FINDING THE BALANCE
About 25 years ago, Richard Margison was homesick in Berlin. It was a familiar feeling in those years, when the Canadian tenor’s robust singing career kept him away from his family for 8-10 months of the year. At the time, he and wife Valerie Kuinka’s daughter, Lauren, was a toddler, and in this particular instance of missing home, Margison decided to distract himself by going to the incredible Berlin Zoo.
“Of course, every damn animal in the zoo had a baby,” he laughs, bittersweetly. “And that just destroyed me.”
He tried souvenir shopping, too. He went out and bought “all these ridiculous Bavarian outfits for little kids,” anticipating the fun of playing dress-up with Lauren. “By the time I got home, they were too small.”
“It’s rough,” says Margison, still smarting from the memories even now, with his daughter grown and his family intact. “It’s really rough.”
The industry line goes thus: opera singers aren’t paid to do what they love, they’re paid to be away from the ones they love. Most singers learn this early in their careers, after missing those first few family holidays, weddings, baby showers, or big birthdays. By the time they’re thinking of starting families, the stakes are high enough that some decide to bow out of the industry.
Yet at that same crisis point, there are singers who soldier forward with their concurrent plans to be an opera singer and a parent. I don’t know how they do it; having children is hard enough without adding things like international health insurance and extra plane tickets. These singers
