Name: How an opera gets made
Uploaded: 2020-09-18T18:06:02.000Z
Duration: 10 min 30 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This is Anthony Roth Costanzo, countertenor extraordinaire, rehearsing one of the most

For six straight minutes, he and his fellow castmates have to sing the word “ah.”

It's an extraordinary feat that happens roughly one hour into Akhnaten, an opera by

Philip Glass about this influential Egyptian pharaoh.

Pulling off this opera takes the coordination of hundreds of people.

a costume with baby heads attached to them,

and a giant sun roughly the size of twelve Anthonys.

Oh, and the music is in four different languages.

This all happens inside this Iconic building, the Metropolitan Opera House in Manhattan.

Anthony has performed Akhnaten with the English National Opera and the Los Angeles Opera

And what's even cooler is we get a peek behind the curtain

So I play Akhnaten, the ancient Egyptian pharaoh, who's a totally fascinating, weird, complex

He has this idea, which changes the course of history.

Which is that instead of hundreds of gods that have existed in Egypt forever, there

would be one God, and that would be the sun.

He was thus the first monotheist - the first person to worship one God.

This opera is like a fever dream of ancient Egypt, and it all starts with the music,

which wouldn't exist without world class vocal chords.

Should I walk you through some exercises?

How many of your neighbors know you're an opera singer?

I was actually going to ask the same thing.

I can't hear my own voice the way other ears can because it's buzzing in my head.

It's so much to do with the way we use our breath.

She's been his vocal coach since he was 17.

But then we have to do it without a lip trill and just starting on a vowel.

[Singing: Oooo, ohhh, ahhhh, aaaaa, eeeee]

See the hardest thing in the world is the first tone.

That first tone is vitally important during every moment of Aknahten, but especially the

So that onset that he did, with no consonant, is real accomplishment.

Because if he did, hah ah, ha ah, he'd kill himself.

To understand how an opera could sound like this, you have to know Philip Glass - perhaps

So he uses repetition with changing rhythms and syncopation to create a kind of meditative

There's a whole lot of arpeggios, meaning a broken chord.

So you'll hear da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da

In opera, there's a beat and the time is king.

And you can go 90 percent into your character, but if you go all the way, you might get totally

The first step in not getting lost is the sitzprobe.

So the Sitz probe is a German term, which sitz means sit and probe means try.

This is the first time the orchestra and singers hear what they sound like together after weeks

So it's a kind of sacred moment where you hear the orchestra for the first time, you

sing with the orchestra for the first time.

And in this particular case, it's the Met orchestra.

There are two people in this room who keep everyone in check.

In western music we have a tendency to steal time at the end of a phrase.

One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three

Here it's more about thinking linearly and being really honest about the length of each

After about three rounds we start to slow down.

So guys playing the offbeats, don't listen to anyone because we tend to get slower.

I really feel like my job inside the rehearsals is to get inside the conductor's mind to

It's hard sometimes for the performers to remember in the moment exactly how many repeats

they've done, so there's a lot of counting down measures.

A lot of this, which means don't sing let me do the work for you.

I give a lot of positive feedback to them to ensure that they're very comfortable

Yeah so this is an opera with a lot of juggling in it.

This is Phelim McDermott and Sean Gandini.

He's the director of the opera and he's the Juggling Master.

One thing is the performers are moving really slowly.

It's true, everyone moves in extreme slow motion the entire performance.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How an opera gets made

extraordinary

individual

fascinating

repetition