Not a Marx brother in sight, but I spent many June days and nights at the opera enjoying Britten’s fun and fantasy-filled adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Several years ago, on this same site, I wrote about putting together a standard opera production at the Metropolitan Opera. That journal entry turned out to be controversial, but I still think it is valuable to understand the process that goes into bringing a work to life from the planning stage to performance. This month, I will take you behind the scenes at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis and explain how we put it all together.

The company has been in existence for fifty years. I was not originally scheduled to conduct at OTSL this summer. Then, out of the blue, about a year ago, I was asked if I would take on the Britten, and I happily accepted the opportunity to be a part of this special anniversary season.

It is always helpful to spend more time at home. Instead of flying to the next engagement, all I have to do is drive about 20 minutes to the Loretto-Hilton Center on the campus of Webster University. Plans are now in the works to build a new opera house about a five-minute walk from my home, but this will probably not come to fruition for four or five years.

Previous engagements saw me leading Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, Rossini’s Barber of Seville, and then, during Covid, Gianni Schicchi by Puccini and Highway 1, USA by William Grant Still. The last two were performed in a parking lot. The experiences have always been wonderful. With a mission focused on discovering and nurturing new talent, OTSL has become a major force on the American opera scene.

All the operas are sung in English. Although understandable in the time before subtitles and surtitles, I see no reason for this today. In my opinion, it robs many works of the natural flow between words and music as intended by the composers. Accents come on strange syllables, notes have to be added or subtracted to fit the text, and most of the time, the translations are archaic and awkward.

With most companies performing operas in their original languages, singers here in St. Louis have to learn any given work in two different ways. If the original idea was to prepare vocalists for major careers, doesn’t it make more sense to let them learn these roles in the language they will be singing these operas in for the rest of their lives?

Additionally, English is the most difficult language of all in terms of vocal projection. During one of the breaks in our rehearsals, the diction coach—yes, we need one, even for operas written in our native language—came up with a very interesting theory. I asked why most of the great singers who perform works in the American Songbook have no problem when it comes to pronunciation. We all understand every word from Sinatra et al. However, in opera, diction is often obscured.

Her on-the-spot thought was that when young singers begin their studies, they learn operas in Italian, French, and other languages heavily dependent on vowels, which impacts the vocal production when they sing in English. The nature of operatic vibrato also plays a role. Moreover, many composers do not set English words particularly well.

So, we spent a lot of time working on pronouncing the Shakespearean text as cleanly as possible. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Britten was certainly at home writing for the stage. With only a year to compose the opera, he came up with a marvelous score featuring an interesting collection of instruments in the pit orchestra. He and his partner, Peter Pears, used the Bard’s words to create the libretto, making judicious cuts for this operatic adaptation.

This opera was new to me in terms of learning the work. I was familiar with it but only via recordings. Although I received the piano/vocal score about six months before our first rehearsal, I had to wait longer to sit down with the orchestral version because I was on the road and unable to travel with the three heavy volumes—one for each act—in tow. I studied the opera while I was away by loading the piano version onto my iPad. Then, all I had to do was get the orchestral colors into my head. A kind of crash study course occurred when I got back from Europe.

I had lots of questions before the first rehearsal. Would we make any cuts? One or two intermissions? Text changes? How would we fit all the musicians into the cramped quarters of the pit? So forth and so on. The answers were yes, one, yes, and we were not sure.

With 19 individual roles, a children’s chorus, and four fairies, this opera is a huge undertaking. Most of the cast was available on a Sunday for the initial musical rehearsal. There would be three of these and then almost three full weeks of staging, all done with piano. To help keep track of not only the vocalists’ names but also which characters they played, the singers had name tags strung around their necks.

The idea on this first day was to try to get through the whole opera from start to finish. I needed to have a sense for how well the singers knew the work, and they needed to understand what tempos I had in mind and the like. My usual approach, whether in symphonic repertoire or operatic fare, is to absorb what occurs at the first reading and then make the appropriate adjustments going forward.

That first rehearsal went surprisingly well. Each singer arrived thoroughly prepared, and the difficult ensemble pieces seemed to have been cast to ensure that balances would not be problematic. I sensed a general atmosphere of excitement and came home feeling that the next two months would be quite satisfying.

British director Tim Albury started with the staging rehearsals the following day. This is a time-consuming process, not to mention a logistical nightmare. OTSL puts on four full productions each season, and several of the singers participate in at least one of the other operas. Availability becomes the key to scheduling. Often, we do not know until the night before what we will be rehearsing on any given day.

It was helpful for me to be around as much as possible in these early phases of preparation, even though it involved a lot of waiting while Tim worked with the cast. Often, a minute of one scene could take up to an hour to stage as he placed the singers and adjusted their positions along the way over the course of several repetitions. It got even more complex when more than two singers appeared and/or sang at the same time.

Our rehearsals took place in one of the three rooms with adequate space to accommodate our needs. For the first week, we were in one of the studios in the lower level of the opera building. This room had a ceiling supported by two pillars, making it a bit complicated to put the singers where they would be in performance. The studio was also about ten feet shallower than the actual stage, so the space was compressed.

