Canadian opera training may need a rinascimento, a second act in which characters come together, untangle the plot and move it forward. The opera industry has changed, but does the current system for training artists fully prepare them for new realities in the professional trenches? Considering the problem holistically, the system encourages the Perpetual Student Singer, cycling young talent through undergraduate and graduate degrees, summer programs and now multiple Young Artist Programs (YAP). The result is at least 10 years spent learning, but mostly sitting and waiting.
Current practice would seem to underplay the new normal, which is that most would-be opera singers need transferrable skills training and more diversity of thought in school and in their apprenticeships to help them develop a portfolio of income streams. Betty Allison, who sang for years at the highest level in Canada, wrote a doctoral dissertation on mid-career artists and their non-musical stressors and coping strategies, and now teaches at Dalhousie University’s Fountain School of the Performing Arts, is one proponent of change. “I never felt like I fit, and I kept looking for the answer,” she says. “The answer wasn’t more education. It’s still serving a model of the past, something that’s dying. The answer is being honest with [students] about what they will face and fostering portfolio careers.”
There are more than four dozen music schools and conservatories in Canada, many in university settings,
