Hillary Schave
Mezzo-soprano Cassidy Smith (top right) and soprano Antoinette Konow (facing the stage) sing with Wingra students in an Opera for the Young performance.
With 30 minutes to showtime in the Wingra School cafeteria, all of the performers — four professional opera singers, one piano player and 35 Wingra students, ages 5 to 11 — are just getting acquainted. “Where are the talking animals?” yells out one of the adult actors. Four children raise their hands — or paws — and shuffle to the front of the group. The adult actors make last-minute decisions and give directions. The crew practices a part where all of the student singers need to raise their hands and yell out “and a pet!” at a specific time. The scene appears slightly chaotic but this is standard operating procedure for Opera for the Young, an organization founded in Madison in 1970.
“The music teachers are provided with the music to practice at school and online materials for the kids to practice on their own,” says Diane Garton Edie, artistic director for Opera for the Young. “When we get to the school our cast teaches the kids their staging and the rehearsal happens in the 45 minutes before curtain.”
Opera for the Young’s original founders — a group of local pianists and voice teachers from UW-Madison — had a simple goal, Garton Edie says. “They wanted to introduce children to opera and bring it into schools. Kids don’t need to have their parents bring them to Chicago to see a big show where the operas are three hours long with expensive tickets. This opera happens right in the school’s gymnasium.”
Each year a famous opera (or original opera, as is the case this year) is chosen and adapted for a younger audience. Past performances have included The Barber of Seville, The Pirates of Penzance and Cinderella. The program has grown throughout the years and there are now about 200 shows a season at elementary schools across the upper Midwest. At the beginning of a new opera season, music teachers contact Opera for the Young if they are interested in hosting a performance at their school that year. Despite increasing demands on teachers and students’ time, “people still make it a priority to bring us in,” says Saira Frank, managing director for Opera for the Young.
Aviv Kammay, the music teacher at Wingra, always signs up for a performance. “I think it’s an opportunity for kids to be exposed to opera live and getting to participate in it makes for an even richer experience,” Kammay says.
A strong supporter of the program, Kammay still likes to break the rules a little. “It’s very important for me to not have auditions for kids and I want everyone to get to be on stage,” he says. While technically there are supposed to be 16 students in the chorus, Garton Edie says they have adapted to allow more students to participate. And at Wingra they are even more flexible. “The Opera for the Young people say, ‘it’s Wingra, it’s Aviv,” Kammay says. “‘We’ll just have two choruses on both sides of the stage.’”
Today’s mid-March performance of Super Storm, written by Garton Edie with music composed by Scott Gendel, was originally scheduled for late January but was delayed by the polar vortex. At a rehearsal the week before the March performance at Wingra, third grade performer Naomi Hoffnung explains Super Storm’s plot. “There is a super storm and it makes all of the pets able to talk,” says Hoffnung before she breaks out into song. “And then the baritone gets over-magnetized and becomes really powerful and thinks we should all be the same.”
“Super Storm has several themes including extreme weather and diversity,” Garton Edie explains. “The seeds for the story were planted in my mind a long time ago.”
As the brief rehearsal comes to an end, the students and staff of Wingra School and family members file into the cafeteria. The audience settles in and the players take the stage. The opera begins and when the part they practiced earlier arrives, the students yell out “and a pet!” on cue as if they had practiced it 100 times.
Work considered the oldest modern opera: Dafne composed by Jacopo Peri around 1590
Oldest opera with a surviving score: Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo from 1607
First English opera: Venus and Adonis composed by John Blow around 1683
Oldest opera house: Teatro di San Carlo, built in 1737, Naples, Italy
DeFord Bailey, African American musician, opened a 1927 country radio show with this line inspiring another opera: “For the past hour we have been listening to music taken largely from grand opera; from now on we will present ‘The Grand Ole Opry.’”
First African American opera: Carmen Jones, 1943
First rock opera: The Story of Simon Simopath by the British band Nirvana, from 1967 (although others lay claim to being the first).
First rap opera: Carmen: A Hip Hopera, 2001
