Richard Woitach Interview with Bruce Duffie . . . . . . . . .

Conductor / Pianist Richard Woitach

A Conversation with Bruce Duffie

Richard Woitach, a versatile Grammy-nominated conductor and pianist whose career included nearly four decades with the Metropolitan Opera, died on October 3rd, 2020 in New York following a long illness, and had been a member of Local 802 since 1957.

Maestro Woitach led over 800 performances of 88 operas, including 23 productions with the Met. He made regular appearances bringing opera to a wider audience with the annual Met in the Parks series. His repertoire as a conductor included over 200 orchestral works. When he wasn’t on the podium, he was well-known for his many appearances on the Metropolitan Opera’s radio broadcast intermission features as a host, pianist, historian, and as an expert panel member on the Texaco Opera Quiz. In 1981, Mr. Woitach recorded “The Unknown Kurt Weill” with soprano Teresa Stratas, which received two Grammy nominations for best classical album and best classical vocal soloist performance. That same year, he accompanied the Metropolitan Opera Ballet to the White House, where they performed Poulenc’s Babar, narrated by Werner Klemperer. A frequent guest piano soloist with various orchestras, he also conducted a London Symphony Orchestra recording of arias with Soprano Lisa DiJulio. Celebrated singers with whom he played and recorded also included Beverly Sills, Sherrill Milnes, Anna Moffo, Regina Resnik [CD re-issue shown below], and Jon Vickers.

See my interviews with Gian Carlo Menotti, and Jorge Mester

woitach Born in Johnson City, New York on July 27, 1935, Woitach began his music studies at age 6, studying piano, flute and conducting as well as performing on the organ with his mother Esther. He attended Johnson City High School where, at the age of 16, he performed Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto with the Tri-Cities Symphony.

Woitach attended the Eastman School of Music, studying under Orazio Frugoni. He joined the Rochester Philharmonic as official pianist while still an undergraduate, where he appeared under the baton of his mentor Erich Leinsdorf as piano soloist, a collaboration that continued with The Boston Symphony. He toured as the piano accompanist for violinist Zino Francescatti from 1957-59, and in 1959 joined the Metropolitan Opera as a rehearsal Pianist and Conductor.

Woitach made his professional operatic debut as a conductor in 1961 with the Cincinnati Opera’s production of The Barber of Seville and his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1974 conducting I Vespri Sicilliani. He served as Artistic Advisor of the Arizona Opera, Music Director of Western Opera Theatre as well as the Wolf Trap Opera Company, which he led for seven seasons. Over the years, he appeared as guest conductor with numerous companies including the San Francisco Opera Company, Opera Company of Boston, Opera Company of Philadelphia, The Vancouver International Festival, and the Milwaukee Florentine Opera. In 1990, he inaugurated the Valhalla Wagnerfest in New York State, conducting performances of Wagner’s Siegfried.

Maestro Woitach was committed to bringing operatic masterpieces from his parents’ native Poland to America. In 1992, he conducted the first complete performances outside Eastern Europe of Karol Szymanowski’s Krol Roger in the original Polish, and an English production at Wolf Trap featuring Metropolitan Opera singers Alan Monk and Richard Cassily.

After retiring from the Metropolitan Opera staff in 1997, Woitach served as Music Director of the Merrick Symphony, and continued to perform as pianist in recitals, and as soloist with orchestras in the New York area. In 2004, he produced and performed the world premiere of a cycle of songs for bass voice by Jack Beeson as well as a suite of selections from Twelfth Night by Donald Foster. Woitach also produced and performed piano recitals featuring works of composer friends, as well as concerts featuring music of Gustav Mahler.

Woitach continued to record performances on piano after his retirement, including The Low Bass with basso Kevin Maynor (2002) [shown below-left]. A 1971 recording of Roland Trogan’s Five Nocturnes [LP shown at left] was reissued on CD in 2006. These nocturnes, which were published to coincide with the recording, were written for and dedicated to Maestro Woitach. [Another recording of a piece by Trogan is shown below-left.]

A dedicated teacher and mentor throughout his career, Woitach coached singers and taught Master Classes at San Francisco State University, Indiana University, Academy of Vocal Arts (Philadelphia), University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada), The Bel Canto Institute at SUNY New Paltz, The Pittsburgh Opera, The University of Alabama, The Glimmerglass Opera (New York), The National Association of Teachers of Singing (Toronto) and others. He participated in programs as a member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR), which involved analyzing the personality and music of Richard Strauss.

== Biography from the website of Local 802 AFM
== Names which are links in this box and below refer to my interviews elsewhere on my website. BD

Conductor and pianist Richard Woitach was in Chicago in mid-July of 1982, as part of a brief series of distinguished musicians brought to DePaul University to coach aspiring singers. During his visit, he graciously took time to sit down with me for a wide-ranging conversation.

While we were setting up, Woitach was sifting through a small pile of papers he had brought, some of which contained information for me to use when presenting this interview. Our session took place in a studio at WNIB, Classical 97, where I worked as Announcer/Producer for just over 25 years. I mention the location because of what happened early in our meeting!

Richard Woitach:   The Wolf Trap Company’s doing Così fan tutte tomorrow night. I’m the Music Director, but I’m not there, so I have to be sure to send them these materials.

Bruce Duffie:   Where are they performing? Didn’t something burn down? [Vis-à-vis the Vickers item shown at left, the comments are from an article Jon Vickers On the Record by Lynn René Bayley. Two more CDs are at the bottom of this webpage.]

Woitach:   It did. We have two facilities now. We have the (new) Filene Center, which is the big place where the Met used to play, and the opera has been playing there for a couple years. Then there is a new facility called The Barns, which is a little 350-seat theater, which they actually made out of two upstate New York barns. There was an English barn and a German barn, and they made it into quite an elegant little theater, with a little bar next to it. The Così is being done there. We do some concerts and smaller operas in there, including a double bill of L’Histoire du Soldat [Stravinsky] and The Apothecary of Haydn. For the big productions, they have brought a substitute facility. The Saudis gave sort of an Arabic Quonset hut, which they had used as a pavilion somewhere. It’s a huge thing that’s all set up, and they’re performing the big stuff there.

