Fish Out of Water

We're in the final days of our summer season, with two concerts left to go, and that means that we're deep into rehearsals for the most stressful show we play all year. It's the full-length semi-staged opera that brings Sommerfest to a close every year, and it's a brutally difficult thing to pull off for a variety of reasons.

The first problem with the opera is that we simply don't have nearly enough time to prepare it. During our regular season, we rehearse a concert for three days or so, then perform it three or four times before starting the next week's repertoire. During Sommerfest, we also perform three or four concerts a week, but every one of them has different repertoire. So if you've ever wondered why professional orchestras tend to play a lot of familiar old warhorses in summer, the lack of rehearsal time is a big part of it.

And that brings us to the second difficulty of the Sommerfest opera. To put it bluntly, we are not an opera orchestra. For the most part, our familiarity with operas and how to play them is very, very low, at least compared with the musicians who play them full-time. Opera really is a very different game than symphonic work - at the risk of overgeneralizing, orchestral music is Germanic, while opera is Italian. Symphony orchestras base nearly everything we do on rigid precision and rhythmic clarity, while opera swims in a much more freeform pool where rhythm is merely a suggestion, tempos shift violently back and forth at the whim of the singers and the conductor, and many of the important elements that give the work its shape aren't noted in any way in the musicians' parts.

And speaking of parts, we come now to the major reason that we'll all be sweating it out until the last note of Aida sounds on Saturday night. As anyone who's ever played in an opera pit can tell you, the printed orchestra parts for even the most famous operas tend to be horrifically, atrociously, criminally difficult to read. I've never really understood why this is, but it's a fact. What's in our part is often different from what's in the conductor's score in very important respects - dynamics might be missing, notes can be incorrect, and the publisher's main aim was obviously not to give us readable parts, but to save as much ink as possible. (For instance, our Aida parts don't have the key signature at the beginning of each line. The sharps and flats only appear when the key changes, so there are several occasions when no key signature appears in my part for several pages. That's a disaster waiting to happen when your part is 57 pages long and you haven't played the piece before.)

There are also lots of little things wrong with the parts - notes that aren't spaced properly, lyrical cues in two languages (one of which is German, for absolutely no reason at all) jammed into small spaces between staves, and then, there's my favorite bit of insanity. The markings in our parts for "piano" and "forte" dynamics are not the usual stylized and markings we're all used to seeing. The "p" is a standard lowercase letter, but the "f" is a block-printed capital letter in miniature, and if you're more than six inches from the page on your stand and playing through a fast section, the f looks exactly like the p!!! This has led to some unscheduled drive-by solos in our rehearsals, which would be hilarious if it weren't quite so terrifying.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when this is what nearly all orchestra parts looked like. But over the last several decades, some very dedicated and detail-obsessed orchestra librarians have helped publishers standardize parts, remove errors, and establish a basic "look" for symphonic scores. There's still plenty of variation from publisher to publisher and country to country (the French, in particular, are ridiculously attached to using a symbol for a quarter rest that looks like a backwards eighth rest, which the rest of the music world just hates,) but generally speaking, most of the repertoire symphony orchestras play comes with parts that are pretty easy to decipher at high speed.

I don't know why the people who publish opera scores don't hire the dedicated librarians to do for them what they did for symphonies, but they haven't. And that's pretty much fine with a lot of established opera companies, because they've owned their sets of parts for decades, and the errors have long since been corrected, and the whole orchestra could probably play Aida from memory anyway, just like I'm pretty certain I could get through Beethoven's 5th without a part. But when a bunch of musicians unaccustomed to playing opera encounters a set of parts that hasn't been opened in 20 years, well... let's just say there's a lot of frantic scribbling in the margins going on.

We'll get through it, of course. We always do (mainly because the singers who will be the main attraction are spectacular performers who actually do opera for a living,) and with any luck, no one will mistake a ppp for an fff on Saturday night. But I'll say this - it's a smart move to schedule the orchestra's annual vacation immediately after this particular performance. I need a nap.