Customer Reviews

Kein' Angst Baby!

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I used this book as a manual for doing exactly what the authors did in the fall of 1994. I did not find an opera job in Germany, but I had a lot of interesting leads and I think if I had had more time and had taken a slightly different strategy with what kind of job I was looking for I might have found something.

The book was fairly accurate except for a couple things. First, the market in Germany for American singers has dried up considerably since the first few years the wall came down. Many houses in eastern Germany are closed due to loss of government funding, or have smaller budgets. In the beginning there was a clamor to show support for the West by hiring American singers, and now they would much rather hire German singers. The economy in eastern Germany was not too good when I went in 1994, which contributed to the trend.

The second reservation I have about this book is the text of the business letters requesting auditions. There were grammatical errors in some of them and one in particular (the one with "ausserordentlich" in it) was too gushy. I highly suggest anyone using this book to have a native German speaker check their letters before sending them out.

One thing the auditioning American singer will find is the book's comments about agents' and Intendants' strange behavior are extremely understated. My kudos to the authors for being so careful, but here's the poop: There is one very well known and prestigious agency with an assistant director who is unbelievably rude. Not only did he scream at someone for warming up in the hallway, but he threw someone out for chewing gum in the lobby the year before.

Some advice I would add to the book, or give to those contemplating a German audition trip is: Germans want much less vibrato (at least for soubrettes and other light sopranos) than is normal in America. If you are a soubrette and do not speak FLAWLESSLY and with NO ACCENT you are not going to get a solo job. But chorus jobs often pay more and they give you a chance to absorb the language.

Do NOT audition sick, EVER. If you get sick, it's much better to miss the audition than to make a bad impression. They will remember that you sang sick which is a waste of their time.

If you sing for ZBF and they don't like you, none of the ZBF's will like you because they can be kind of a Saftladen. On the other hand the ONLY audition I got from an agent was from ZBF, so maybe I should be nicer.

Americans might have better luck auditioning for Broadway type musicals in Germany than for opera since it's often in English. I met several Americans who had careers in that. Toi toi toi! - Emily Baehr