BD:   Is there a lot of oil money in opera these days?

Woitach:   In Houston, there is, as well as in Dallas.

BD:   Is there a lot of Saudi oil money?

Woitach:   They’re getting in there, but things that I’m associated with are limited on this. [Pauses a moment] I’m playing for Jon Vickers. We’re doing a recital together on Labor Day.

BD:   I had a nice interview with him last fall.

Woitach:   When he was here for the Lyric?

BD:   Yes.

Woitach:   I’m sure is spoke very philosophically.

BD:   Of course. He did Fidelio last year, and this year he is coming for both Tristan and Pagliacci.

Woitach:   [Still sifting through a few papers] I’m conducting the East Coast premiere of King Roger. It’s the Szymanowski Centennial [1882-1937], so we’re doing that. We’re also doing Regina [Blitzstein], and there is a showcase program that we’re doing at the end. It will be a whole program of scenes from various French operas with our singers.

See my interviews with Anita Berry, and Bruce Ford

BD:   [At this point, one of the cats that lived at the station jumped down from a shelf where he had been sleeping.] That’s Charlie. Do you want him to go away?

Woitach:   Yes. It doesn’t bother me, but when I get back home, my dog, also named Charlie, will go bananas. [Both laugh] He’ll start sniffing me and will probably attack my legs. He’s a very neurotic dog. We have a cat staying with us now. We have a friend who came from California and brought her. I forgot she was going to bring her cat, so the cat is locked on the third floor up in the bedroom. It attacked my wife the other day.

BD:   Oh, no! I was doing an interview with John Pritchard, and I didn’t realize when we started that the cat was in the room. All of a sudden, in the middle of the interview, the cat plopped down on the table. Pritchard loved it because he has a cat at home, too.

Woitach:   A funny thing happened when he was conducting Peter Grimes. I was the cover conductor, so I was listening to him rehearse. I was checking tempi, and he wasn’t sure about the balance. He asked me to conduct the Prologue, and as we were switching places, one of the wise guys in the orchestra said, “Well, Richard for Pritchard.” John leaned over the pit rail and said, “What’s a P [pee] among friends?” Everyone laughed.

BD:   Do you like being a cover conductor, or would you rather have the production yourself?
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Woitach:   It’s frustrating when you cover. I’ve both covered and been covered, and I sympathize with my colleagues when they have to cover me because I’ve never gotten sick. I’ve never canceled anything in my life. I’ve covered Jimmy Levine a lot. That’s how I got to debut at the Met. Initially he was supposed to conduct Les vêpres siciliennes [Verdi] on the tour, and he got sick and had to cancel. I was set to do the last performance, but I had to take over all of them. He used to get sick at certain points during the year. He is prone to the flu, but he’s been taking extra vitamins in the last few years, and hasn’t canceled much.

BD:   I was reading an interview with a tenor who covers a lot, and he was saying that he would look at the singer’s schedule, and would know when he would probably cancel.

Woitach:   With certain people you can guess pretty closely, and if you know they’re really under tremendous pressure, you stay healthy yourself. But it’s frustrating. I don’t mind it, but it’s not fun. If it’s an opera that you know, it’s no great sweat, and oftentimes I cover from home rather than go to the theater. I’m only ten minutes from the Met, so I’m always easy to reach by phone. I do check in before each performance to make sure the conductor’s feeling all right. But for the really high-pressure operas, like Elektra, I will be right there because it would be a shame to have the performance grind to a halt. I’ve never had to jump in the middle of a performance... [correcting himself] oh yes I did. I take that back. When Tommy Schippers first was beginning to show signs of the illness that killed him — we didn’t know that he was sick at the time — he canceled the last act of Siege of Corinth once. I got a call in the morning saying that he had been feeling strange, and I would need to be sure to be there. He finished two acts, and I thought he was going to be okay. Then I was told to go down immediately because he was feeling faint and numb.

BD:   Did they make an announcement for you that you were conducting the last act?

Woitach:   In that case they didn’t because it was so late in the opera, and they didn’t want to upset everybody. So I just went into the pit, and he went home.

BD:   I assume your colleagues on stage were told.

Woitach:   Oh, they were told, yes. They had time to tell Verrett, who was the first one to be singing an aria. The biggest switch I’ve heard of like that was when Fausto Cleva was conducting. The first time he got sick he had a scary heart attack. He was conducting Manon Lescaut [December 22, 1958], and in the middle of the second act he suddenly felt faint. So he stepped off the podium. Normally you think the concert master would take over, but he didn’t move very fast. There was a second violinist who was an aspiring conductor at the time. He’s since become a conductor for one of the ballet companies, but he was right up there immediately. He jumped up and led the opera for a while. Meanwhile, George Schick, who was the cover conductor was about 6'3", and Cleva was about 5'1". Whoever had to make an entrance, I think it was Richard Tucker, came in. They didn’t have time to tell anybody in that case, so instead of looking down and seeing little Cleva, there suddenly was big Schick conducting. [Both laugh] It was like the time they switched Martina Arroyo and Lucine Amara between scenes of the first act of Forza [February 13, 1975]. Martina got sick, and Lucine was already in costume. Martina made an exit and Lucine entered.

BD:   How long have you been at the Met?

Woitach:   I’ve been there since 1959, but there were five years just about exactly in the middle that I was away from the company. I was there nine years as an assistant conductor, and then I went to West Coast. I was music director for Western Opera Theater in San Francisco, although I could work with other companies. I sort of bummed around and freelanced with Sarah Caldwell, and did little guest things. Then when Rafael Kubelik came in, he invited me to come back to the Met, and I came back as a conductor. I like to do a variety of things when I’m there. When I’m not covering, I don’t mind playing piano at a rehearsal. I usually play Parsifal rehearsals, and if Levine does a German opera for the first time. Sometimes he would specifically ask me to play.

BD:   Are you part of the ‘German Wing’?

Woitach:   I sort of became that when I went there. Alberta Masiello and I joined the Met at the same time. We both auditioned and were hired as rehearsal pianists. She immediately said that she didn’t do any German repertoire, so I inherited those operas. I got to play the whole Ring the first year I was there, and I have done Salome, Elektra, Wozzeck...

