The daily reality of the life of a singer is far removed from the rose-tinted experiences of the wannabes on TV’s talent show Operatunity, in which the winner goes, in a year, from being an amateur to singing a lead role with ENO – for one night only.
Perhaps I’m a very slow learner. I spent five years at music college followed by ten years of obscurity and misery learning how to sing and perform, and am only now beginning to make a name for myself.
If Operatunity is right, why don’t we restructure the study of music, and spend all the money on a one year intensive course, instead of the four to eight years endured by most singers?
This would mean that when we left college and couldn’t get a job it wouldn’t matter that much. We could easily retrain for other occupations.
I know singers who are thinking of becoming plumbers once they’ve summoned up the courage to plunge their arms into other people’s U-bends.
Most of my contemporaries and virtually all the younger graduates take other jobs to make ends meet, from painting and decorating to working at Selfridges. There is so little opportunity in this country that we can barely sustain two opera houses in our capital city.
Before they give up their day jobs the not-so-young hopefuls in Operatunity need to realise that there are lots of singers just waiting in the wings to step into their shoes at the supermarket checkout.
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There is no such thing as an undiscovered star. If you’re not doing it, it’s because you haven’t got the where-with-all to survive the dark times. The times when you’re thrown out of music college for having the temerity to suggest that your singing teacher is making your voice worse rather than better.
The times when you take a job selling ice-creams at the Royal Opera House and have to suffer the indignity of former teachers approaching you with “Still here, then? And two choc ices please.” The times when, in desperation, you audition for an amateur company just so you can keep singing, and don’t get the job. The times when you go for an audition at a director’s house and emerge sometime later bruised from battling to keep off his personal casting couch.
Why is ENO encouraging this ‘anyone can do it’ attitude? It is bad timing to place a virtual novice in front of the skilled ENO chorus when many of them are about to lose their jobs. If the makers of the programme really wanted to discover and nurture a talent, they would have done better to go to one of the music colleges to help a struggling student who has always had a burning desire to become an accountant but hasn’t known how to go about it.
But I suppose that wouldn’t make such compelling TV.
Jessica Walker
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