Before the First Note

The Work That Begins Before the Work

Imagine what can happen to an artist — more specifically, an opera singer — who is offered a role in a production. After the perfectly understandable initial enthusiasm, the offer of an engagement may seem like one of the milestones on a more or less lengthy journey: years of training, auditions, study, opportunities pursued and sometimes missed.

For the performer receiving it, however, it is also the beginning of another operation, less visible and considerably less musical, because the performer has to put together a schedule, assess the duration of the commitment, organise a stay away from home, and work out how much money will be needed before the fee becomes available.

Yes. Before it becomes available.

Of course, this does not mean that all these expenses necessarily have to be borne personally. Some agreements provide for reimbursements, advances or services paid for directly by the organiser. What matters is what the individual engagement provides for, including in terms of timing: an expense reimbursed at the end of the engagement may meanwhile have required money that the artist needed to have available.

We shall get there a little at a time.

The distinction between what has to be done and who has to pay for it already emerges at this stage. Before rehearsals even begin, somebody has to make the performer’s presence there materially possible, and in order to arrive on time for the first call the singer will already have had to sort out quite a number of things. The audience will hear the result several weeks later, when this preliminary work has already produced its effect.

For the public, a singer’s work coincides above all with what happens on stage: a voice rises above the orchestra, gives substance to a character, moves through a scene. The attack, the phrasing, the sustaining of a line, the ability to restore to the music its dramatic necessity. It is understandable that attention should concentrate there, not least because one buys a ticket to attend a performance, and it is that performance that one judges.

Preparation, however, has a different timescale, one that cannot be reduced to rehearsals and the soirée. Obviously, a role has to be known before it can be rehearsed, and knowing a score involves far more than reading the notes: the language — imagine a native German speaker having to sing in fluent Italian, and vice versa — the articulation of the text, harmonic relationships, the shaping of the character, the management of vocal difficulties, and possibly the comparison of different editions.

When the role is not already part of the performer’s repertoire, this work can begin long before arrival at the theatre. And when it is, it must still be taken up again and adapted to the circumstances of the new production. Look, this is no small matter: colleagues change, the conductor changes, stage requirements change, and even what seemed fully mastered may require a fresh adjustment.

Part of this preparation takes place at home, without every hour spent over the score necessarily entailing an outlay. It nevertheless remains professional time that has been committed and is therefore unavailable for other possible activities. Quite another matter are the expenses for services the performer may decide to purchase, and confusing these two situations means losing, from the outset, the possibility of understanding what exactly we are calculating.

Then collective work begins, with the conductor, the director, the orchestra, the chorus, the technical staff and everyone else on whom the realisation of the performance depends. The singer has to coordinate his or her availability with that of others, comply with calls and schedules, and bring what has been prepared individually into that particular production. The commitment therefore stretches over a period considerably longer than the evenings on which the singer will actually be heard.

And this is where the fee begins to need a little explanation.

The figure may be attractive, even high, but in order to assess it one needs to know which services it includes, which expenses remain with the artist and when the money will actually be paid. An artistically desirable proposal may involve financial conditions that the professional has to examine with equal care. The initial enthusiasm, however justified, will have to reckon with this too.

The Price of a Stay

To see a little more clearly how the problem works, let us set aside for a moment the differences between one career and another and construct an entirely hypothetical situation.

No particular singer, no production that has actually existed, no theatre concealed between the lines. Let us simply imagine a performer who has to spend twenty-nine days away from home for a production with four performances. First come the rehearsals, then the performances, and meanwhile one has to sleep somewhere, eat, get around, reach the workplace. In short, generally speaking, go on living. Perhaps even find a little distraction now and then, which never does any harm.

Nothing surprising so far, you will say.

Fine. Let us try, however, to put the expenses together.

To do so, we use public prices for accommodation and transport and add a few purely hypothetical amounts for the additional cost of food — not counting the extra hunger, perhaps from nerves: it happens, and it is more than understandable — and the tourist tax. Our example thus comes to approximately 1,652 euros.

Now, take that figure for what it is: not a national average, not the “true” cost of a production, still less a figure that we claim to apply to every singer, heaven forbid. It is simply the result of a deliberately constructed basket that allows us to do a few calculations without speaking merely on the basis of impressions.

