When soprano Caitlin Vincent (MM ’09, Voice) would get ready to perform an opera, she maintained a strict pre-performance ritual. She slept with a copy of the score under her pillow—to facilitate osmosis, of course—and put on her stage makeup while watching an episode of the BBC sitcom Blackadder the Third. She also ate the same meal: a large bowl of penne pasta with olive oil and Parmesan.
“I was very regimented,” Vincent says over Zoom from her home in Melbourne, Australia, where she’s lived since 2015. “I had mind games to calm myself down. And if I didn’t do it, I was, like—that’s it, gonna be a bad show. I didn’t watch Blackadder, I’m screwed.”
When soprano Caitlin Vincent (MM ’09, Voice) would get ready to perform an opera, she maintained a strict pre-performance ritual. She slept with a copy of the score under her pillow—to facilitate osmosis, of course—and put on her stage makeup while watching an episode of the BBC sitcom Blackadder the Third. She also ate the same meal: a large bowl of penne pasta with olive oil and Parmesan.
“I was very regimented,” Vincent says over Zoom from her home in Melbourne, Australia, where she’s lived since 2015. “I had mind games to calm myself down. And if I didn’t do it, I was, like—that’s it, gonna be a bad show. I didn’t watch Blackadder, I’m screwed.”
In 2009, around the time the Baltimore Opera Company dissolved in bankruptcy, Vincent recruited 11 singers, pianist Michael Sheppard (BM ’98, MM ’00, GPD ’03, Piano), and then-Peabody Opera Music Director JoAnn Kulesza as conductor for a version of The Marriage of Figaro called The Figaro Project. Over the next five years Vincent was Artistic Director of The Figaro Project, an independent opera company that produced new works by Doug Buchanan (MM ’08, Composition, Music Theory Pedagogy; DMA ’13, Composition), Paul Mathews (DMA ’98, Composition), and Joshua Bornfield (DMA ’13 Composition; MM ’14, Music Theory Pedagogy), among others.
In 2013, The Figaro Project produced Camelot Requiem, an exploration of the immediate aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination as experienced by the people closest to him, which was composed by Bornfield with Vincent as librettist. Vincent has since become an in-demand, award-winning librettist and lyricist—Computing Venus, featuring music by Timothy C. Takach is being staged January 23-25 at Vassar College; Paw and Tail, a song cycle featuring music by Juliana Hall, is performed March 9 at Missouri State University; and Love Songs from a Third Floor Walk-Up, featuring music by Raphael Fusco, is performed in July at the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) National Conference—while also earning her PhD and becoming a cultural labor researcher.
Vincent is currently a Senior Lecturer and Australian Research Council’s DECRA Fellow at the University of Melbourne working on a three-year project to examine career pathways for conductors and stage directors working in opera. She’s aiming to put data to some of the challenges facing the contemporary opera industry that she explores in Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for its Future (Scribner).
Drawing on her own experiences performing and running a company alongside numerous interviews with singers, directors, and administrators, Opera Wars provides a streamlined synthesis of scholarly opera history to discuss how opera companies are and aren’t managing the tightrope walk of staging problematic 19th-century works for 21st-century audiences, making the career path more equitable, and paying for it all. She identifies the “battlefields” where these tensions and conflicts play out—at the level of the score, the stage, the singers, the company, and opera culture at large.
“I wrote this book like a libretto, because it’s not academic,” Vincent says. “I mean, it is academic, but I hide the academia and the research behind jokes. Each chapter follows a narrative arc and is structured as a scene. And I read it out loud as I was writing, in the same way I do my opera libretti, in terms of hearing the rhythm—which I think makes it more fun to read.”
Vincent is currently a Senior Lecturer and Australian Research Council’s DECRA Fellow at the University of Melbourne working on a three-year project to examine career pathways for conductors and stage directors working in opera. She’s aiming to put data to some of the challenges facing the contemporary opera industry that she explores in Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for its Future (Scribner).
Drawing on her own experiences performing and running a company alongside numerous interviews with singers, directors, and administrators, Opera Wars provides a streamlined synthesis of scholarly opera history to discuss how opera companies are and aren’t managing the tightrope walk of staging problematic 19th-century works for 21st-century audiences, making the career path more equitable, and paying for it all. She identifies the “battlefields” where these tensions and conflicts play out—at the level of the score, the stage, the singers, the company, and opera culture at large.
