Così fan tutte (2015)

Meagan Mahlberg (Mus’08,MA’11) knew bliss would come, and almost precisely when.

It was late fall and the 28-year-old soprano was preparing for her role in CU-Boulder’s spring production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte. Group rehearsals had barely begun. Orchestral accompaniment was months away. But she’d done her homework and sensed already that her second-act aria would deliver a drawn-out moment of pure transcendence as scores of musicians reached full throttle and she drew out a high note in a hall seating thousands.

“She’s essentially asking for forgiveness from her fiancé, maybe from God, maybe from herself,” Mahlberg says of her character, Fiordiligi, a young lover losing a battle against temptation. “She’s already realized she’s going to betray.”

Dramatic, athletic, fantastic and, above all, musical, opera induces the immersive state of total engagement that drives Mahlberg. One of four singers enrolled in the College of Music’s professional certificate program in opera and solo vocal performance, she’s already performed in more than a dozen fully-staged productions, including professional work in Boulder and New York.

“I am trying to make a life out of this,” she says.

That’s not an easy thing to do.

Keith Miller (Art ex’97), a former CU and professional football player who reinvented himself as an opera singer and has performed at the Metropolitan Opera, puts it this way on his website: “A million-to-one to make it in professional football, two-million-to-one to succeed in opera.”

Despite long odds, CU alumni voices sound in opera halls near and far. Mezzo-soprano Megan Marino (MMus’08), soprano Christie Hageman (MMus’10) and tenor John Lindsey (MMus’11) all perform with major U.S. opera companies. Bass-baritone Ashraf Sewailam (Mus’94,DMA’08) has been called a “standout” by The New York Times. Soprano Cynthia Lawrence (MMus’87) — a bona fide star who performs at famous opera houses around the world — appeared with Italian tenor Luciano Pavoratti more than 70 times.

There’s no foolproof recipe for an opera career, of course. University training, talent agents and vocal contest victories are common ingredients. Many of CU’s current aspirants hope to join a major opera company’s young artist program, basically in-house troupes of early-career singers.

Competition is fierce. Singers apply to audition, which amounts to auditioning to audition. After the initial winnowing there can still be hundreds of singers vying for fewer than a dozen slots. The tryouts are brief and no-nonsense. In October Max Hosmer (MMus’14), a tenor from California cast as Ferrando in CU’s Così, flew to New York for an eight-minute tryout.

Even success — a junior spot in a professional company — is just a start. Singers in young artist programs get short-term contracts and typically undertake duties far from the spotlight, as community ambassadors for the opera, for example. But there’s also the possibility of small roles and chorus appearances, and the incalculable benefit of being an insider.

Says Hosmer, “You never know when you might get a call — ‘We need a Ferrando tomorrow!’”

Experience Counts

Training professional opera singers is one aim of the College of Music and the Eklund Family Opera Program, which helps support three campus productions each year. A broader goal, says program director Leigh Holman, is to provide music students with meaningful exposure to a major category of theater music. Many students will become teachers; to be good ones, she says, they need to know opera.

For the professional aspirants in the Così cast, performing big roles in famous operas is vital currency in the job market. Opera companies want more than talent; they want singers intimate with specific roles in a small pool of popular operas that includes Così fan tutte.

“Management will like to see that you’ve done the role before,” says Holman, a mezzo-soprano who sang professionally and directed Opera Colorado’s young artist program before joining the CU music faculty in 2007. “It gives them confidence the singer has the goods to pull it off.”

CU’s professional performance program offers young singers the extra benefit of helping them expand their repertoires as they await developments that can’t be rushed: The human voice doesn’t fully mature until the early 30s, in some cases later.

That’s one reason why Così is a college favorite: It’s meant for young voices.