Opera Singer

"Since singing is so good a thing," wrote William Byrd in 1588, "I wish all men would learne to sing." It is just as well for professional singers that his advice has not been literally taken to heart, for the profession is over-full as it is, and extremely hazardous. It is true that successful singers have exciting, eventful, satistying lives that at the very top can win wealth and luxury and world-fame, and even not-quite-at-the-top can still bring a good deal of public notice and admiration, and considerable material comfort. But for every prosperous singer there are hundreds for whom singing has meant disappointment, failure and poverty.

Even for the successful singer, there are many hazards, perhaps more than in other branches of professional music.

He has, to begin with, to establish himself.* This is not easy, for there are in Britain far too many singers competing for not-nearly-enough work, and competition is fierce. The principal singer has no union to protect his fees. He is paid as much as he can afford to stand out for in a cut-throat market, and when he is getting started he must have a hairline accuracy of judgment (should he take as little as ten guineas? Is it wise to refuse as much as eight?) He must be careful with his first successes. Often he cannot afford to refuse work, even for small fees, or to lose goodwill by refusing, and so he is tempted to take everything that is offered him.

Obviously, he must sing everything that may lead on to something more important, but, equally obviously, he must not endanger his voice by over-working it. ——

*Everything in this chapter will apply equally to women as to men. But it would be very trying to have keep on writing, "He or she has to establish himself or herself", and the like, and I hope sopranos, mezzos and contraltos will forgive me if I use throughout a conventional and convenient masculine gender.

When he has picked his way safely through such dangers, and his work comes in regularly and comfortingly, even then the singer cannot relax to enjoy his success, for this is a cut-throat profession, and there are always younger, fresher and cheaper voices pressing hard on his heels, ready and eager to take advantage of any fall in his standards. He can therefore never afford to give a bad performance - although he is often compelled to give one, when for instance a heavy cold has left him almost voiceless but he nevertheless has to go on and sing, because no one else is available to sing the part.

Even this uneasy tenure of his professional status may well not last very long, in comparison with other professions, and the average singer will be lucky if he sings at his best for twenty years. A distinguished agent insists that the figure is as low as fifteen.) There was a relevant example in the 1948 season of the Glyndebourne Opera. Two Mozart operas were produced at Edinburgh for the first time since the Opera closed down at the beginning of the war, and in 1948 there were only two principals still left in the cast-John Brownlee and I-who had sung for the company before the war, only nine years before! There are, of course, spectacular exceptions. Madame Patti sang for over forty years, and so has Norman Allin. I heard Jussi Bjorling in 1939, and, twenty years later, in 1959, he is still one of the world's great tenors.

But the increasing speed of modern travel has made it possible for the singer to travel too fast from engagement to engagement, and so to sing too often, without enough rest between performances. Bernard Shaw, in his music-critic days, once wrote of a singer: "He shows every sign of a short life and a merry one, for his method may be summed up in two words: sheer violence." Even for singers with a nonviolent technique, the motto is still true. It is too often a short life and a merry one.

Unfortunately, even in this short career there is no security for British singers. Some Continental opera-houses have pension schemes, but as yet there are no pensions for British singers. A singer may be lucky and get a forty- or forty-two-week contract with an opera company, but that is the longest security that he ever knows. His concert contracts are for single performances only. Always he is at the mercy of his health. A common cold that a bank manager would scarcely notice may force the singer to cancel several engagements and to lose a few hundred pounds in fees. An illness, which would leave another man fit enough for work at his desk, can finish the career of a singer in a moment and leave him penniless.

A short life and a merry one; and a fascinating one, too, for, in spite of its risks and its uncertainties, hundreds of young people each year find it quite irresistible and determine to try their luck. You may well be among their number. This chapter is for you, so that at least you will know what qualities you should have before you can even start to think of singing professionally, what you must face in training yourself for professional singing, and what problems to expect in getting a foothold in the profession. If you are determined to face the dangers and the risks of the pro-fession, at least begin with your eyes open.

And begin at the beginning. You will need a very good voice. The sort of voice that is good enough to sing ballads in the drawing-room with Auntie Elsie contributing a hushed accompaniment at the piano to the admiration of your family may well not be enough for professional singing. Some of your most important work will be with an orchestra - on Wagner nights in the opera-house, it may be a hundred strong - and you must have a voice big enough to make itself heard, even against an orchestra. You will need a big range, too, at least two octaves, and this is roughly what each voice must be able to stretch in the standard works of the ordinary singer's repertory:

Your voice must be flexible. This applies most particularly to sopranos, but every singer, even a heavy bass, must be able to get his voice moving quickly and lightly (think of all those triplets in "Why do the nations"). The voice must have colour, too. To put it at its simplest, you must be able to make sad songs sound sad and happy songs sound happy.