BD:   What’s it like playing the Ring on the piano?

Woitach:   Rheingold is fun, and parts of Walküre. When it moves, it’s fine. Tristan is very frustrating on the piano. It just doesn’t sound like anything. It doesn’t move.

BD:   There is so much color in the orchestra.

Woitach:   Yes, exactly. But you can have some fun with the Ring, especially Rheingold. It’s so Mendelssohnian. It keeps moving, and Götterdämmerung is always fun. Siegfried is kind of boring on the piano because it’s all under the middle of the keyboard. It doesn’t get above middle C for the first hour. It doesn’t sound like much on the piano.

BD:   Sure. It’s all in the cave with very dark colors. The orchestration has bassoons, and English horns, and French horns...

Woitach:   Exactly. You need those colors to make it sound like anything.

BD:   Do you aspire to conduct Wagner?

Woitach:   I’ve conducted Lohengrin. I did that with the Met on tour one year, and that was fun. It’s the only Wagner I’ve conducted. I have conducted Ariadne, and that was a lot of fun. Strauss is great fun for a conductor. I’ve got some Wagner in the offing because I am the Artistic Director of the Arizona Opera. [Woitach would be there for two seasons, 1981-1983, and then be succeeded by Glynn Ross from 1983-1998.]

BD:   They’re going to do Wagner?

Woitach:   They’ve done Lohengrin already with a previous artistic director, Jim Sullivan [1971-1981]. We’ll probably do the Dutchman in the next three years... [That opera would not be presented until 2005.]

BD:   In English or German?

Woitach:   That we’d do in German. They do more in the original there than in English. In twelve years the company’s been in existence, the only operas they’ve done in English have been Rossini and Marriage of Figaro. They even did Don Giovanni in Italian. We’re doing Elixir of Love in Italian. The public demanded it. We announced Elixir of Love in English, and immediately started getting phone calls and letters. We were in a quandary, and a brochure had to be prepared. So we put a ballot in the brochure, and they voted for Italian. It was about 55% to 45%.

BD:   Were any performances in English for the people who wanted in English?

Woitach:   Democratically speaking, that would be fair. It should have been three out of four in Italian and maybe one in English. But that’s rough because we have a single cast and only four performances all together.

BD:   Do operas work in English?

Woitach:   A lot of operas can if you get a decent translation. Even then, you still have to work with any translation that is published. It has to evolve. For instance, the Così started with one of the printed versions, and we worked that with Western Opera until only about 40% of the original translation was left. But I thought it was mostly an improvement.
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BD:   Singers get into to working with the various lines, and they hear them over and over again.

Woitach:   Exactly. They get input, and you see what works in actual practice. This summer at Wolf Trap, we’re doing King Roger in English, not in Polish. [Program shown at left] We are also doing some Szymanowski folk songs, and a cycle of his in Polish.

BD:   Is King Roger a good opera?

Woitach:   It’s a beautiful piece, but it would be a very hard work to stage. Ours will be a concert. I’ve talked to Frank Corsaro about it. He loves the piece, and has been trying to talk somebody into doing it for years. He’s mad about it. In fact, he helped me find an orchestra score. There’s no decent orchestra score in this country. There’s only a publisher’s photocopy of a terrible manuscript. There’s a beautiful score from Poland that’s in the Complete Works of Szymanowski over there. He just happened to have a copy which belongs to Szymanowski’s nephew in Connecticut. So I borrowed it and Xeroxed the whole thing. I now have a beautiful printed full score. The problem partly is the nature of the piece. It’s very high flowing poetry. It’s an allegorical story, and in the preface to the work that’s in this complete edition, the person who wrote the article says that it’s really a combination, part opera, part oratory, and part mystery play. There’s no physical action to speak of, except an orgy in the second act. [Both laugh] You sit around and wait for that for two hours. It’s not a long opera.

BD:   Isn’t is about an hour and a half of music?

Woitach:   Something like that. The first act is about 35 minutes, the last act is about 25, and the middle one is about 40. So it’s not long, but it’s very static as far as any overt action. There just isn’t any. It’s all talk. Its atmosphere and the settings are marvelous, but the stage director would have to have a very special sense to get something out of it.

BD:   Is that the kind of thing that would fit on television better than on stage?

Woitach:   Absolutely, because you could do all kinds of images. If Corsaro were doing it, he probably would use film and things like that. It needs some visual techniques, which you might get in live theater, but they would be very non-realistic.

BD:   Would there be a point in doing it in Polish with subtitles in English? [Remember, this interview was in 1982, before the introduction of supertitles in the theater.]

Woitach:   Sure. That that would work very well, because the Polish does sound very rich. Dick Cassily is doing the part of the shepherd, and he’s rewritten his translation, and it’s all to the good. It’s much closer to the phrasing of the Polish, especially where the breaths fall. Plus, it’s a little simpler and more understandable. I’ve rewritten the other roles fairly extensively, especially the key points, just to try to improve it all. So we’ve got already an amalgamation, but I think it would sound well in Polish, and subtitles would be great.

BD:   The only Polish operas I know are the ones by Moniuszko [1819-1872].

Woitach:   Oh, Halka and...

BD:   Hrabina [The Countess]...

Woitach:   Yes, Hrabina. I did an aria from that with Kubiak once in a concert. There was a huge orchestra. The original Wolf Trap performance facility, the big one, the whole huge wooden cathedral was destroyed. It would have been perfect for King Roger. The new facility has a much smaller stage. We originally had a chorus of 140, plus an orchestra of about 82, and that wouldn’t fit on this stage. So I’ve cut the chorus to 100, which is still all right. It’s the University of Maryland Chorus, which is excellent. One of the things was that we only had to pay them a token of a fee for the university. The orchestra I managed to cut down from about 82 to 75 just to squeeze them in, but there’s still no room for the orchestra on stage. So they put the chorus on stage, which gives everybody a lot of room. The orchestra will go down below as if there were a pit, but there is no pit. The orchestra will go in the first six rows, and I will be suspended from a cherry picker about halfway between. [Both laugh] Something will be set up in the middle so that everybody can see me. We’ll see how it works out.