My assistant conductor was Darwin Aquino, who has been with the company for several years. He offered advice and covered for me when my services were required elsewhere. Darwin did a great job, and I felt fortunate to have him, especially in the event that I would be placed on the disabled list.

After just six days, we had done most of the first act and some bits and pieces from the remaining two. Things were coming into focus. Particular kudos to the kiddos, the children’s chorus, who have a major role throughout the opera. Because of them, I did one sort of silly thing.

Several years ago, I had a shirt that read, “These are difficult times.” It showed the time signatures of 11/16 and 6/4. Having remembered that, I started looking around for other musically themed tees and found several. I donned a different one each day until I exhausted my wardrobe, at which point I cleaned them and gave them away to the young singers.

We moved upstairs to a bigger space during the second week. There, we started to get a better idea of where everyone would be placed. The only singer who was not available during the first week was our lead character, Oberon. Each member of the main cast has a cover, should something happen to put the principal out of commission. Since this role is sung by a countertenor, finding a suitable understudy can be difficult, but fortunately, OTSL has been training many of these voices over the years.

While diving deeper into staging, we also added choreography. Not a lot of dancing is required in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but what there is should look convincing. Seán Curran, who directed the Puccini opera I led several years ago, took on the terpsichorean responsibilities and did a terrific job showing the performers how to do the various steps.

With such a large cast, I wondered if there would be any tensions between the singers, but from my perspective, everyone seemed to get along swimmingly. Lots of good humor was on display at each rehearsal, and we all had a good time putting this piece together.

I saw the St. Louis Symphony, the house band, for the first time a little after the two-week mark. My goal for the four rehearsals spread out over two days was to get through the whole opera twice (without singers). This piece requires some fancy footwork from the musicians.

The staging rehearsals continued almost daily, with six or seven hours of intensive and detailed work. Although the process can feel tiresome as the director adjusts and refines, by the end of the third week, we were able to go through entire acts without pause. It was all starting to come together.

Finally, the orchestra and cast assembled for the first Sitzprobe, and we could assess what it would sound like. We had the good fortune to be in the theater with the orchestra in the pit. I was positioned quite a bit higher than the musicians. The small size of the pit made it impossible to fit everyone, so the percussion section was actually in another room, watching me over a video monitor.

We encountered another challenge with the harpsichord. We were prohibited from using the real thing due to space limitations, but the electronic version sounded awful. Fortunately, there was a newer model that somehow no one knew anything about. None of the other operas required this instrument. It needed to be placed near the two harps and celeste, but they were quite far away to my left. We had to put sound monitors in so that the rest of the orchestra could hear them. Since the Sitzprobe was just a single rehearsal, I decided to work on the first act only. We could do each scene twice, more or less.

The next day, we had a piano run-through of the whole show. We had not yet introduced costumes, but some of the props were available, and the rehearsal room was large enough to simulate the conditions on the stage. Everyone was very proud of how it went. A second piano run-through with an invited audience—who loved it—took place, followed by a much-needed day off.

There were three piano tech rehearsals. This is the most tedious part of putting a production together. It is all about the lighting, so every cast member is constantly moved around while the technicians futz with colors, angles, and the like. These rehearsals presented the first real opportunities to get everybody onstage and in their precise positions. For the first time, I knew whom I could see from the podium and which singers would take their cues from the monitors placed in two offstage ramps.

Next, we had two orchestra dress rehearsals, each three hours long. We knew it would be pretty tight in terms of getting through the entire opera and correcting any problems that might arise. For these rehearsals, all the forces came together: orchestra, cast, and technical crew.

The orchestra had not seen the first act for almost a week, so I was concerned that some members might not remember all that we had rehearsed. Indeed, we had a few bumps in the road, and I took about ten minutes to fix them up. After a break, we returned for a pretty good run of Act II.

The one hiccup was that we ran out of the allotted rehearsal time with six bars to go. When we approached the end of this first dress, the personnel manager of the orchestra came into the pit and signaled that I had a minute left, and I tried to show him that we needed to finish. During the final piano tech, we had not coordinated the last note and the subsequent blackout, which was important to nail down. Since there was no visible clock, it was impossible for me to know what time it was, and I could not make any on-the-fly tempo adjustments to compensate.

The second and final dress rehearsal went very well, and everything fell into place. With a sense of confidence, I found myself very excited for opening night, which was 48 hours away.

We had decided from day one that I would not make a traditional entrance into the pit but simply be in place a few minutes before performance time. The red light on the floor signaled to me when to begin. The first act was magical and moved along well. Following a 25-minute intermission, I did trek to the podium, mostly to allow the orchestra to receive a well-deserved bow.

What I did not expect, nor did anyone else, was how often the audience would burst into applause or robust laughter during the performance. Sometimes we actually had to stop and either wait or go back a couple of bars. At the conclusion of the opera, the usually reserved Missourians leapt to their feet. We took more curtain calls than originally planned before Oberon led us off the stage.

After six successful performances, I am headed back to the concert world, with a few interesting stops along the way.

See you next month,

Leonard