A singer must characterize, and for a clear definition of character in a song or in a whole operatic role you need clear words. You must have good diction. All these qualities will be developed, of course, by good teaching, but there must be some natural foundation on which your teacher can build.

You will need some qualities of musicianship. The British orchestral player is noted for his extraordinary sight-reading and is inclined to look down on the singer, whose sight-reading is generally not very good. But the truth is that, though good reading is essential for an orchestral musician, it is not in the least essential for a singer. It is a convenience to be able to learn and rehearse new music quickly, but the singer can get along perfectly well without being able to read. The greatest Falstaff of a past generation could not read a note, but learnt each bar of his big repertory by having a pianist patiently play every phrase over and over again until he had got it by ear. But once he had learnt it, he never made a mistake-and there was the further advantage that, by the time he had finished memorizing his music, he had worked it comfortably into his voice. The good sight-reader finds it so easy to be accurate that often he sings without as much rehearsal as the well-being of the voice requires, and I have known several singers who could sing anything at sight but whose voices had been damaged through the years because they never took quite long enough to "groove" the music into the voice.

A singer's musicianship must, I think, have five main points.

(a) He must sing accurately in performance, no matter what his reading is like in private.

(b) He must have a feeling for style. Bach must sound like Bach and not like Verdi, and Mozart not like Wagner but like Mozart. This means that the singer must know each work that he sings in its historical setting, and understand how the period and the conditions it was written for affect the way it must be sung.

(c) He must have good intonation. Often, singing out of tune is a matter of technique, and a good teacher can put things right. But there are people with, say, a defect of the ear, who can never sing right on the note. Fortunately, this is very rare, but if you are lucky enough to be one of those unfortunates who do suffer in this way, then you must content yourself with singing only for your own pleasure. Alas, you will never make a living at it.

(d) He must have a good music-memory. There is a convention of the concert-hall that he may carry the music of an oratorio on the platform, but everything else, in ordinary concerts, in song recitals, and in the opera-house, he must sing from memory.

(e) He must be versatile enough to be able to sing both as a soloist, with a tone that leads and dominates, and in an ensemble, with a quality that will blend with the other voices to form one stream of sound.

There are certain physical qualities that you must have— strength and stamina, for instance, not so much for actual singing, but for all the other activities of the singer than can sap his energy and take the edge off his voice. Travelling is a great burden and a great problem. One singer once told me that he found himself with six engagements on six successive nights; on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with an opera company in Glasgow, and a concert and two broadcasts on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday in London; and he spent six successive nights in a sleeper, three nights going north and three nights south! I can myself remember a week from my own diary, singing with the Glyndebourne company in Edinburgh, and simultaneously rehearsing at Covent Garden. Monday, I sang in Edinburgh; Tuesday, caught the morning plane to London, rehearsed at Covent Garden all day, and caught the night train to Edinburgh; Wednesday, Isang in Edinburgh; Thursday, flew again to London, worked all day, and came back again by the night train; Friday, 1 sang in Edinburgh; Saturday was the end of the Festival, and there was packing to do, and parties to attend; on Sunday I caught the night train to London, arrived at King's Cross at 7.30 a.m., hurried home, had a bath, shaved and had break-fast, and was on the stage at Covent Garden at 9.55 a.m., ready for a ro a.m. orchestral rehearsal of Aida.

This is where the singer's stamina begins to tell. An audience does not pay to hear a tired pertormance, and the singer must be able to stand up to the physical strain of working and travelling constantly at such a pace, and still be fresh and full of energy for each new audience. A good physique is an essential, then, both for the physical process of producing a big voice and for the never-ending round— travel, rehearse, sing, travel, rehearse, sing-week after week, year after year.

Your good physique will be of great value, too, in your public performances. Good looks are an advantage, but there are many fine singers, of both sexes, who have managed without them. (I remember the famous founder of a world-famous opera gazing entranced at a foreign prima donna, who was making her first appearance at a rehearsal of his company. He hugged himself with pleasure. "She looks," he said, "just like my pug-dog!" She did.) But, even without a handsome face, a good physique, some height, a good carriage, all of these will help to impress an audience, even before you have sung a note to them. You will need, as people have it, a "good personality".

