Opera in the Pandemic

Amidst the wider fallout caused by the Covid pandemic, musicians have been particularly hard hit, suffering cuts worse than restaurants and other badly affected industries. With venues shuttered, concerts canceled for months, and people obliged to distance themselves from one another, many musicians have had their entire existence upended with few if any opportunities remaining to play together and to perform in front of audiences. Early in the pandemic, we in the Cal Arte Ensemble realized that we needed to rethink radically the way we operate. As symphony orchestras, opera houses, and concert halls shut down, it became clear that many of us would be unable to play in front of audiences for a long time – at least a year and perhaps longer. As news of the pandemic developed, a large concert we had long planned to perform in March 2020 with the San Jose Symphonic Choir featuring works by Beethoven and Hummel was canceled. With all the uncertainties that came with the rapid spread of a dangerous and hitherto unknown virus, it felt like we were living in a bleak new era, almost the stuff of a dystopian science fiction novel.

We quickly decided to make the best of the situation by recording one of the pieces that had been programmed for our March concert using techniques that have now become almost commonplace. We asked our ensemble musicians and choristers to record each of their parts at home. After they had submitted their recordings to us, we were able to align and mix them together in a virtual performance. The result was a rendition of Beethoven’s beautiful and rarely performed choral gem Opferlied which we put on YouTube in April 2020. Many of those who had participated expressed their joy in seeing the resulting video, in part because the shock of the almost complete shutdown had robbed so many of the opportunity to get together, rehearse, and perform. Some even said that we had offered them an emotional lifeline because now, although they were confined at home, some of them quite alone, the virtual performance gave them a sense of a shared musical experience.

Although we had put together one of the first pandemic-inspired virtual performances, the idea quickly spread and before long, there emerged a plethora of other virtual performance videos created by musical groups across the globe, including leading symphony orchestras. However, the performances were usually of short well known pieces done more with novelty and amusement in mind than perhaps for any serious artistic content. 

At Cal Arte, Tamami Honma felt strongly that we should aim for something altogether bigger and came up with the idea of putting together a virtual performance of a complete opera. Thus was born her vision to create a virtual version of Verdi’s beloved masterpiece La Traviata. She saw it as a beacon of hope, like sending up a bright flare into the sky announcing to the world and to other musicians that, yes, we can still work together. By such a collaboration, we could continue to draw upon a tremendous array of musical energy and talent, while audiences could listen to newly-produced content that went beyond the usual three minute novelty video. In her quest to assemble a cast, she asked all the singers: to put themselves in the zone just as they would have done on stage. Of course, such a transformation is not easy. The pianist Vladimir Horowitz, for example, refused to record without some audience around him because he felt it would enliven his performance. The starting point for this production was to ask the singers to record themselves while listening to piano tracks of the arias that Tamami had recorded. These piano tracks serve as the replacement for a conductor providing the critical framework that enables the whole production to come together. But rather like the way scaffolding is eventually removed from a building in its construction, the piano tracks will not be heard in the final performance because they will be replaced by a virtual orchestra. Just as a conductor has to have a very clear vision of how they will approach a work, the tracks required a lot of work and thought because they needed to embrace the huge variety of tempi that Verdi encoded in his score while also anticipating and negotiating the tempo variations that each singer might want to bring to their performance. Doing this while the cast are altogether in the rehearsal studio is one thing. Doing it one by one, with everyone working remotely, is quite another. Tamami’s previous conducting experience and as pianist in rehearsing opera productions has come to the fore in managing this complex and intricate feat. 

Another critical component in pulling off a large-scale production of this kind comes in the magic of the video and sound engineering that makes it possible to bring together a disparate array of home recordings into one seamless performance. Sound recordings need to be aligned and synchronized so that they sound as though two or more singers are performing on the same stage. Multiple instruments need to be layered in to replace the anchor piano tracks with an orchestral sense of rubato and nuance. None of this is being done with the usual studio shortcut of using metronome click tracks. While click tracks are useful for short works that move at a constant pace, they are not flexible enough to allow singers the freedom to breathe and express themselves naturally. Video recordings also have to be assembled into a coherent whole that somehow evokes the theatricality of the opera. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Cal Arte’s Julian Brown, who has played as concertmaster in many orchestras and has prior experience at the BBC in sound recording and production, has applied his blend of expertise to both technical and artistic issues in a series of virtual performances including Cal Arte’s video of Beethoven’s Opferlied and the San Jose Symphonic Choir’s complete performance of Faure’s Requiem premiered in November 2020. 

The production of La Traviata is planned for release on Cal Arte’s YouTube channel on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2021. With a cast of established opera stars working together here in the US and in Germany performing the main roles, it promises to be something truly out of the ordinary. But because this has been such an extraordinary time and the pandemic has had such a profound effect on the way many musicians work, we felt it worth finding out how our singers in this production have adapted and kept their spirits up. Worth mentioning too is that, in some ways, singers have been even more adversely affected than instrumentalists. While some string quartet and piano recitals have still been possible, albeit with much diminished socially-distanced audiences, because of the aerosol transmission of the Covid virus, singers have been almost entirely banished from most performance venues. We wanted to know how our singers have coped and how they see the value of working on this and other virtual productions.