“I wrote this book like a libretto, because it’s not academic,” Vincent says. “I mean, it is academic, but I hide the academia and the research behind jokes. Each chapter follows a narrative arc and is structured as a scene. And I read it out loud as I was writing, in the same way I do my opera libretti, in terms of hearing the rhythm—which I think makes it more fun to read.”
It does: spending time with Opera Wars is like having a convivial conversation with a loquacious expert whose amusing anecdotes contain quiet wisdom and critique. It’s as entertaining as it is educational. “I wanted to write a book about opera that might bring new people in,” she says. “What we need is something to make people understand that opera is a fascinating industry that’s still very much here. Rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated—and you probably know more than you think you do from pasta sauce commercials and James Bond movies and more, because it’s all around you.
“I also wanted to write something for younger singers, to let them know that there are many career paths for them if they want to work in opera,” she continues. “They can be a singer but they don’t have to be a singer. We need companies, we need smart administrators, we need people who have vision, we need librettists, we need composers, we need designers and directors and conductors—all of those people.
“And donors,” she adds. “We also need donors. If someone wants to become a donor, that would be great!”
Peabody magazine caught up with Vincent to talk about opera as a job and career, research and the arts, and the many battles of Opera Wars.
How has being a singer and running an opera company informed your approach to being a librettist?
My experience with The Figaro Project and as a singer definitely shapes the way I write as a librettist. As a singer, I think about the kinds of texts that I wanted to sing—or what is singable and the collaboration with composers. Part of my work with The Figaro Project was working with composers, and that was something that started at Peabody. The first time I ever sang new music—or even knew that a composer could be alive—was at Peabody.
All of those experiences have continued to shape that craft as I’ve been doing it now for more than a decade. For any new commission, I ask myself, what’s going to be emotionally interesting for the performer? What character would they be able to pull out of this? And how can I make this [libretto] easy for the composer to set?
And then, of course, from the business side, practicality: I know that if I write a libretto that has 27 scenes, a chorus of 500, and requires digital projections, it’s never going to get staged. All of that informs the kind of art I want to make.
Similarly, how has your experience as a librettist, singer, and administrator informed your pivot to research in 2015?
I didn’t even mean to become an academic, I just followed the thread of my interests. I was always really interested in the making of opera and music, working behind the scenes, the collaboration, how singers work together, what it’s like being in a rehearsal room—I think what I enjoyed most about being a singer was that part of the process, even more than the performing.
In my research, I really was just following that thread: How do people work together? How do they navigate the industry? What do careers actually look like? What could we do to make it better? What are the issues in the industry that I encountered during my own career and my colleagues are still dealing with?
Some of the work that I did around gender inequality in opera production was recognizing that people have been talking about these issues for years and years but there’s no data to show who’s actually being hired by companies. So if no one’s pulling the data, I thought, how about I collect the data. Then we’ll actually know who’s being hired, and if we want to, we can try to change things.
Now that you’ve been doing research for a while, where are your research and findings taking you? You’re currently working on a three-year project but I imagine during this time you’re also thinking about what comes next.
One of the challenges with the arts in general is that people working in the field don’t have time to do research. They’re trying to get their seasons together. They’re desperately trying to get money. Everyone would love to have the time to collect data, to figure out trends, to say, What are we doing? What could be better? What could be more sustainable? But they don’t have time.
I’m an academic and [data is] part of my job, so I enjoy doing the kinds of research that can be applied by the industry to make things better, to give them the information they need to shift things in practice. So one of those projects was collecting data from over 20 years to track how many women were actually hired as directors and conductors by the largest opera companies in the United States.
The current project I’m working on is an extension of that [research] to ask, we now know who’s being hired—but why is it that certain people are able to navigate their careers and find success and others can’t? And what does it actually look like to build that career?
So I’ve been interviewing a number of different directors and conductors to ask, How did you do it? What were the challenges that you faced? What are the issues that maybe could be resolved if companies did something different, or if we changed policy, or if we had different interventions? By having this information, hopefully the industry can then use some of it to make this career path more sustainable.
That is my hope, anyway. They’re probably like, Caitlin, just shut up—stop telling us who we’re not hiring!
Are you saying your gender disparity research—“Unequal Opera-tunities: Gender Inequality and Non-Standard Work in US Opera Production”—wasn’t well received?
The data absolutely showed that there are some companies that are really doing well. Washington National Opera is so far ahead of every other company in terms of gender equity, it shows that it can be done. So it’s a question of, well, why aren’t the other companies doing it?
