In The Gigli Concert, Tom Murphy’s play from 1983, the successful middle-aged protagonist, who is known only as the Irishman, finds himself in a moment of crisis. After decades of striving he has realised that there are “too many facts in the world”.
The solution, he comes to believe, is to sing like the legendary opera star Beniamino Gigli, and he enlists the assistance of JPW King, a self-proclaimed “dynamatologist”, whose job is to make the impossible happen. The Irishman eventually achieves his goal in a moment of personal and theatrical transformation.
Murphy’s play is on my mind as I sign up for Sing Rusalka, a public workshop that Irish National Opera is running to let people have a go at Antonín Dvorak’s 1901 opera, which it’s performing at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre this month.
There are Play Rusalka and Paint Rusalka options, too, but as a long-retired choir girl it’s the opportunity to experience the power of a choral group that appeals. I spent much of my childhood performing with Cantairí Óga Átha Cliath, a competitive youth choir that sang every year at the National Concert Hall, as well as in international competitions in Wales and the Netherlands, where we were regular prize winners.
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I stopped singing around the same time I started smoking, in my early teens, and while I gave up the tobacco habit not long after coming of age, I never sang in public again.
Now, like the Irishman in Murphy’s play, I find myself nearing my middle years in a state of dismay at the inescapable facts of the world. Global instability, climate change, the impact of tyrannical individuals rippling across oceans: it’s easy to get lost in one’s own anxiety. Sing Rusalka feels like a personal challenge. Can I sing myself into sanguinity?
After signing up, I receive an email with sheet music and a link to a recording of the Wedding Chorus, a joyful celebration song from the second of the opera’s three acts, that marks the nuptials of Rusalka, a water nymph, to the prince, in a story that has close parallels to The Little Mermaid.
Fergus Sheil, Irish National Opera’s artistic director, has chosen it for us to sing today because “it is a beautiful, short chorus section that you can get your head around in a two or three-hour session. Some operas, like Madama Butterfly, would be less suitable, because the chorus don’t get the stand-alone moment they do here”.
Although the invitation stresses that you need no experience, and don’t need to prepare, I decide to be proactive. Apart from lullabies and kitchen karaoke, I rarely exercise my vocal cords musically, so I use the materials the company has sent to reawaken my inner diva, conscious that singers who are far more experienced than I am will also be participating: members of church choirs, choral societies and amateur music groups, as well, perhaps, as trained opera singers.
I can sight-read music quite well, but still, the score seems intimidating, with four parts – soprano, alto, tenor and bass – laid out, a dizzying array of sharps and flats, and a libretto in three languages: the original Czech, plus German and English.
The page is too busy for me to make sense of, so I revert to the recording instead. I play it over and over, humming along at first, before graduating to dum-de-dumming and, finally, getting to the words.
Although we will be singing at the workshop in English – “White are the roses by the way, brightly the sunshine beating” – the work is written to be performed in Czech, and it’s fascinating how the guttural plosives of the libretto’s original language take on an airier expression of joy in the English translation.
Knowing the notes does not an opera singer make, however, so I call Jennifer Davis, the soprano who is starring as Rusalka, for a quick tutorial on the difference between singing in an opera and singing anything else.
The main difference, she explains, is that “singers are unamplified, which is very different from other genres. You need to be able to sing loud enough to be heard over an orchestra and fill a large space, and there is a lot of training and technique that goes into that.
“The way the voice works is the same, but you need to be able to project your voice in a different way than in other genres, and to be able to support the voice with your body, not just neck and throat. There is a lot of technique that goes into doing that safely.”
The only preparation she advises is a basic one. “Drink tons of water. Hydration is the number-one thing when you are preparing to sing, and you need to start drinking water hours before, because it takes that long for the water to reach the muscles.”
Davis’s other key tip is not so much technical as philosophical. “Anyone can sing and sound pretty, but with opera you need to remember you are telling a story.”
Finally, performance day arrives and I arrive at the RDS Concert Hall, in Dublin, with about 100 other singers, most of whom are women and most of whom are of a certain age. Many are gripping scores already marked with pencil and highlighter, and filed in professional-looking folders.
While we’re waiting for the warm-ups to begin, I chat to a viola player, a professional clown, a theatre director, a journalist who isn’t reporting and an employee of the Czech embassy, who will be called on towards the morning’s end to give us a quick introduction to pronouncing the libretto in its native language.
Sheil starts by inviting us to hum some scales: as soon as we press our lips together the room fills with an impressive wall of sound. Now that our voices are warm, he asks us to apply the same attention to our breathing. We are to use our diaphragms, he tells us, not our lungs.
As we try filling our bellies out with a series of phrases – including a playful rendition of The Grand Old Duke of York – it’s remarkably easy to hear the difference his breathing advice makes to the rotundity and longevity of individual notes.
Pianist Adam McDonagh joins the session as we start to tackle the score. There is no gentle part-by-part approach: we launch straight in with the four competing song lines.
Only a smattering of tenors and basses are here, but what they lack in number, they make up for in the force of their low notes.
I have placed myself among the altos, assuming the middle ground would be the easiest spot to be, but I soon realise I should be across the room with the sopranos, whose high melody dominates.
I have no highlighter and am still finding it hard to focus on the score, so I just follow the lead of those around me, which I realise includes a few members of the Irish National Opera chorus. One is directly behind me, and her surety definitely helps imprint the harmonising melody of the mezzo line.
Sheil corrects our mistakes as we move through the music four bars at a time. He shows us how to sing the vowels, how to focus our voices as light bulbs rather than torches, so that the sound will fill the room. The goal of the chorus, he explains – and this comes as a real surprise to choristers – is not to make a homogeneous sound. The chorus are characters, too, so we need to add colour and individuality to our expression. Eventually, we seem to be sounding quite impressive.
The biggest challenge is yet to come, however. An opera chorus, Sheil reminds us, doesn’t stand at the back of the stage, supporting the solo singers. Its members are moving around the stage all the time.
At his instruction we descend from stalls to the floor and put our singing into physical motion, as if we are revellers at a wedding party.
It is unbelievably difficult. I try to follow the chorus member again, but she is spinning around, and I can’t hear her. In fact, I can’t catch the mezzo line at all, so I just walk around like a drunk at the afters of a wedding, mouthing “rhubarb, rhubarb”, because the score is even more difficult to read while you’re in motion. Thankfully, I am not alone in my confusion.
Back in our seats, we are giddy with failure. Whoever knew that singing could be so easily derailed by all the other elements involved in an opera? The Irishman’s feat in The Gigli Concert was surely a bit of a cheat: singing like Gigli would have been a doddle compared with performing like him.
Yet, like the Irishman, my encounter with the power of the live voice – mine and others’ – has been enough to distract me from the facts of the world, if only for a few hours on a Sunday morning.
Rusalka, staged by Irish National Opera, is at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, from Sunday, March 22nd, until Saturday, March 28th