You will get on best with audiences if they sense that you are friendly and human. Courage, confidence - you will need both. (It really does take courage to wait in the Artists' Room at the Albert Hall at your first Prom, listening to the applause after the overture, to hear the Concert Manager say, "Thank you, Mr. X - we are ready for you now', to go straight on to the platform, thread your way through the orchestra, face the enormous audience and that vast hall, and immediately sing calmly, steadily, and accurately.) But your courage must not run to seed and become arrogance -your confidence must not degenerate into conceit. You must be able to put success into perspective, and in this you will receive much outside assistance!

The Press can be a very astringent corrective. If you are to be a success at all, your first notices will have been good, encouraging and even exciting to a beginner. But very soon you will find that the critics have a knack of bringing you down the peg or two that they helped to put you up. There will be many amateur critics, too. You will be surprised to find how often people you know - and those you do not know - take an intense pleasure in offering you their unsolicited, unpleasant and wounding comments on your work. You must have enough self-control to suffer good criticism and bad, praise or malice, without letting yourself be upset by any of it.

You must know something about people. If you are shy and withdrawn and shrink from public criticism, or find it an ordeal to meet strangers; if you find yourself puzzled, or disgusted, by human motives and behaviour; if you cannot be sympathetic towards people of every sort and condition and sex-then you must not try to sing professionally. In all of your work, in the concert-hall and in the theatre, you have to be an interpreter, and you must constantly meet and work with new groups of people, and you can neither interpret people nor work with people unless you can understand them.

Above all, you will need luck. A good, big voice, good musicianship, enormous strength, fine stamina, extraordinary good looks, courage and self-confidence, an attractive personality, a sympathetic understanding of people-you can have all these, and still not get anywhere unless you have in addition the luck at the right moment to attract the attention of the right man, with the right contract in his pocket, waiting for someone like you. Every successful singer can point to moments in his career when he took a great step forward through his luck in being at the right place at the right time. You will need luck, too—lots of it.

If you have succeeded in getting so far, if the risks of the profession have not frightened you off, and if you feel that you have the right qualities of body and mind, we must now take a step further and discuss the question of your training.

First of all, why must you train at all? You have a good, big natural voice-why bother to train an instrument which is working well enough? There are two answers. One, that a full and complete "natural" voice is rare. Most voices need a good teacher to develop fully their size, range, quality and flexibility. Two, even a good "natural" voice can wear badly under pressure, under for instance the strain of singing a heavy season, or studying a big new repertory, or singing for some time through a cold or a throat infection. A "natural" singer, who sings unconsciously, without understanding the working of his own technique, will not know how to put things right when they go wrong, as someday they certainly will. A good teacher can help you to understand the workings of your voice, and, once you do understand it, you can keep it much more easily on the rails when you are working hard, and can nurse it safely through the periods of ill-health that you are bound to suffer.

Where should you train? You can work either at one of the colleges or schools of music,* or privately with a freelance teacher of singing. The choice is easy to define, but extremely difficult to make, for there are advantages and considerable disadvantages in each method, and some difficulties and dangers that are common to both.

To my mind, the most persuasive argument in favour of a school is that there you can study more than just singing. It becomes your principal study in a general musical education. You are one of a body of hundreds of students, living in a musical atmosphere, with opportunities to work at different kinds of music, with student accompanists, with student ensembles. The routine of rehearsal and performance becomes familiar, and you will not feel a stranger in a strange world when you begin to do both professionally. You can be awarded a Diploma at the end of your course. It’s true that a Performer’s Diploma of one of recognized schools is not, frankly, of any marked value to a young performer. Managers and choral societies are much more interested in how you actually sing than in your possession of a Diploma. But a Teacher’s Diploma may be of some aid as an insurance if you want to have teaching in reserve, in case you fail as a performer.

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* For example, the Royal College of Music, Royal Academy of Music, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and Trinity College of Music in London; Royal Manchester College of Music; the Birmingham School of Music; the Royal Scottish Academy of Music in Glasgow. I need not add, though I do, that this list is neither exhaustive, selective, nor in any order of merit, and that there are other schools of comparable standards.

But for singers there are some disadvantages in the schools.

First, you are committed to a course of full-time study, which may last three or four years, and at a time when no one can say whether there will be even a bare living for you in singing when you have finished your studies.

