oldest standbys, learned in my very first lesson with my undergraduate voice teacher, is an alignment exercise. Standing with my back against a wall, I could feel a tendency to subtly arch backward while breathing and collapse forward while moving through a phrase. Another trick isolated a breathing issue: I was expanding my abdomen forward while keeping my chest flat and static with each deep inhalation. The combination was untenable in my present condition as every full breath resulted in a jolt of pain. If I could maintain proper alignment and breathe with a sensation of expanding my ribcage outward in every direction, I did not experience any additional pain. After these mild adjustments, Scarpia’s demanding phrases were suddenly attainable. However, it quickly became obvious that my performance would have to be significantly less physically active if I were to make it through the role (relatively) painlessly. This wasn’t a bad thing, as my reliance on movement and energy in the past has created some apparently frantic performances, whereas a calm and relaxed demeanour was far better suited to Scarpia’s cold, cruel authoritarian character. Ultimately, I believe I created a superior performance because of the pain. In accommodating my condition, I made both technical and dramatic breakthroughs that I doubt I would have achieved otherwise.
Along with the necessary technical adjustments, I made a few changes in general repertoire choice. My tendency towards dramatic, exciting operatic arias was not doing me any favours, so to break old habits I put more effort into lighter arias, art song, and even jazz. I had to step outside my comfort zone to keep my singing relaxed and pain-free. I was barely taking any lessons during this period, as I was afraid to let word of my condition get around and I didn’t want to lose the confidence of my teacher, so I relied on my own experience and the occasional guidance from my remarkable spouse while working through this new and unfamiliar repertoire. By no means did I become a master of art song, but the changes I forced myself to make only improved my operatic singing.
A few months after my first and only Tosca, I started work on The Merry Widow. Vocally I was in good shape, and my physical condition had seemingly plateaued. Daily stretching and core exercises prescribed by my physical therapist kept the muscle damage from exacerbating, but pain was still unavoidable in many situations. The Merry Widow, a dance-heavy Viennese operetta, was ripe with these potentially painful moments. I feared that if I revealed my condition to the director and company I might endanger my chances to work in the future, so I did everything I could to hide the pain. I asked for no physical accommodation; I waltzed, spun, and high-kicked to the very best of my ability and often limped my way home after rehearsals. I made it through the shows, albeit with a fair serving of discomfort, but began to develop a vague sense of foreboding. It was no longer unreasonable to fear that my physical limitations could jeopardize a performance.
My fears came to fruition in my next opera. The performance was in a small, intimate theatre with very simple staging. In one scene, all I had to do was walk across the stage and take a seat on an ornate throne. As my backside hit the cushion, a shot of pain gripped my right side and my face involuntarily contorted for a brief half-second. It was just a little wince, nothing more—I doubt anyone in the audience even noticed it—but that momentary break in character was enough to reveal the writing on the wall for me. It’s unlikely that my condition will improve, and if I cannot make it through a show without reacting to very real pain that my character is not feeling, it seems to me that it would be irresponsible to continue working in this field.
I had another Merry Widow on the docket that season, with a company I had performed with many times. As soon as I returned home I called the artistic director and we had an emotional conversation about what I was going through. I did not ask for a release, but I would be completely understanding if he felt the show would be better served by another baritone. He would hear nothing of it and insisted I stay with the show. The staging was adjusted and accommodations were made, but I still had a few tough rehearsals. I was lucky to be in an extremely supportive environment among friends and long-time colleagues, and my castmates were more than happy to take up the slack when I could not. We turned the closing night party into a retirement celebration, an outpouring of support and appreciation from friends old and new, and it will remain a highlight of my career.
Chronic pain has a strange effect on the psyche. It can be frustrating, demoralizing, and ultimately humbling. Before this phase of my life, I had never really considered my operatic work from any perspective outside my own. I worked hard to be a reliable colleague, not because I cared deeply for the needs of my co-stars, but because being a reliable colleague was beneficial to my own professional goals. But when it became clear that I could lose that reliability due to physical factors outside my control, my perspective shifted. If I continued to perform on the operatic stage, it was almost inevitable that a moment of failure would come. In that moment, I would not only be failing myself, I would be letting down my castmates, the artistic and production teams, everyone in the company who had worked hard to make the show a reality, and most importantly, the audience. I came to see that I loved the art too much to put myself in that position. The alternative was to go out on my own terms, head held high. I doubt I will ever regret the choice I made.