BD:   At least without any staging you won’t have to worry about sightlines.

Woitach:   Exactly. There won’t be any problem with coordination and audience visibility. Everything there is amplified.

BD:   [Very surprised] Is that good???

Woitach:   It’s been variable in the past. The problem is if it isn’t tried out, then they don’t know what to expect. With the Wolf Trap Company, since we’re in residence, we worked very hard last year with The Marriage of Figaro, and we got the best we could get out of what was there. With the new facility, there are two things. First of all, it’s actually better. It’s more enclosed than the other one was, therefore it’s easier to amplify. Out of sympathy, the company that had sold them the original equipment which was destroyed in the fire, sent new equipment, which is fantastic. It’s like five times better than what they originally owned.

See my interview with Donald Gramm

Also, a brief biography (with photo) of Francesca Zambello is with my interview of John DeMain.

BD: Had you amplified everything in the past?

Woitach: Everything has to be amplified there because of this huge vaulted dome. You also have another 3,000 people on the lawn. In the Feline Center, it was huge verticals. It was like a huge triangle with an amphitheater that went down, and then a roof came over it which was immensely tall. It was like being in a redwood forest. They had to do a little amplifying indoors, and ironically, this year we were going to experiment with cutting down and maybe trying to do parts of the house without amplification, and only amplifying the lawn. But that’s academic now.
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BD:   When you amplified the lawn, is there a delay built in?

Woitach:   There is a slight delay, yes. I’m not sure how long it is.

BD:   At Ravinia, they have a very complicated system because there are speakers right behind the amphitheater, then speakers out on the next part of the lawn, and also speakers farther away. They’ve got to make sure that the live sound of a bass drum from the stage gets to the speaker-locations live at the same time it reaches the speakers electronically.

Woitach:   Yes. It’s like micro computation. We have a slight delay. It’s not a huge space, but it’s just big enough that there has to be some delay.

BD:   I hope the Szymanowski goes very well.

Woitach:   Thank you.

BD:   Are there other Szymanowski works that you’ll be doing, or that you want to do?

Woitach:   There’s a set of twelve folk songs which are actually all from the same part of Poland called Kurpie, which is one of the provinces of Poland. They’re in the Kurpien dialect, and we’re doing about six or seven of those. [The music from Kurpie is very different from its neighbors. A priest named Władysław Skierkowski, in his book Puszcza Kurpiowska w pieśni, recorded over 1000 traditional Kurpie songs. The first part of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony #3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) is based on traditional Kurpie music.] Then we’re doing a piece called Songs of a Foolish Muezzin. It’s a cycle of the six different hours of the day when the muezzin calls from the minaret. He’s singing about Allah, and it’s like the Song of Solomon. It’s very erotic. There are erotic undertones because he’s singing about his girlfriend at the same time. It’s very melismatic.

BD:   Will they be in the Kurpie dialect?

Woitach:   That will be in High Polish. We were lucky to have the Polish Cultural Attaché at the embassy in Washington DC come over personally and to coach the Polish diction. He brought over huge blow-up photos of Szymanowski from 60 years ago. There was of Arthur Rubinstein as a young man with Szymanowski.

BD:   You told me that you are Polish?

Woitach:   Yes, half Lithuanian and half Polish.

BD:   Do you have any desire to conduct in Poland?

Woitach:   I’d love to. Kazimierz Kord [1930-2021] is coming to Washington with the Cracow Philharmonic this summer. I’d like to see him again because we worked together at the Met. I covered his Borises there, and then I conducted about seven performances with the Met on tour. It was great thrill for me because it’s always been something I wanted to do since I was a kid.

BD:   Are you glad they are using the original version?

Woitach:   Yes, I am.

BD:   Is there any point now to ever do the Rimsky-Korsakov version?

Woitach:   Not in my opinion... maybe in a concert to do certain excerpts for a certain singer, perhaps a bass or a bass-baritone who really couldn’t sing the lower tessitura in the first monologue. But even then, I wouldn’t bother with Rimsky orchestration. I would just transpose it if it really was an expressive artist who couldn’t go down there. Even Ghiaurov learned the original version, I think.

* * * * *

BD: You’re here in a coaching role. How do young singers today compare with young singers of 1959?

Woitach: I’m thinking back to the singers that I knew when I first came to the Met because the Metropolitan Opera Studio had not been founded yet. That was one of the first programs of its kind, along with the Merola program in San Francisco. The Metropolitan Opera Studio was a prototype for these young artists programs. I would say that the younger singers today have a harder road to hoe. They’re very nervous about their futures.
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BD:   Why?

Woitach:   Because there’s so much competition. Now there are more singers being turned out by music schools. On the other hand, there are more companies. Back then, if you didn’t get into the New York City Opera or the Met, there was precious little you could do. There were a couple of summer apprentice programs such as the one in Santa Fe, and that was about it. Now, there are a great number of programs, but unfortunately the number of programs have not multiplied as fast as the number of singers. Today there’s an immense amount of talent around, but some of them are rather confused because they see people making very fast careers, and they get frustrated, or they get impatient because they think that’s the way it should go. They feel they should be successful already at 25. It’s like a good wine. It has to age. The voice and the artistry have to age.

BD:   The old saying is that one spends 15 years becoming an overnight success.

Woitach:   [Laughs] Yes, exactly. When that sudden opportunity comes, they’ve been preparing for it for a long time. Let’s take a case in point. My first year at the Met, Teresa Stratas [shown in her Weill LP at right] made her debut. She was 22, and she’d already done some concerts. She had sung a bit in Canada, and she was ready. When that opportunity came, she just grabbed it with both hands. She debuted as Poussette in Manon. She also did Annina in Traviata, a peasant girl in Figaro, and a flower maiden in Parsifal. She did everything. She’s a rare exception, even among mature artists, in that she was always asking questions, and always watching other people’s rehearsals, and constantly soaking up things. Some of the younger singers today are doing that, but there’s a habit that singers have to watch out for. It happens around the Met sometimes with the younger singers, where it’s kind of a coffee-house atmosphere. They gather on the coffee wagon, where they talk for hours, and they complain. That’s part of the business. I’m not putting it down, because complaining is part of the business. It’s sort of one of the benefits. They share their frustrations and their insecurities and everything. There have been years when many of the younger singers lacked a sense of direction. Now at the Met there’s a whole different setup with the Young Artists Program. They’re separated from being part of the house. They’re being used in small parts right away, as opposed to learning.

