Article November 30, 1998 Issue

Scores to learn? No problem

Spiritual strategies for success

By Christina Sloan

HAVE YOU EVER been faced with a work assignment so huge that you think, "I can't do it — it's impossible"? That's what I thought several years ago as a voice student in the Opera School of the Salzburg Mozarteum in Austria. I'd studied German for one year in preparation for this first experience on my own away from the United States.

The first two days of the six-week summer course, the coaches had each of us perform two opera arias. Our perfomances would determine the level of work we were given. Evidently mine went pretty well, because they assigned me roles in three opera scenes, to be learned and studied musically, staged, and then performed at the end of the course. "Great!" you say. So did I, at first. But the coaches gave me that assignment at noon on Friday and told me to return Monday morning at ten with all three scenes memorized! And these scenes weren't little two-page numbers.

I knew one scene, Act I of Hansel and Gretel, but I knew it in English and now had to learn the German text. It's a wordy scene, especially for someone with only one year of German under her belt. The second piece, which I'd never studied before, was the complicated five-voice card scene from Carmen And the third was from a challenging Richard Strauss opera, Arabella, that I'd never even heard of.