For accommodation, for example, we have taken a publicly advertised minimum rate as our reference. In real life, naturally, one would have to check that the accommodation was actually available during the weeks in question, and might discover that it costs more. Let us not forget that in some cities rents are decidedly over the top.

We have excluded income tax, personal social-security contributions and even any lessons or coaching sessions: we do not know whether our imaginary singer needs them, and it would be absurd to invent them merely to inflate the total.

There is then an even more important question. Those 1,652 euros are not necessarily money lost by the performer.

The theatre might pay for the accommodation directly, reimburse the journey, provide a per diem, or have agreed a fee in which the parties consider those expenses already included. It depends on the engagement. For that reason, simply subtracting the figure from the fee and concluding that “the singer is left with X euros” would be a particularly irritating piece of accounting sleight of hand. And in this matter we can quite comfortably do without things of that sort.

The figure does, however, show us something else.

Rent does not become cheaper because the person paying it earns less. A train ticket, however low-cost it may be, does not know the artist’s fee. Nor does the supermarket — sometimes not even the cheapest discount store.

If, therefore, we leave the conditions of the stay unchanged and alter only the hypothetical fee, the weight of those same expenses changes considerably: at €8,000 they account for around 20.7 per cent; at €6,000, 27.5 per cent; at €4,000, 41.3 per cent.

I am not saying that these three amounts correspond to three real categories of singers. We do not know that, and that is not the point. We have simply turned one knob while leaving all the others untouched.

The arithmetic, however, is quite eloquent and Solomonic: when part of the costs remains substantially stable, its weight increases as the fee falls.

Then, in real life, many things will change. One person lives closer, another finds hospitality, another shares a flat; some will obtain reimbursement and others will negotiate different conditions. And it is precisely this variability that makes it rather foolish to judge an engagement solely by the figure written next to the word fee.

But the really interesting point comes a moment earlier.

And where, meanwhile, is the money for the trip coming from?

If payment is made at the end of the engagement, or in any event after some of the work has already been done, certain expenses will already have had to be met. A job can be perfectly worthwhile overall and still require money to be available in order to finance it while waiting to be paid.

It is a distinction that seems small until one actually has to face it.

In our example, therefore, with no advance at all, the peak requirement for the performer’s own money before final payment reaches approximately €1,913 — more than the cost calculated earlier because here we also include the food that would in any case have been paid for at home. Introduce a hypothetical advance of €2,000 on arrival and, in exactly the same scenario, that requirement almost disappears: approximately €70, apart from the security hold placed on the card at the time of booking, which is not an expense but keeps the amount of the room blocked for three weeks.

The singer has not earned a cent more.

The theatre has not given the singer anything for free.

Only when the money became available has changed.

Naturally, on the other side, that advance represents an earlier cash outflow for the organiser, who will have to factor it into cash-flow management. No magic wand, then. But the difference allows us to understand something essential: cost and liquidity are not the same thing.

Nor are they the same thing as risk.

Suppose one of the four performances falls through for whatever reason. The room in which the performer has already slept for three weeks cannot travel back in time, nor can the days already spent in rehearsal. What happens to the fee, on the other hand, will depend on the conditions agreed.

Here, then, are the three problems that will continue to recur — a distinctly non-Wagnerian leitmotif, and therefore rather unpleasant to listen to — throughout the discussion: how much it costs to make the work possible; how much money one needs to have before being paid; what happens economically if something goes wrong.

They are called cost, liquidity and risk. They resemble one another enough to be confused and differ enough to change completely how a contract is read.

The Questions That Define an Engagement

At this point, however, one clarification is necessary.

In preparing this article, public documents, legislation, agreements and materials relating to the organisation of operatic work were examined; no complete contemporary form emerged that would allow us to say: this is the engagement normally offered today in Italy to a guest solo singer.

So we will not say it.

We will not say that “in Italy rehearsals are paid in this way”, that “travel is always paid by the singer”, or that “if a performance is cancelled, this is what happens”. We do not have the evidence.

Not least because every engagement may, quite obviously, be a case unto itself. And the more seasoned reader will realise that immediately.

What we can do, however, is something more useful: understand which questions an engagement must in any case resolve.

Beginning with the most obvious: what is being paid for?

A fee per performance and a fee for the entire production are not necessarily the same thing. Remuneration that also includes the rehearsal period is different from remuneration that provides a separate fee for rehearsals. And the absence of a separate item is not, in itself, enough to conclude that the work is being done for free: it may simply be included in the overall fee.