BD:   Does the huge proliferation of recordings make it easier or harder for a young artist?

Woitach:   Both. It makes it easier to hear a variety of performances, but it’s also dangerous because you start imitating other singers that are homogenized. They’re put through a tube, and when it comes out you don’t know who’s singing. It’s like borscht. [Both laugh] Not that there aren’t some lovely recordings, but I just don’t enjoy listening to them that much. I listen to them, but usually just once. I’ll buy a recording, and then listen to it out of curiosity, and then I’ll sell it. I’ve got one shelf of recordings that I’ve kept for a number of years, and they’re all oddball things, like symphonies on some offbeat label. I rarely ever listen to recordings of pieces that I’m doing. I would start out to listen, and then I’d wonder which of ten recordings I should listen to. So, I forget it.

BD:   When you’re talking to a young singer, do you ever tell them to go and listen to a particular recording?

Woitach:   Yes, but only if there’s a particular something that they can get out of it... if there’s a nuance or something that is suitable for them. Or maybe if they don’t believe me, or if they say they can’t do that, or ask if that really is the way it’s done. I’ll tell them to listen to so-and-so’s recording, and at least it’s sort of a testimony.

BD:   Do the young singers still come to millions of performances? Do they sit on stage, or up in the high boxes all the time?

Woitach:   I don’t know. I’m not sure. Do you mean the ones who are in the house, or the aspiring singers from Juilliard?

BD:   Both.

Woitach:   There are both there, and it varies. It’s very refreshing. They’re immensely curious. They’ll come to see operas that they might not ever sing, because they like them, or because they want to share something.

BD:   Is it easier to get a young singer to learn La bohème (which they will probably use often) than, say, Straszny Dwór [The Haunted Manor by Moniuszko]?

Woitach:   Yes. Of course, if you were hiring them to do Straszny Dwór, maybe then they’d go out and learn it. The hard thing is that nowadays there’s an exploration of unusual repertoire, which is great, like King Roger we were talking about. There’s a tendency in universities to do productions that get publicity for the school or the conductor or stage director, and it’s not necessarily to the benefit of the young singers who are studying there.

BD:   I’m surprised that Corsaro hasn’t been able to talk Juilliard, or Manhattan into doing King Roger.

Woitach:   He might! Some wealthy Polish industrialist might give them the money to put it on really smashingly. But I would hate to be responsible for casting a budding talent in one of those roles.

BD:   We should do it here in Chicago. We have more Poles in Chicago than any place else except Warsaw.

Woitach:   I know. King Roger would be right at home here, and we could do it in Polish. [Pauses a moment to contemplate this possibility.] The public is hungry for new experiences, and we are digging up pieces that have been either forgotten for years or never done. But it’s hard for singers to have to learn something and sing it maybe once or twice.

BD:   If the public always wants something new, why don’t they go to new operas?

Woitach:   You mean modern operas?

BD:   Yes.

Woitach:   They’re too new. People want something new that’s old. They want the familiar a lot of the time.

BD:   They want something new that they’re going to enjoy?

Woitach:   Yes, exactly. They want things that are similar to something they have enjoyed before. It’s a human tendency towards intellectual laziness.

BD:   Is there a point to digging up all the early Verdi operas, and all the old Meyerbeer operas?

Woitach:   I would like to hear all the Verdi works, but Meyerbeer I am not sure.

BD:   The Met revived Le prophète [in 1977, after a 50 year hiatus, with McCracken, Horne, Scotto, and Hines]. Is there any chance they’re going to do L’Africaine or Les Huguenots?

Woitach:   I don’t think so. I’ve seen L’Africaine. I did it at San Francisco, and never realized it was so long before (the famous aria) O Paradis. We sat through a lot of Meyerbeer to get there. I also never realized it was indoors. I expected to see a beautiful vista, with Plácido Domingo standing, looking over the shore like Balboa on the Pacific. [Think of the aria Cielo e mar from La Gioconda.] It’s inside the palace. Big disappointment! [Both laugh] It was still a pretty aria, and he sang it beautifully. I don’t know if there are any plans. Meyerbeer has not been mentioned for a couple years, since the last time we did Prophète. I am enjoying the Verdi revivals which Tito Capobianco is doing in San Diego. [I Lombardi, Giovanna d’Arco, Un giorno di regno, and Il corsaro. His successor, Ian Campbell, would do I masnadieri, and Oberto.] I think that’s worthwhile. Even something like Alzira, which has a reputation for being Verdi’s worst opera. He said it was his worst opera! Even that one has moments which are worth hearing now. Maybe they should just be taken out by themselves, but I think those should be done. Really though, it’s necessary to take out the whole opera and dust it off once in a while, because it was very difficult for Verdi to get through an entire evening without writing something first rate.

BD:   There was a quiz question years ago asking about good-bad operas.

Woitach:   Oh yes, the operas you love to hate. Maybe Verdi was tripped out on something when he wrote that. He had those stomach pains, and he took a sizable amount of laudanum, which is an opiate. He claimed he didn’t really remember having written Alzira, so he might have been on a high.

BD:   Maybe that’s the first spaced out opera! [Both laugh] [Thinking of P.T. Barnum] Perhaps that could be the drawing card... ‘Come see a great opera written by man on drugs.’

Woitach:   [Still laughing] Sure, and in very small print you see Verdi’s name. [Pauses] Getting back to young singers, another of the problems with the haste of careers now is that there are singers who are singing repertoire which is way beyond them. There’s a great tendency to cast for bodies these days instead of for voices. There’s a reasonable middle ground. It doesn’t mean that one has to try to look like one of the old clichés of a fat opera singer, but there’s such a tendency to cast a type, which is the influence of television and movies. It’s become ridiculous. Not in Chicago or in other big opera houses in our country, but you can go through an entire cast of a Verdi opera without hearing one Verdi voice. So why bother and do it?
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BD:   Where are the young Verdi voices these days?

