In January, I attended my first opera, Strauss's Daphne at McCaw Hall. The experience was everything I wished it to be, though far less intimidating than I anticipated due to a lifetime of being inundated with stereotypes suggesting that opera was stuffy and old. My best friend and I used the occasion to dress up—both wearing black velvet dresses and fur-trimmed coats with updos and our fanciest costume jewelry.
It can be scary to step out in opera finery onto city streets full of sweatpants and parkas, but we found our people inside McCaw Hall—primarily silver-haired folks in dress pants and matching cardigan sets. While waiting in line at concessions, one woman in funky reading glasses acknowledged our efforts. "I love the outfits, ladies!" she marveled. We told her it was our first time at the opera. She looked genuinely excited for us, adding that she isn't normally this chatty, but the Irish cream in her morning coffee had her feeling brave. We asked what her favorite opera was, to which she mumbled, "This isn't a very unique answer, but I have to say Carmen."
When Daphne began, I was immediately awed by the delicate quality of sound—the orchestra: rich and unified. The vocals: crystalline and all-consuming. The sound: soft, but never quiet. This was because, as Google told me after the show, opera singers and classical musicians do not traditionally use microphones or electronic amplification. Once my ears adjusted, the sound was actually quite loud. (Incredible, considering that my eardrums were once blown out at a My Bloody Valentine concert.)
"The human voice is capable of producing sounds that could exceed frequencies above 2,500 hertz," Michaella Calzaretta, the Seattle Opera's chorus master and head of music staff, tells me. For reference, an average human speaking voice is in the 100 to 200 hertz range. "There is a big misconception that an opera singer must be louder than the orchestra, which is not really achievable," she explains. "It's about manipulating the resonance and the space inside your vocal tract so that the sound is heard through the orchestra." Simply put, an opera singer's unamplified voice can reach every ear of the nearly 3,000-seat McCaw Hall, not because of the volume of their voice, but because of the frequency that they achieve.
"We are trained to project with no amplification," confirms J'Nai Bridges, the acclaimed Lakewood, WA–born opera singer and star of the Seattle Opera's upcoming production of Carmen. "It takes a lot of breath work, riding the air of the voice, and tapping into resonators in the face so that the overtones in the resonances project all the way to the back of the house."
With the encouragement of her high school choir teacher, Bridges began singing opera at the age of 18, turning down a basketball scholarship to study at the Manhattan School of Music. But, despite what I learned from High School Musical, she tells me that singing and sports are not all that different—singers are athletes, and thus, it takes their entire bodies to do the job. Bridges follows the Alexander Technique, which focuses on lengthening the spine and correcting posture. "If you listen to a baby scream, it's so loud because their spine is in the perfect placement," Bridges explains. "As we age, we move further away from that resonance, and, as opera singers, we're always trying to get back to that natural cry.
"I have a couple of warm-up exercises that are very similar to crying. I don't actually cry, but it's similar to the placement of the mouth, and even the eyes are like crying. Even emotionally, it can be a similar feeling, because we have to be so vulnerable and open." Bridges achieves this physical openness with a combination of yoga, Pilates, chiropractic work, acupuncture, and a lot of vocal practice.
Another way to reach maximum resonance is through proper enunciation. Bridges speaks Italian, French, German, and Spanish, all of which she absorbed through years of learning and translating operas. Calzaretta underlined the importance of pronunciation: "If you don't have clear diction, the likelihood of your voice not ever leaving the stage is pretty high, especially for the chorus. I talk about that all the time, because we want aligned consonants and vowels that match for the sound to have the biggest bloom."
The Seattle Opera's upcoming performance of Carmen will be a big full-circle moment for Bridges, not just because she'll be back near her hometown, but because it was the first opera she ever attended. "My godfather took me, and I remember feeling super overwhelmed with amazement," recalls Bridges. "We were sitting really high up in the nosebleeds, and I remember recognizing 'Toreador Song' and 'Habanera' from commercials and movies." And I bet you'd recognize it, too—Carmen is perhaps the most referenced opera in pop culture, with "Habanera" needle drops in Up, Trainspotting, and Magnolia, and there's even a Muppet-fied cover by Swedish Chef and Beaker.
Written in 1875 by French composer Georges Bizet, Carmen tells the story of a powerfully uncompromising woman who captivates every man she meets, including the self-destructive, lovesick soldier Don José, who sabotages his future in pursuit of her. Carmen stays true to herself until the bitter end, prioritizing freedom and fame over love, which ends in Don José killing her in a jealous rage.
"Carmen is a great gateway opera, because it has everything—literally everything," says Calzaretta. "It has a huge chorus, a children's chorus, dancers, and all of the stage and storytelling pageantry that we expect from grand opera, along with love, conflict, tragedy, and other relatable themes of the human experience."
Calzaretta also highlighted the rarity of experiencing an unamplified performance in this day and age: "I take it for granted because I live in this world, but there are people who are going to come and see this for the first time and experience what analog performance is like. In the 21st century, we get so little of that unless we put ourselves in that situation. I'm honestly a little jealous!"