I suppose I’m a bit of a troublemaker, but I care about the industry. And I think anytime you have been inside of it, you become very familiar with the issues and the tensions. So the work I do now is just trying to make it better, more sustainable. I want opera to survive.
That impression comes through in Opera Wars, as it is very much about opera as work, an approach that opens the book up to a wide range of readers. As you write in the book, “the only way to make sense of opera is to deconstruct it”—and that’s what Opera Wars does. How did you arrive upon this approach?
Opera is not just an art form, it’s an industry, which is something that we often forget when we’re thinking about the arts from an academic standpoint. People work in opera, it’s a site of employment, there are audiences, there are all these different stakeholders.
It’s always been very unwieldy to me to try to figure out why opera is so complex and why some people hate it so much, and why there are 400 years of baggage. So the very first battleground that I started working in was around casting and the use of yellow face, blackface, those traditional staging practices. That’s something that I started exploring maybe five years ago that grew out of the question, What do you do with this historical repertoire? Companies have to keep doing it for financial reasons, but some of it is really cringey and icky. And it’s a situation that just kept coming up over and over again—how do you stage Madame Butterfly? How do you stage Aida? What do you do with these pieces?
That was really the kernel for Opera Wars, talking about that battle over what people think should be done with these historical works—and people get very upset about it. I wrote a little commentary piece about that question, What do we do with these historical works? [Editor’s note: “Opera is stuck in a racist, sexist past, while many in the audience have moved on.”]
In this article, I was saying that I don’t know what opera companies should do, that they’re really stuck between an operatic rock and a hard place, but the response was unexpectedly angry. People were posting comments with selfies of themselves wearing blackface makeup on stage and saying I was the “PC police” and a Nazi!
So I knew I wanted to write something more about that battle, and initially, that was the whole book: let’s just talk about these culture wars. And then my editor really pushed me to make it more expansive and accessible, even to people who don’t have any existing familiarity with opera. So I started thinking about these other battlegrounds that exist in the field, and the way they’re often cumulative. It starts from the musical score, then we add the staging, then we add the casting, and then we add the directors and conductors, rehearsal rooms, and companies—and it’s all connected.
There are other battlegrounds as well, but I thought these were the really big ones, that are really shaping the way we think about opera and these arguments over its future.
I was really impressed by your ability to parse the general information that somebody might know about opera and then add some clarifying context around that—the idea that even people who have never seen Carmen know the story. As an insider, how did you go about deciding, say, for the reader who first heard opera via a Bugs Bunny cartoon what they need to know?
It was a challenge, of course, because I’ve been singing since I was 14 and I had classical music playing in my house, so I couldn’t help but have some assumptions about what terms readers would know. There were some spots where my editor asked me, What’s a fach? What’s a score? And that was actually incredibly helpful!
I didn’t want the book to become an Opera 101 introduction, as opera already has a lot of issues with seeming elite, snobby, like you have to do research in order to appreciate it—and that excludes so many people who I think would really enjoy opera. It was important to me that I didn’t do that with this book and that no one felt like they needed to have the Grove Dictionary of Music on hand while reading. So to bring everyone in, where necessary I have as an aside, “by the way, here’s what an aria is—now you’re up to date, now let’s keep going.”
I’m glad you mention the issue of opera being viewed as “elitist.” To what do you attribute that?
Some of it obviously comes from its origins—it was entertainment for royalty, not for the public. That shifted, you still had to be able to pay for it, but it was a popular public entertainment. People were carousing, they were drinking, they were chatting, they were having a great time. It wasn’t so formal.
That really shifted with Wagner in the 1870s or so. And around that same time, with the crystallization of the canon, opera started being seen as very prestigious and elite.
I think that one of the big turning points was the introduction of supertitles in the 1980s. Before that point, if you didn’t know what was happening then you needed to have done research because it’s in a different language, and there was an air of opera being highbrow. You know, it’s not for the people, it’s not in English. And some people in opera were actually upset about the introduction of supertitles, because they thought that it was dumbing it down instead of a huge shift that made it more accessible.
I also think that for some more conservative opera-goers, it is a club. They like that it’s exclusive, that they’re the patrons, and they don’t want people to be coming in wearing jeans. And they want to see Madame Butterfly the way it has always been done.
But the argument I make in the book is that opera is a dynamic art form. If you hold onto it so tightly, you kill it. It has to evolve. It has always evolved. It’s just been the last 125 years or so where it’s been essentially stuck in this museum picture frame.
Opera was never just that. It’s evolving whether people want it to or not, and some people are kicking and screaming about it. But what do you want? Do you want opera to die? Do you want no one to be able to afford to go?
