Back before I got into singing folk songs, I was an opera fan. I listened to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on Saturday afternoons, and on the rare occasion when a local entrepreneur produced an opera (usually built around a nationally known singer, along with some pretty good locals), I was there.

Then a friend of mine acquainted me with a small, local opera company (this was some years before Seattle Opera was founded and Seattle got its own opera company—which is now the fourth largest in the country!). A Mrs. Towers, a local voice teacher reasoned that young singers would do a lot better in opera auditions if, instead of just knowing a few well-known arias, they knew a few entire roles. She started TOPS, "Towers Opera Production Studios," and she would produce four or five operas a year, with the casts made up of her young students.

She and her students would put on an entire opera on the small stage of a "decommissioned" movie theater in Seattle's Broadway District. The young singers would sing an entire opera, complete with sets and costumes, with Mrs. Towers playing the orchestral part on a grand piano. I saw productions of several operas there: "Faust," with a sixteen-year-old Marguerita, a seventeen-year-old Faust, and a seventeen-year-old-Mephistopheles; "Rigoletto," with the same sixteen-year-old girl as Gilda, an eighteen-year-old Duke of Mantua, and a twenty-five-year-old Rigoletto; other productions of full-length operas with often—usually—teenage casts, such as "I Pagliacci" and "Cavalleria Rusticana."

Some of these kids carved out pretty good careers for themselves. The sixteen-year-old girl who I saw—and heard—doing both Marguerita and Gilda—wound up singing for Seattle Opera, is now retired from singing, and is on the Seattle Opera's executive board.   

And the point of this particular spasm?

If these kids could memorize the score of an entire operatic role—which could extend for as much as three or four hours—what is the matter with some folks who can't get through a three minute folk song without referring to a book or crib sheet!??

Don Firth

P. S. Ancient skops, skalds, and bards used to sing—from memory—songs and ballads that ran to hundreds of verses. Beowulf takes several hours to recite. It's the medieval equivalent of a television miniseries…..

Don't dishonor an ancient tradition by being slap-dash!