My Dearest Son,
The world is burning, but you, you are swimming. Floating in a peaceful sea that is rapidly becoming too small to contain you. How do I know this? I can feel you resisting its boundaries, bashing, raising your head, yearning to feel the warmth of the sun for the first time. Well, to you, little man, I say rage! You are right to do so. There is no space large enough to contain you, and you should never accept the limitations of your own perceived existence. The world is burning, and we need you.
This whole blog sprang from a Facebook note I wrote on my feelings about fitness and singing. Since tonight I am closing this season's run of our uniquely demanding production of Don Giovanni at Deutsche Oper Berlin, I thought it was a good time to revisit the post that started this whole thing. Whether you missed it the first time, are new to following my thoughts, or are just interested in reading it again, I hope you enjoy, and please keep your eyes open for a new original post on a somewhat related topic soon.
It’s very late. I can’t sleep. I just finished one of those performances which makes all the crap we go through worth it. If you haven’t experienced that feeling, I hope some day you will be lucky enough to. You may find yourself in that place where the darkness of uncertainty and the pain of rejection seem like they will never go away. But, I can tell you, to borrow a line from another far more worthy cause than this, it gets better.
Welcome to the first official post of my new blog. As I said in the introduction post, I am here to try and get down in the dirt of the opera business, and here 429 days into my sobriety (I’m not obsessed with counting days. I swear. I have an app that counts for me), I can’t help but thinking about what it means to be sober in life, but especially what it means to be sober in opera. So, buckle up because I’m about to tell you what I think. What you do with that information is up to you, and I’m equally excited and anxious to see what happens.
What the hell am I doing? I’m taking the first step into a whole new experience. As anyone who knows me can tell you, I have a lot to say about this whole opera thing, and I never really hold back, forcing everybody in my path to listen. I guess that means I shouldn’t call expressing my thoughts on our business a “whole new experience,” but here I am putting those thoughts down on digital paper and sending them out into the blogosphere for all to read.