Woitach:   Looking around, there are some if they are properly guided and trained.

BD:   What is this proper guidance?

Woitach:   A slow study, singing lighter repertoire first such as Donizetti and bel canto. If you hear a soprano who might eventually be a Norma, she should not to go right to Verdi. She should sing Lucia first to develop the agility.

BD:   Does the size of the house make a big difference?

Woitach:   Oh, indeed! Gearing towards a house like the Met or Chicago, a young voice that perhaps could sing a slightly more dramatic role in a moderate size European house has to extend itself tremendously to do the same in a big house. And it’s not only the younger singers that suffer. It’s also the more mature singers who get one step beyond themselves.

BD:   Is the Met too big?

Woitach:   Probably, but it’s more intimate than you would think an opera house like that will be. Standing on the stage and thinking as a singer, it’s surprising compared with the old Met. The old Met was much more forbidding psychologically, and also even acoustically, because the voice would go out and it wouldn’t come back. In the new Met, at least the singer gets to hear himself. But it’s probably too big for really optimum sound. It should probably be about a thousand seats smaller.

BD:   If you have a young singer who is offered two contracts, one to sing Figaro in a medium-sized house, and another to sing a small role at the Met, which would you advise him to take? [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at left, see my interview with Norman Dello Joio.]

Woitach:   It depends on his temperament. If he’s up to the Figaro, I would say do that to develop. Of course, the hope for the young artists is that they’ll be able to do both, and that they will be able to be around the Met, and get the coaching and the guidance that they’re supposed to get. Then they will get releases to go other places. I don’t know the maximum number that’s being thought of for that program, but we talked about as many as 20. There are about a dozen now.

BD:   I think there are about 13 or 14 in the Lyric Opera School [now called the Ryan Opera Center]. They wind up many times doing small roles.

Woitach:   I know at the Met in the beginning there were some who used to be in the chorus.

BD:   Is that good experience?

Woitach:   Oh, sure. Any stage experience, unless it’s a role that is really vocally wrong (if it’s too low or too high) is good, because you get a chance to be on stage in a relatively low-pressure situation.

BD:   How do you convince a singer who thinks that he’s the next Pavarotti to sing something small such as Parpignol?

Woitach:   If there’s a balance of some kind. We have a young tenor at the Met in the young artist program, Jeffrey Stamm. You may have seen the televised program about the young artists in the Trittico intermission. He was the one with the tape recorder on his ear all the time studying.

BD:   [A bit alarmed] Is that the right way to study???

Woitach:   It helps when you’re commuting to make use of the time. It was for his Italian diction. He was listening to himself, which is useful.

BD:   [Relieved] Oh, he’s listening to himself, not to records.

Woitach:   Oh, yes. Right. He was listening to his coaching. He is going to get to do Rodolfo for a couple of performances after Domingo. In the meantime, he’ll do things like the Arturo in Lucia [several performances at the Met and on tour, including the telecast with Sutherland, Kraus, Elvira, Plishka, conducted by Bonynge]. So he’ll get on stage and get his feet wet if that balance can be kept, where he gets just enough of the medium-sized things. It’s a little harder to keep a young singer stimulated doing parts like the Jailer in Tosca. However, they don’t do ‘La cena è pronta’ (Dinner is served), the one line in Traviata. That’s done by a chorister.

BD:   Do you have the same chorister do that line all the time, or is it rotated around to different people?

Woitach:   They usually rotate those bits, but within a season they usually keep it consistent. They may divide it. If there are 15 performances, they’ll go 8 and 7 with two people.

BD:   Traviata comes up so much...

Woitach: Yes, and if it comes up the next year, they’ll divide it again between two other people.

BD:   Are there some operas that are done too much? I must admit that I don’t know if I could ever sit through Bohème again.

Woitach:   I really was pleased with the production that we had at the Met last year. It sort of refreshed Bohème for me, especially when you get a lot of rehearsal with Zeffirelli and a cast like that. Bohème, strangely enough, is one that I almost never get tired of. However, I do get tired of Butterfly and Tosca. Butterfly can get overexposed. Unfortunately, it’s an opera that’s relatively easy to put on, with simple sets and everything. It’s even been the cover opera for the Met in case of emergency. On the road, if a disaster happens, they always have the production of Butterfly along because they can usually get a cast.

BD:   You can’t just find a cast of Ariadne.

Woitach:   It’s funny you should say Ariadne because of what happened. Do you remember that?

BD:   Yes, back in 1963. It was a Saturday afternoon broadcast, and they changed the opera! [Der Fliegende Holländer had been scheduled for this matinee, but was replaced at the last minute because of the illness of Sándor Kónya, the Erik. Ironically, Kónya would sing Bacchus in Ariadne at the Met exactly one month later, and in subsequent performances.]

Woitach:   They found the cast of Ariadne. [Rysanek, Thomas, Peters, Meyer, Uppman, conducted by Böhm.] I found Roberta Peters at the hairdresser’s. It was just lucky the timing was right, because otherwise they would have been up in the air.

BD:   I remember reading that you had to get the clarinet player out of a ball game in Jersey.

Woitach:   That sounds right.

BD:   How bad is it to actually change the opera? That doesn’t happen very often.

Woitach:   Not terribly often, but sometimes it can be done, like the time we did Don Carlo two days in a row [February 12 (with Giacomini, Scotto, Milnes, Horne, Ghiaurov, Morris, led by Levine) and 13 (with Moldoveanu, Hazzan, Boyagian, Horne, Plishka, Morris, again led by Levine), 1979]. Price was supposed to do Ariadne for the first time, and she canceled. I was in Philadelphia. I was the cover conductor for Ariadne, but I’d gone down to do some business early in the day. I got a phone call there, and they said I had better come back early because I might be conducting Butterfly that night. They didn’t know what opera they were putting on because of Price’s cancellation. So I got on the Metroliner, and as luck would have it, the phone on the Metroliner wasn’t working. So I didn’t know until I got to New York about 3 in the afternoon that it was changed to Don Carlo. Ariadne, of course, had an 8 o’clock curtain, and Don Carlo was at 7 o’clock because the Met version is immensely long. So it finished at 1 o’clock in the morning, and by that time there was a very small audience. Another time, in Detroit, we did Don Giovanni two nights in a row [April 29 and 30, 1974. Amazingly, with only one change (Leporello), the cast was the same both nights... Milnes, Moser, Lear, Goeke, Corena/Berry, von Stade, Michalski, Morris, conducted by Rudolf]. It was the other way around. Don Giovanni was scheduled for Tuesday night, and Marilyn Horne canceled (the Monday night performance of) Italiana in Algeri. However, her cover was sick, too. So they did Tuesday night’s opera on Monday as well. The only unfortunate thing was that the audience didn’t know until the curtain was ready to go up. They sent the stage manager on who announced that the program was changed.

