Go for the Gold!

I have been watching the Vancouver Winter Olympics these cold February nights, seated by the fire, while the young athletes there are risking life and limb on the (sometimes) icy slopes of British Columbia. John and I visited British Columbia some years ago and found Spring-like weather there in January. So it's no wonder that they have had a problem getting enough snow to work with.

It has occurred to me this time around, as it has in the past, that 'A performance is a performance is a performance', as Gertrude Stein almost said. Whether in sports or in music, it is the physical and mental preparation that gets one ready for the big moment.

These athletes work hard for years to prepare their event so that when they have their five minutes on the ice or the snow, they can excel. Musical performers must follow the same kind of regimen. If you are performing a quadruple flip or singing a difficult aria, the same preparation must go into it. The young red-headed man who won the Gold on the Half-Pipe last night has literally spent years getting ready to do what he did last night in about three minutes. As he said, he has had many falls along the way, but last night, when the chips were down, he delivered in Spades! (I'm mixing my metaphors, but then...).

Years ago a very fine Mezzo-Soprano, who had studied with me for a number of years, had learned the famous Verdi aria 'O don fatale', with its perilous last page where the singer must stay at the top of her range throughout that entire section at full throttle, after already having sung a difficult and dramatic six or so pages. As a dear friend of mine, the late Jane Lafetra, who was a mountain climber, used to say when crossing a dangerous pass in the Rockies, 'This is no time to think of home and Mother!!'. Well, the Mezzo could sing the whole aria flawlessly until the last page, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. After a lot of work on the aria, she was determined to use it as an audition piece. I told her 'Absolutely not! Until you can sing it through twice and come out smiling after that fiendish last page!'. Amazingly, she took my advice and continued working on it until as I told her, 'I should be able to wake you up from a sound sleep and you would breeze through it beautifully and ask if I wanted to hear it again'. Roberta Peters reputedly sang the Queen of the Night arias in her Met audition about six times as they brought more and more listeners to hear her.


My Mezzo had done the work and when her version of the Olympics came, in her case, also an audition at the Metropolitan Opera Company, she delivered the aria that she had perfected and was added to the roster. She became one of six of my students to sing for that illustrious company.

Whatever song or aria you are preparing must reach this point of perfection, so that whether you are soaring 20 feet above the half pipe, or soaring on the stage of the Met, you win the gold!