Second, a student has generally speaking no choice of teacher, but is allotted to a teacher by the Principal. Administratively, it must be done that way - that is obvious. But the success of any teacher with a voice depends upon a close understanding and sympathy between teacher and pupil; and if I had to be a student all over again I should be very reluctant to enter any school, however valuable its general musical education, if I were to be pitchforked into working with a teacher in whose selection I had no say.

Third, generally the time spent on singing in the schools is far too short. Two thirty-minute lessons is a common ration, and I have heard of two twenty-minute lessons, and even of one twenty-minute lesson, each week. I believe that on this point I am prejudiced because of my own experience, for when I began I had a lesson a day for four years, sometimes two lessons, and very occasionally three lessons in the day, and I cannot feel that one or two short lessons a week are really enough for a full professional training.

Fourth, there is sometimes conflict between the needs of the school and the nursing of the voice. Schools take pride in the concerts and the operas that they can produce, and it is understandable that if a production is endangered for want of a tenor, it is very tempting for the school to cast the best tenor that it has available, even if he is not quite ready for the role. One has often heard young singers in school opera performances, loyally struggling with music that is much too difficult for their immature voices. Their enthusiasm for their school leads them to make the attempt. Their selfishness—and every young singer must be selfish in protecting his young voice-ought to have kept them out of the cast. Similarly, though this is much less of a danger to the voice than singing a heavy role, most schools, and under-standably, expect all their singing students to sing in the school choir. It is, of course, a useful training in sight-reading, in musicianship, and in a different kind of musical experience. But the training of a principal singer and that of a chorister aim in opposite directions. The soloist must produce an individual sound that will always stand out boldly from its neighbours. The chorister must blend his voice with the others in the choir, so that its individuality is merged in the total sound of the choir; often, I think, the promising solo voice has something of its edge dulled by too much chorus-singing.

The advantages of working with a private teacher are for the most part the exact opposite of the school’s disadvantages. You have complete freedom in the choice of a teacher and in the amount of time that you want to devote to your studies. You work entirely for yourself, and at your own pace. Your attention is not distracted from the work that you have planned by having to learn, rehearse, and perform a part in an opera, or in oratorio, that you must sing because a school demands it. Your only loyalty is to your own voice and its development.

But this freedom has its handicaps. You work so much alone in the studio that your first professional rehearsals with an orchestra or with an ensemble may be a great ordeal for you. You will miss the companionship of the rehearsal routine of the school, the opportunity you would find there for student performances.

There are points for and against each way of working. How do you decide? Basically, I think it comes to this. The higher your ambition, the more important it is that you should retain in your own hands the choice of your teacher. You may be lucky enough to persuade the Principal of a school to allot you to the man of your choice, but either in a school, or privately outside, you must work with the right teacher. That is the key factor. The foundation of your whole career is your voice, and its proper development depends upon your studying with the right teacher

In the choice of a teacher, you must be quite ruthless. A young singer whom I knew once came to me for advice. He was in the middle of a scholarship at one of the schools. His voice was all over the place, he had no confidence in the teacher with whom his Principal insisted he must work, and he was miserably getting nowhere. I suggested that the sensible thing was to withdraw from the school, get a job to support himself, and study with someone in whom he had confidence. "But," he protested, "if I do that, I shall lose my scholarship grants!" It seemed to me to be very muddled thinking which would make him want to continue drawing several hundred pounds a year to enable him to take a course of study which he knew was spoiling his voice! In the end, whatever it costs, the only economical way of getting your training is to study with the right teacher.

How do you find and recognize the right teacher? Standards of teaching vary quite surprisingly, both in and out of the schools. You will fortunately be spared the sort of advertisement that was common in the press before 1907: "The Elements of an Aesthetic Tone in ONLY Six Lessons, and BY POST! After this Initial Instruction, the Intelligent Pupil can do the Rest—UNAIDED!" There was in those days a vast interest in making music in the home, in singing for your family and your friends, and there were many dishonest

teachers who preyed upon the ambitions of ordinary people to sing well. But a famous slander case in 1907 was instrumental in calling public attention to the charlatans of the profession, and advertising became more dignified and discreet. Today's standards of honesty and professional conduct are higher. But still there are good teachers and bad teachers.

