So there we were last January, late at night, cleaning up from the last performance of Wee Small Hours. I think something like 150 people total showed up for three premiere shows, and I could be exaggerating, but I think it was something around there.
The building was still a little chilly as the heat had been turned on a few hours prior and some circuit wouldn't let the heater work properly, something to that effect.
I looked at the people who had made the show happen. Not just the people who were on the stage, but the people behind the scenes as well. I felt I had let them down. I mean artistically, as usual, we put on an amazing production, but yet again, low attendance.
Put it in this perspective...
I am an opera singer. That's really what I do. Opera, of course, entails all the best of the physiological event of singing- two thin pieces of cartilage slamming together faster than imagination contributing to a bunch of different factors that culminate in the emanation of a beautiful sound.
I studied and worked hard to do with my voice what God intended through many eaons of evolution and genetic luck. Yup God, Science and plain old luck.
But then...
The Three Tenors Came out. I was stunned to think how these icons of the operatic stage could do something as huge as that and as cool. I was wowed that the art form could withstand the mass effect.
Then Bocelli came out... Touted as the next Pavarotti. I was crushed. I know so many of you reading this are like, Whaaaat? Crushed? Whatever do you mean?
It's like this.
There is a similarity in what an athlete does and what an opera singer does. Training, coaching, practicing are ALL part of the deal. Striving to be the best in what the body will allow is what it's about. And good opera singers have something crazy extra to make it so that their voices sound like it's coming from Mount Olympus.
Pop, on the other hand is a vista that takes all colors of the spectrum. If you compare a pop singer to an athlete, you get a person who a lot of time savages their body, whether it be the Cords or the legs to make a more human condition. To show that everyman can do whatever event is in the heat, but there, the aesthetics are different. It is more song and sound of the music and lyrics oriented rather than what kind of sound comes from the two cords in the larynx.
This is why opera singers are so standoffish sometimes. They don't want ANYTHING to happen to their, literally, precious voices. You get two vocal cords.
SO when a pop singer entered the vaunted realm of opera I and many of my opera brothers and sisters were shocked and horrified. That the artform was going to be usurped was our unspoken fear. And if you say the opera world today in comparison to then, it is different. It is not just about the voice anymore. Opera has learned that it has to compete for peoples' time just like any entertainment source, regardless of how rewarding it may be. Butts in seats.
New matinee idols are in the opera world. They are sleek, elegant creatures, many can sing amazingly well, a few cannot. But it isn't about the singing so much anymore. It's image. It's pizzaz, it's business as usual and art sometimes.
But let me not let you think that I'm breaking maudlin here. Yes there were expectations there in that world a decade ago or so.
But things have changed...and so have I.
My goal and purpose for the past three years is to synch the business of art with the personal of art. The passion and desire melded with the, "how many records did you sell" of art.
Think about this.
There are very, very high paid artists out there. Opera leads in major houses earn an amazing amount of money for their work. But in the pantheon of the music industry, as a whole, not many people would raise a glance when they say that artist on the street, much less come to a performance JUST because of them. Now think about that when a less well known opera singer lead comes to a less major house, still gets a high fee, but is even LESS well known in that locale than in the town with a major opera company.
It's called in the rock world, a Draw. "How much can you draw?" (how many people can you pied piper in here) asks a bar owner to a rock/pop band. "Uh, like fifty." good you're hired. At the gig, the band draws 60 people, the cover charge being three dollars, the band gets one hundred eighty bucks. Each player gets roughly forty five dollars.
That's not much. But four months later, the band comes back... and having played more gigs, having made flyers and handouts and writing all sorts of folks, listing in the paper, having had those first 60 people, now fans, say they are "the bomb", their next gig at that bar draws one hundred fifty people.
And so on, each time drawing a larger and larger crowd, earning them larger and larger paychecks at the end until they begin to sell out festivals, then music halls, then sports arenas, when their fees are more than ample for the investment in flyers and footwork.
In these past years, it's been my duty to, as operatic tenor, Nathan Granner raise awareness of opera through non-traditional formats and to develop a fan-base. So all that time spent on this project and that project have all been about increasing my draw in the opera world and increasing the world of opera's draw.
The American Tenors, Musicals, artistic Directing, Company founding, art shows, rock shows, Night of Song -opera in restaurants, Hymns and other collaborations are all about getting more people to come and see the amazing operas.
The big business of music is nothing without getting out there and touching people personally. It is relationships and fanaticism on both the artists side and the audience side. There is no strategy that can beat the slow burn of building, like a rock band, a fan-base.
This is why last Tuesday, when we performed the fourth ever performance of Wee Small Hours and twelve people showed up, I was a wreck. Twelve people at twelve dollars a person. five people, serious professional, deserving a career musicians in my band, not including myself, hundreds of dollars spent on marketing that probably went as far as the next block and twelve people.
It didn't help that it was Tuesday, but Ive seen people come out on any given weekday.
This is supposed to be me coming back into opera as a triumphant general, bringing rabid fans into the opera house and I drew twelve people in a pop show.
My Expectations were crushed.
What to do about the financial reality? What to do about bringing crowds out? How does this help the opera career?
Yet, as the evening progressed, we had more important things to attend to. The show rocked. It was as powerful as I thought it was after out January premiere, even better. And the people that WERE there, who ranged from ages 21-75 all (well except for a couple classical music traditionalists) were excited and impressed by the show. The staff danced.
It was SUCH a good time.
My expectations...my dreams...I don't know really. I was expecting to be the next Pavarotti. I was expecting to do a lot of things over the years. And, whether it was a rejection, or change in the industry, I've had to adapt to whatever forces that are out of my control.
What hasn't changed are my goals. Through stings and difficulty and life itself, operatic tenor, Nathan Granner will be on that stage somewhere Whether in some smaller city or in a massive hall, bringing the world of opera to people both familiar and unfamiliar to the art-form in a way that is personal and authentic. Plus a whole bunch of other stuff!
It is for me to walk a thousand miles in order to mark one step. My only expectation is to make that step.
Erin, keep taking that step.
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