As somebody who has done now a fair amount of research about opera in a variety of areas, what information do you wish you could dig into about opera? What data or histories or information is missing?
I talk about some of this in the book, but one burning question for me is, How reliant actually is the American opera industry on the canon? Is it actually getting better? Some people were really worried during the COVID lockdown that there would be a retrenchment, that people would become more conservative in their programming, and in some ways, they have.
But is that actually reflected in the repertoire companies are choosing to do? Looking at new productions versus revivals, what are the trends with that? We don’t have that data, and all of that has implications on who gets hired. It trickles down in terms of actual employment.
Another big question for me is around trends in casting and employment. If you’re playing Bess in Porgy and Bess, what are the rates for being cast in other roles compared to white sopranos? There are a lot of issues that are really difficult to collect that data about and I don’t know that we can. But I would love to find a way to look more at hiring practices, longer-term career trends within the industry that might show us what is actually happening during the career path.
And I wish we could know what donors are demanding and what the board is saying in response behind the scenes. Those conversations are things we can never find out because companies will not tell us. I’d really like to know how much of programming is determined by one person who has a lot of money and says, “I want this Madame Butterfly to have kimonos and I’m going to give you $3 million.”
I’m hoping that Opera Wars shows how all of these questions and tensions are impacting opera as a site of employment, as a business—even if it’s bad business, as it’s all connected. And that’s why it’s so difficult to fix one thing—because if we do that, it’s going to have a trickle effect. If we look at the career path, it’s going to impact opera companies and what they can stage and how.
But it’s also fascinating—I like opera so much more now that I have revealed more of its warts for myself. It’s more likable. It is not some snobby, highbrow, pearl-wearing art form. Opera is a bit of a disaster and yet so resilient.
Now that you know so much more about opera than you probably did when you started at 14, would you have still decided to pursue this career?
When you’re training, you think it’s the only thing—I’m going to be an opera singer, full stop. And the chapter where I talk about giving up singing was probably the most personal and something I didn’t want to talk about for a long time. It was something that I hadn’t really dealt with and that I didn’t realize I hadn’t dealt with until I was writing that chapter, and being like, OK, this was the better path for me.
When you’re training you don’t know what it’s going to be like to work in the industry. You don’t know what the pressures are on the companies, what the interpersonal dynamics are, all these other things that are informing the kinds of opportunities you get and who’s being hired. I think knowing that is important for singers so they don’t take it personally if they don’t “make it,” the way that they told themselves was the only path.
You just don’t know. You only think about the singing and the flowers you get afterward.
I performed professionally for 10 years—people paid me to sing, but I was never able to pay rent with it, and I never sang at the Met. So, you know, is that a failure? Or did it just inform what I’m doing now?
A decade into your career as a researcher, do you have any ideas where you think opera is headed?
I think the biggest pressure point is still these historical works that have ethnic exoticism in them—Madame Butterfly, Aida, Turandot—and the ones that have really overt gender-based violence, like Carmen and Tosca.
We’ve seen these works over and over again and we’re just at the point in social discourse—especially in America and Australia and the UK—where they simply cannot be performed without commentary.
It’s very difficult to do Madame Butterfly without some people pointing out that the only traditional Japanese melody in there is a song about eggplants. This work was not a thoughtful composition. It’s cultural appropriation and in many ways a racist portrayal, full stop. And that is where it’s just becoming such an increasing risk for companies and they don’t know what to do.
I think we’re going to see continued discussions about that, and I think we might see companies start moving away from some of those works. They’re just not going to do them.
Of course, with Butterfly in particular, in the interviews with singers I was doing, one of the singers said, “If you cancel Butterfly it actually hurts our employment opportunities because that’s the only thing we’re being hired for. So maybe don’t cancel Butterfly, hire us for other things as well.”
But I have to say, I’m a librettist, and I would like the industry to be moving more toward new opera. It should not be 90% canon and 10% new work that’s in the black box theater on the side. The only way we’re going to build the next canon is if we actually produce a bunch of works. Some of them are going to be mediocre. Some of them are going to be good. And some of them are going to be amazing. But you have to keep generating the product in order to evolve the art form.
The challenge is finding the money for that. It’s very difficult to find money for new works, especially right now.
But I’m just going to keep writing operas. And hopefully I will convince people to buy tickets to see contemporary operas, because they’ll read my book and say, Maybe it’s not going to hurt me. Maybe it’ll make me think about the world in a different way.