Generally speaking, it is better that your teacher should be a singer himself. There are excellent teachers who have not had a performing career, but it should be easier for a man who has himself sung in concert-halls, in the theatre, and in broadcasting and recording studios, who knows all the differing demands that the profession makes upon the voice, to be able to guide a pupil safely through the dangers and the difficulties of the early stages of a career.

Your good sense can, I think, help you to find the right man. If you have the singer's instinct, if you have the right feeling for the voice - and without it you will not make much of a career - you will sense, in the performance of each singer that you hear, just how he uses his voice. You may not be able to put it into words, but you will feel where he places his voice, how he handles the phrase — you will be able to "think" your way into his voice. You may not always like what you sense, and indeed, often you will find your throat aching in sympathy with the tensions of a bad singer. But, if you search long and patiently enough, you will in the end find a singer whom you understand completely. Everything in his voice is comfortable, and easy and familiar to you. You feel absolutely at home as you listen.

This is how you would sing — if only you knew how! If he teaches, this is the man for you. If he does not teach, then find out where he studied, who was his teacher. You have recognized the method that you want to study-now you must find the immediate source of that method.

Now that you have found your teacher, a number of other questions present themselves. 1. What should you study? 2. How long will it take? 3. How much will it cost? 4. At what age should you begin?

(1) If you study at one of the schools, your course will be laid down for you, and will include singing as your principal study, and a second study, which preferably should be the piano, for an ability to play at least a part of the accompaniments of your songs will be a great help to you in learning your music. You will take, too, such academic subjects as elementary harmony, aural training, the history of music, musical form, and so on. These, though not immediately necessary in performance, will help you to understand the materials with which you are to work. If you plan to sing in opera, classes in stage work will be helpful.

Studying with a private teacher, you will not have classes in these ancillary subjects ready at hand, but you would be well advised to arrange them for yourself. If you live near enough to one of the schools that admit part-time students, you will find that joining classes there will be the most economical way of doing it.

You should take every opportunity, once your voice is matured enough, of singing with an orchestra and with small ensembles.

Duets, trios, quartets, quintets, are part of the texture of oratorio and of opera, and you must learn the technique of oratorio and of opera, and you must learn the technique of balancing and blending your voice with other soloists.

Languages, too, are important, three in particular-French, Italian and German. You must acquire a good accent in each. But that is not enough. You cannot sing Lieder recitals, for instance, parrot-fashion, with no more than a carefully-manufactured accent, and no knowledge of the meaning of the words. The turn of a phrase, the inflection of a melodic line, depend upon the verbal accents, and these come from the subtleties implicit in the meanings of the words. The ideal is to be able to speak these three languages perfectly and idiomatically. But even if you cannot speak them, you must have enough of their vocabularies, and of their varying grammatical constructions, for you to be able to understand completely each detail of the songs that you are to sing.

(2) How long will it take? Generally, I think it is true to say that it does not take long enough. Most singers become impatient, and try themselves too high too soon. They forget

- and teachers, too— that a voice must be really safely established before a start can be made on the standard repertory.

(I know of one case where a young beginner, with no knowledge of singing at all, found himself at his second lesson being taught to sing "Silent Noon", one of the most difficult of all English songs. That is like asking a piano pupil to try his hand at his second lesson at a Mozart sonata, just to see if he can manage it.) Get your voice properly poised first, so that its range is complete and the tone flows easily under a supple control throughout its whole range, and through its whole range of dynamics. You will find it useful, from time to time during this part of your work, to learn simple, lyrical songs, to use them as practice jumps against which you can measure the development of your voice and technique. But do not embark upon the preparation of what will be the big works in your repertory - the big opera and oratorio arias, the Lieder cycles — until the voice and your control of it are equal to the task.

This is a long process, and few people outside the profession realize how long it should be. One of the leading agents in England, who has had hundreds of singers through her hands and has watched each one succeed or fail, insists that it takes from five to seven years to finish making a singer, and indeed I know one very distinguished Viennese singer who did study for seven years before he made his début.

You must be patient. It must be expected to take time, and if you try to hurry things up you will only damage your voice and inhibit your final success. And, if you cannot be patient, then you must not think of being a professional singer.

(3) How much will it cost? This is an impossible question to answer, for it must vary from singer to singer, from school to school, and from teacher to teacher. But one or two figures may be of help. At two of the London schools fees are £90 a year. You must, of course, add to that figure the cost of your keep, your food, clothes, fares, music, going to concerts, drama classes, foreign language lessons, and so on.