BD:   Is there any adequate way to prepare a young singer for these kinds of trials and tribulations?

Woitach:   Just warn them and tell them to always be ready for anything. Nothing is sure except for surprise. [Both laugh] Any performer who has that instinct has a nose for what they should concentrate on. You can develop it, but it can’t be taught.

BD:   Are there any really dumb singers?

Woitach:   Not many, no, but there are a few.

BD:   Are those the ones that just don’t make it at all?
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Woitach: Yes. Once in a while, you find somebody who is fairly low on the IQ scale, who is just innocent enough of the complications of life and the mind that they sort of sail through. Nothing happens to them because some divine power is looking from above and keeping them out of trouble. As long as they’re nice people, you don’t mind.

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BD: [Coming back to his current engagement at DePaul University in Chicago] Have you done masterclasses before?

Woitach:   It’s the first time I’ve done it quite in this format, where it’s half private and then half public. That’s new. For instance, I spent a week with the ensemble of the Canadian Opera, and just coached their 10 singers for a solid week in various repertoire. I’ve also done workshops in various places in the past on either a very short-term basis, like a day or two, or just a masterclass, or on a long-term basis like four weeks of real workshops with a performance. This is the first time I’ve done something where we’re preparing a program with a little private demonstration the last night. Here, nobody’s technically performing. We’re just showing what we worked on, and I may even do some stopping and correcting.

BD:   Are there any before-and-after tapes?

Woitach:   That’s an interesting idea. The singers have been doing their own cassettes, and the final session will probably be taped by the school. They’ll then put it in the archives. At Wolf Trap, they used to have an early concert where all the seniors would arrive, as well as the associates who contribute to the opera program. We finally convinced them to do that later in the season, and not to have 20 arias. That was like the singers were re-auditioning.

BD:   Would it rattle the singers to know that there are a handful of microphones out there, or maybe even a television camera?

Woitach:   Yes. If they’re warned. I don’t think it’s a bad idea. Last summer, we had an aria concert with orchestra the last day they were there, and they suddenly spied a video camera on a tripod in the middle of the theater. It didn’t seem to bother the singers, but the orchestra contractor made me tell the guy to take it out.

BD:   But that’s a union problem.

Woitach:   Yes, exactly. Flash cameras bother the singers a lot. [For some interesting (?) sidelights about this subject, see my Rant Page. Scroll down, or use your computer’s ‘find’ feature to jump to March 2, 2023.]

BD:   Does it rattle the performers at the Met to know that it’s the Saturday afternoon broadcast [or now the telecast]?

Woitach:   I don’t think so, no.

BD:   Now for the big question. Where is opera going today?

Woitach:   I hate to say your guess is as good as mine, but it seems to be going in a lot of different directions. I also hate to mention concert opera again because it sounds like I’m really pushing King Roger, but that’s been a growing thing. They’ve had it in London for a number of years, and in New York with Eve Queler’s group, and the American Opera Society before that. We’re going to hear a lot of operas we haven’t heard before. There’s still a large number of big vehicles that we won’t see produced. We’ll just hear them... [musing] works such as Rienzi and Die Feen [very early works by Wagner]. I think the operas will continue to be turned out at a good rate. The number of world premieres in this country in universities every year by faculty members is incredible, and that probably will continue. As far as the production of opera, and the companies that are producing it, the companies which are really efficient or really farsighted are the ones that are going to survive. The Metropolitan I’m pretty sure is going to survive. It’s pretty big.

BD:   Is the Met a museum?

Woitach:   It is, yes. It has changed tremendously over the years, and now it’s at least partially a 20th century museum. We’ve had Lulu now, so we’re up to the latest certified masterpieces, but just by the nature of the kind of large institution it is, I don’t think it can be too experimental.

BD:   How do we get the public to enjoy Lulu [Berg (1885-1935)]?

Woitach:   Television has helped. A lot of people saw it on television with the subtitles, and enjoyed it. There are some people who would never like it, and that’s their privilege, any more than everybody has to like Picasso’s Guernica. That’s something which is so close to our own time. Distance is what allows people to enjoy something old. It’s not too related to their immediate experience, which is exactly what other people like about it. Some people really have a hunger for the latest.
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BD:   [Gently protesting] But it seems like people would much rather go to a Mercadante (1795-1870) opera than to one by Berg.

Woitach:   A large part of the public, yes. I don’t think there ever will be a huge general public — at least within this century — even for the new operas which we acknowledge as being masterpieces, like Lulu. There’ll be a growing public, but it’s always going to be a specialized public.

BD:   Going the other direction, should we also be doing the works by Monteverdi (1567-1643) or Cavalli (1602-1676)? [Program for Ormindo shown at left. See my interviews with Robynne Redmon, and Linda Brovsky.]

Woitach:   Oh yes, because there is tremendous vitality there. Of course, you have the discussion of exactly how to do them. In every version that you see, there’s a slightly different orchestration. But I guess that was true even in the time of Monteverdi. Then, if they’re done in places that are too big, that’s the only problem.

BD:   So the Met could never do Coronation of Poppea?

Woitach:   I don’t think so. It would get lost in there. Plus, it’s too modern a place. It should be done in a Palazzo. San Francisco Spring Opera did a fairly decent Orfeo a few years ago, but they put it in the framework of a modern-day story. That device is maybe overused...

BD:   Does that ever work... maybe putting Bohème, or Così in modern dress?