Private teachers' fees vary greatly. They can be a few shillings a lesson - they can be three guineas a lesson, and some fashionable teachers may be asking more. So a programme of three or four lessons a week can be a very expensive business.

But you must be sensible in planning your work if you have limited resources. You may be tempted to go to the cheapest teacher you can find. By all means go to a cheap teacher, if he is good. It is not the size of his fee but the quality of his work that matters. If that is bad, no matter how little you pay for it, you still cannot afford it. If you find a good teacher whose fees are high, you may be tempted to eke out your money by arranging only one or two lessons a month. For a beginner, that I believe is a waste of time and money. With lessons so widely spaced, you lose the continuity of your work and spend half of each lesson recapturing the essence of the one before. You would do much better to hold your impatience in check and to save until you have enough money for, say, three lessons a week for some months. A concentrated effort in the early part of your training is much the most economical way of spending your money, for you will get much more out of your lessons that way. Then, when you have got your voice going well, you can drop the number of your lessons down to what you can comfortably afford each week.

(4) When should you begin? I think most singers in Britain begin much too young. I believe that it is a mistake for youngsters to leave school and go straight to a school of music, or to a private teacher, to learn to sing, at the same age as their friends who start serious study of the piano or violin or who go to the university to read law or natural science. Voices mature later than people suspect. You could make a long list of singers who have started fine careers in their late twenties or early thirties. One of the greatest of dramatic sopranos was a light soprano until at thirty-five her voice matured into the tremendous instrument that we all heard with such awe and admiration. You could make another list, a sad one, of singers who have studied early, have made some impression, have forced their voices to sing music much too heavy and exacting for their age, and have fizzled out within a few years. The better your voice is going to be, the longer you need to nurse it. As a rough guide, if you start your training somewhere in your early twenties, and spend five to seven years on it (even if you spend four years at one of the schools, you will find that your voice still needs plenty of work when that is ended), you will be in your later twenties when you first make your bid to establish yourself.

But that means that there will be a gap of some years between your leaving school and starting serious work on your voice. That gap, to my mind, is the most valuable single factor in all your planning. It will give your voice time to mature, ready for the strain of serious singing, and it will give you some years to learn, and establish yourself in, another way of earning a living, as an insurance against failing as a singer.

Statistically, the bitter truth is that the odds are that you will fail. You are trying to edge yourself into a small and precarious profession. Do you realize how small it is? In the two permanent opera companies, at Covent Garden and Sadler's Wells, there are in all about seventy-five principal singers, and that includes those who sing the glamorous leading roles-the Mimis, the Beckmessers, and the Alfredos — as well as those who appear in the small character parts that are possibly ungrateful but certainly valuable in the repertory. There are seventy-five careers to be made, no more. It is true that there are others to be made in the D'Oyly Carte company, but it must be remembered that the demands of Gilbert and Sullivan, though equally exacting, are very different from those of Covent Garden and Sadler's Wells, and it is not easy for a singer to switch from the Savoy operas to the more serious side of the profession.

There are one or two singers who have managed to change from Gilbert and Sullivan to grand opera, or the other way round, but in general you must think of the D'Oyly Carte company as a career in itself. It is extremely unlikely that you could use a position in that company as a stepping-stone to grand opera. There are, of course, other demands for singers to appear in musical shows in the theatre, in London and on tour. But these demands are impossible to assess, for they vary from year to year. You will often find ambitious young singers working in the chorus of such shows. After all, it is one way of earning bread-and-butter while you are waiting for recognition in the more serious felds of music.

Occasionally well-known singers will leave grand opera or concert singing for a while to sing in a "musical". But this kind of work stands apart from work in grand opera, and it remains true that there are only seventy-five principals' contracts in force in British opera as it is at the moment.

In the concert world, the other field of professional singing, there are no more than fifty singers (sixty at the very outside) who, in present conditions, can earn a comfortable living at concert singing alone. There are, then, about one hundred and thirty full-time professional singers in the feld of serious music. If you assume that the average singing life is about fifteen years, then the annual wastage - by death, illness, increasing age, and, amongst the women, by marriage - is no more than eight or nine a year. (If you take the average singing life as twenty years, then the wastage figure drops to between six and seven a year.) Roughly, you can expect there to be room for four new singers in the opera companies each year, and four in the concert world too.

Competing for these places are a vast horde of young voices. Six of the schools of music have been good enough to let me have details of the numbers of their full-time students of singing in 1958-9. They add up to these totals: Principal study—272. Second study—355. In addition, at four schools there were 426 part-time students. In these six schools of music alone, therefore, there were 698 serious students, with another 355 serious enough to take singing as a second study.

I have not been able, for various reasons, to obtain figures from every school in the country, but I am sure that to add in the totals of the remainder would more than double these figures. This would give an estimate of 1,400-odd serious students, with another 700-odd second-study students. These figures would themselves be insignificant in comparison with the numbers of singers studying privately all over the country. There are hundreds of teachers, the best of them with diaries full from early morning until late at night five or six days a week, besides those, not so gifted or fortunate, with a dozen or so singers amongst the students of piano, organ, harmonium, elements of music, and piano accordion that fll the studios of the general practitioners of music. The mind boggles at the thought of having to count accurately the total number of singers in the country - there are certainly thousands.

These figures, vague as they are, must be kept in proportion. It is true that many of them will be working for the sheer pleasure of singing; some, so that they will know enough to take class-singing in schools; others, and thousands of them, to compete in music festivals. Only a very small percentage will acknowledge that they are working with a definite intention to sing professionally. But a very much larger percentage will have a deep-seated conviction, which they prudently keep to themselves, that their talents will take them into the profession, and a larger percentage still would gladly leap at a professional contract if it were offered them! So it is overwhelmingly true that the pool from which new professional singers will come is many hundreds of times greater than the very small number of places which become available each year. You must be one in thousands— and your success will be balanced by thousands of disappointments.

How do you set about securing one of the few vacant places for yourself? The quickest way is a successful audition with an opera company, which may get you a season's contract, and this, with luck, will be renewed each year. But, because the stakes are so high and precarious, please listen to a word of two of warning.

(I) Don't audition too soon. Young singers too often explain a bad audition by saying that they only did it "for the experience". The only experience worth having is that of a successful audition. Sing to a management before you are ready, and they may well dismiss you from their minds for good.

(2) Remember there is no security. A monthly cheque is a great comfort, but a dispute with the management might easily lead to its disappearance. In Germany or Italy, with scores of opera-houses, if you have something of a reputation you would not find it hard to get another job, but in Britain your resignation, or the non-renewal of your contract, might well mean the end of your operatic career.

(3) So you should try to keep your concerts going, while you sing in opera. The "N.A. date" —a feature of British operatic life— is a date on which you have permission from the management to accept an outside engagement, and are therefore "Not Available" for performances or rehearsals in the opera-house. Every N.A. application is a nuisance for the manage-ment, for they have to decide, perhaps nine months ahead, if the singer is needed to rehearse or to sing on that particular day, but, for the singer, it is his insurance against the day when he will want to leave the opera-house.

(4) Be sensible about chorus contracts. You may be tempted to join a permanent opera chorus, with romantic day-dreams of one day becoming a principal, with first night cheers or flowers. I can think of no more than four singers who have done that in fifteen years. The physical strain of the chorus is considerable. Principals sing no more than two or three times a week, but the chorus are on every night and rehearse every morning. Only the strongest voices can survive, and they often become roughened and hardened. It is almost a certainty that, once you are in the chorus, you stay there. Quite apart from the fact that years of singing in the chorus may spoil your voice for solo singing, you must realize that once you have settled down in the chorus you are much more valuable to the management as a chorister than you could be as a principal. You acquire a specialist knowledge of the repertory. In The Magic Flute, Act I, you bring on the veil for Tamino; in Bohème, you serve the meal in Act Il; you bind Carmen's wrists in Act I, so that she can slip the rope when she wants to — and in a repertory of twenty or thirty operas, you make yourself so busy that it would cost the management hundreds of pounds to rehearse anyone else in all your detailed tasks. If you enter a chorus, you will work with a friendly and loyal crowd, you will enjoy their company, but you must be sensible and abandon your ambitions to be a principal - and this for twelve or fourteen pounds a week. Perhaps I should add here that the Glyndebourne chorus is in a different position. The engagement is for a festival season only, and not an all-the-year-round contract; there are only six or seven operas in each year's repertory; most of the operas performed there are very light on the chorus; and so there is little danger of any vocal strain.

Other managements make it plain that they expect their choristers to make a career of the chorus. At Glyndebourne the policy is to engage promising young singers in the chorus, and to encourage them towards becoming soloists by offering them a chance as understudies, and young people have everything to gain and everything to learn from working in the chorus of such a theatre.