Woitach:   Again, it’s interesting to experiment, but only unless there’s a reason that prompts putting it in modern dress. One of the reasons could be to save money. If a company was really broke, and then they had to do it in order to put on a performance and to survive, that’s a pragmatic reason. However, I don’t think a pragmatic reason is necessarily an artistic reason. I was having fantasies the other day about which operas would go nicely in modern dress. I can’t remember which ones they were, but it suddenly seemed so logical and so right. So I shook myself up and said, “No, you’ve got to stop thinking this. You’re starting to sound like a stage director now!” [Both laugh]

BD:   Are stage directors going too far these days?

Woitach:   I think some have, but the pendulum is turning around. We’ve gone through the era of the stage director in the last 10 or 15 years. It’s been building and building.

BD:   We had the era of the composer, then the era of the conductor, then the era of the star singer, and now the era of the producer.

Woitach:   Yes. Maybe the lighting designers will be next. Maybe we’re going toward the costumer. It’s a shift of weight, but the music is important, and it will swing back. I don’t think we should fail to learn from what we’ve gone through, even with some of the silly productions that we’ve seen, as well as some of the really good ones. All of us have seen movies now, so we can’t look at opera the same way. You can’t throw all that out. On the other hand, we’ve learned where certain things don’t work, especially when something is arbitrary.

BD:   As you said before, opera does have to grow if it’s going to survive.

Woitach:   Oh, yes. You can’t just do duplicate productions, for instance the way that the Verdi and Puccini operas at one time were simply duplicates of what (the publisher) Ricordi sent out of the mise-en-scène in the score. They even sent out a list of the props and everything. It’s nothing more than people eating the same food. [Sighs] Fortunately or unfortunately, they do that at McDonald’s, where you have that wonderful security. But people are demanding something that’s more of their own. As far as an artistic organization getting the most out of the amount of money they have, we all know that it costs a great deal to put on productions now, and part of that requires organizing time and materials and people well. That’s what is needed to survive. You try to balance credibility with the public on one hand by giving them something that’s exciting, but also credibility with the artist that you don’t exploit them. You don’t ask them to do things that are either counterproductive or an inefficient use of their time. They’ve got to conserve their energy to perform, and not just sit around and wait for a month for someone to get inspiration.

BD:   In the 1960s, they were talking about the jet plane ruining the singers. Are the singers now finding out that they shouldn’t jet around quite so much?

Woitach:   I hope so, but I think they’re still doing it. An older colleague of mine who is in his middle 80s, was a prompter at the Met in 1924. He’s still around, and I see him occasionally. He told me when he first came to New York, the four tenors that were at the Met at that time were Martinelli, Gigli, Lauri Volpi, and [pauses] Melchior? But he said he never heard any of them ‘mark’ [sing half-voice]. They always sang full voice.
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BD:   Even in rehearsals?

Woitach:   Yes. In all rehearsals they sang out full voice. Of course, there were fewer staging rehearsals because there was less going on, on the stage. There was a stage manager, not even a stage director, who more or less put things on. They didn’t rehearse a great number of hours a day, and they stayed in one place for months.

BD:   Then in order to get from New York to Covent Garden, it was a week on boat. [Vis-à-vis the cast-list at right, see my interview with Dominick Argento.]

Woitach:   Exactly, so they had that piece of time not having to sing. It was just the whole rhythm of life. They didn’t have income taxes to cope with, and accountants, and corporations...

BD:   [Wistfully] Will we ever get back to that?

Woitach:   No, I don’t think so. It’s a very different age. That’s why we worry once in a while. You sometimes think that maybe 19th century opera is an anachronism, because it spoke to an age that doesn’t exist anymore. On the other hand, maybe that’s why it’s still surviving, because maybe we need that little touch with the past, and we have to be able to dip our toe back into that pool.

BD:   Are you optimistic about the future of opera?

Woitach:   I am. I have to be. I’m committed to it. As the man said, do I have an alternative? [Both laugh] I am optimistic, but it’s very different. Even in the 20 some years that I’ve been working full time in opera, a lot of things are different. A lot of them are better. I think back now where there are certain things in production, or in even certain musical values that I could see at the time, and we were a little naive. On the other hand, I’m afraid there’s a tendency now to homogeneity in performance, because of the speed of having to put things together, where singers fly in and the big stars are performing once.

BD:   There is less individuality?

Woitach:   I think so, and in instrumental performing, too. But in opera productions there’s a lot more variety. What you see is a lot more individualized.

BD:   [Noting the time] Thank you very much. You’ve been very kind to take time out of your busy schedule.

Woitach: You’re welcome.

BD: You coach for the next few days and then...

Woitach:   I’ll do another couple of days here, and then I’ll be back at Wolf Trap. I’ll start working in the afternoon, but I don’t know if there’ll be that much for me to do. There’s a performance that night of Così, so that cast is going to be tied up, and I can’t rehearse anything with them. Then the cast that had sung on Thursday night is going to be singing Sunday, but the Friday cast is finished, so they will be available to start work on Regina and other things.

BD:   We just had Regina here with the Chicago Opera Theater.

Woitach:   I saw a photo in your magazine [Opera Scene]. I enjoyed reading it, especially the whole interview with Ruthie [Welting]. That was a lot of fun. She’s quite young. I was working with her when I first met my wife. I was doing Barber in Seville about seven years ago [1975] at the Greek Theater in Hollywood, and Ruth was doing Rosina [autographed program shown below]. At that point, she was carrying on a long telephone relationship with Edo DeWaart who was in the Met... [We then walked out together to hail a cab for his ride back to his hotel.]

See my interviews with Frank Guarrera, and Arnold Voketaitis

[This image is for sale from a commercial source, hence their 'watermark']

This conversation was recorded in a studio at WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago, on July 14, 1982. Portions were used in Opera Scene magazine three months later. A copy of the unedited audio was given to DePaul University. This transcription was made in 2024, and posted on this website at that time.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here. To read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few other interesting observations, click here.

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Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001. His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.

You are invited to visit his website for more information about his work, including selected transcripts of other interviews, plus a full list of his guests. He would also like to call your attention to the photos and information about his grandfather, who was a pioneer in the automotive field more than a century ago. You may also send him E-Mail with comments, questions and suggestions.