In the world of concerts, there is no quick entry. You may have dreamed of an audition with a famous agent, who, with tears in his eyes, will promise you that he will make you a star in a few months. It is a nice dream, but it will not come true. A theatre agent will go out and try to find work for his actor-clients. Concert agents work differently, and they are as much agents for employers as they are for singers.

Societies will ask them to engage artists for their seasons, and will often send a list of the artists they want, with alternatives, in order of preference: "Messiah-December uth. Tenor: I. John Brown; 2. James Smith; 3. Tom Jones." The agents will offer the engagement to Brown, Smith and Jones, in that order. If Brown is already booked for December IIth, the offer passes to Smith, and so on. But, whoever in the end gets the contract, the agents, and of course with perfect propriety, will draw their usual commission. It is no part of their responsibility to persuade the society to have you rather than Brown, or Smith, or Jones. That is up to you. You will get work through any agent, if a society writes to him with your name at the top of its list.

So you must get yourself known. In the old days, you gave a London recital, and your Press notices were useful in introducing you to the public. Nowadays, that technique is not so productive. There are fewer London dailies, and the popular Press has little interest in serious music or unknown artists, so you will be lucky if you get more than two or three very short notices in return for your very expensive concert. You must start off in the provinces, for that is where the bulk of your work will be. The world of music has a very formidable competitor in television, which keeps audiences away from concerts and makes musical finances very shaky.

But it may be a help to you that many societies, to save expenses, have begun to engage local singers, and young beginners, at small fees. In the old days before the war, and for some years afterwards, even in small Welsh villages and small northern towns, they would engage four well-known and comparatively expensive artists for their Messiahs and Elijahs. Now, one or two established singers will find promising youngsters with them on the platform. This may give you your opportunity to get started. You make a local reputation as a promising amateur. You are offered a small fee for a concert with established singers. You sing well.

More concerts follow. When you have so much singing on hand that your ordinary job begins to interfere with your singing, then you give it up, and lo! you are a professional singer, with your other job safely tucked away in the background in case you should ever need it. This is how many singers begin, and it is obviously the safest way, for you do not commit yourself to full-time singing until you see enough work ahead of you to keep you going.

There are, of course, fields in which you may supplement your first earnings as a concert singer. There is "dinner work", entertaining at Masonic and other dinners. Fees vary greatly. Some singers will command their twenty, twenty-five, or thirty-guinea fee, though I think it is true that such fees are more often paid to popular T.V. magicians or comedians than to concert singers. Many singers must content themselves with five guineas for a fee, though it is sometimes possible for them to hurry from one function to another and so earn two fees in the evening. But, if you do "dinner work", you must be prepared to find that your fees from this source will be smaller than those you get in the concert-hall. Still, they are a help towards making a living.

There are also calls for singers to sing in small groups for recordings, in film studios, out-of-vision in television studios. The demand is for good sight-readers, to reduce rehearsal costs. The work is well-paid and can be a useful addition to your income. But it is not solo singing, and doing too much of it might well affect your status as a principal singer.

One of the most important of your early auditions will be for the B.B.C. The B.B.C. is very much aware of its responsibilities to artists and of the immense amount of work that it has to distribute each year. I have seen a lot of its work, both as a performer and as a producer of some of its programmes, and I have always been struck by the pains that are taken to ensure that artists are fairly treated. Its auditions are scrupulously conducted. A good audition, and successful first broadcasts, will help enormously to bring you to the notice of the public. Each time you sing, your name is printed in the Radio Times-and each week 8,000,000 copies are printed!

In addition to publicity, sound radio has a great range of engagements for singers, in recitals, orchestral programmes, operas, choral concerts. Television will give you even greater publicity, it you have the special qualities demanded by that difficult and treacherous medium. But you must not hope for a great volume of work from it. The space allotted to serious music in the programmes is very small. Nevertheless, you will find the B.B.C. one of the most important and interesting markets in your work, and an encouragingly fair and civilized employer in a cut-throat world.

Have I made this cut-throat world seem difficult and precarious? I hope so, and with a clear conscience, for (1) it is difficult and precarious, and (2) if you really have the stuff of singing in you, if you are determined to make it a career, nothing that I can say will stop you. Nor would I want to stop you. It is a good life. But if what I have said has made other and lesser talents hesitate and doubt, has made them pause before they launch themselves into a singing career, then at least I shall have helped to clear the way for you.

Good luck!

David Franklin