It sounds like a subtle distinction, but if you think about it, it is not one at all.

If I have to remain available for four weeks, knowing that four performances are worth a certain amount still tells me relatively little if I do not know what happens during all the other days and what that fee actually covers.

The same applies to the number of performances.

Four announced performances do not necessarily mean four performances financially guaranteed to the performer. They may be, or they may not. If one is cancelled, one has to understand what happens to the fee and which costs have meanwhile already become irreversible.

Then come rehearsals, preparation, and possible illness, which for a singer can become one of the most feared contingencies. The instrument, in this case, cannot be put back in its case at the end of the working day: one has to carry it around twenty-four hours a day and try, as far as possible, to protect it — particularly during the winter months — from those things that for us ordinary mortals are merely seasonal nuisances. For a performer, by contrast, they can turn into a genuine professional calamity.

In short, the opera singer has this small peculiarity, which requires no grand theory to understand: the voice is the working instrument and, however well one prepares, it does not always obey the calendar. One can arrive on time, have studied the role perfectly, have taken part in all the rehearsals and nevertheless find oneself unable to sing, perhaps because of a particularly nasty inflammation or a cold that begins almost innocently and develops into progressive hoarseness at precisely the worst possible moment.

What happens then is not decided by the bronchitis, but by the contractual relationship.

The same impediment can in fact produce different economic consequences depending on the guarantees provided, the moment at which it occurs and the work that has already been done in the meantime.

A room already occupied is an expense already incurred, whereas a journey not yet made can be avoided. Likewise, a sum blocked on a card, for example, is not a final cost, even though for a few days it prevents that money from being used.

These may look like details for an inveterate accountant, but they are precisely the details that prevent the aforesaid accountant from telling us a false story.

And then there is payment.

If an advance — by that point, decidedly welcome — arrives during the rehearsal period, the artist needs fewer personal resources to get through those weeks. If, on the other hand, final payment arrives considerably later, the final amount may well be exactly the same: in the meantime, however, the problem has been finding the money to get that far.

None of this concerns only the singer, because the theatre too has to schedule outgoings, absorb possible unforeseen costs and hold together an entire production in which the variables are numerous and, alas, often expensive in their own right.

The contract stands precisely between these two needs.

There is, however, an interesting comparison within the Italian system itself.

For certain forms of dependent employment within Italy’s opera-symphonic foundations, there are already mechanisms that explicitly address mobility: allowances, travel reimbursements and, under certain conditions, advances for employees hired from outside the city; other provisions regulate travel for staff already in service.

This obviously does not mean that the same rules can simply be pasted onto the engagement of a guest soloist, because the relationships are different.

It does mean, however, that the problem is hardly unknown to the sector.

When work is organised in one form, moving, living away from one’s home base and having to advance money become matters worthy of specific regulation. When the relationship takes another form, one simply has to see where those same costs have ended up.

The Work of the Intermediary

Between singer and theatre, naturally, there may be an agent. Indeed, let us say it quite openly: anyone familiar with theatres knows that at a certain level the agent is an almost routine presence.

And here too it is worth avoiding a very convenient simplification: an agent is not there merely to “get a higher fee”.

That may well be the most important point in a negotiation, but it is not the only one. One production may pay well but occupy too much of the calendar, while another may offer a lower figure but better conditions for accommodation, payment or the period of availability required. An advance, a guarantee or a reimbursement may change the actual attractiveness of an engagement without moving the nominal fee by a single euro.

Italian legislation, moreover, assigns the agent a role that goes well beyond simply discussing the fee: programmes, places, dates and contractual clauses all enter the negotiation. This means that the person representing the artist may have to assess not merely how much a job pays, but how much time it will take away, which other engagements it will make incompatible, and what conditions the artist will have to shoulder in order to accept it.

Intermediation, naturally — needless to say — costs money too. And here one has to be careful with universal formulas, because there is no magic percentage that applies to everyone. There are commission-based representation agreements, different formulas, shorter or longer relationships, possible exclusivity clauses, services that may be far from identical. Putting an arbitrarily chosen percentage into our calculation would be very convenient, but we would simply have invented a number.

Much better to stop at what really matters: if a commission is provided for, it becomes part of the professional cost of the engagement. How much it actually weighs depends on the representation agreement.

There is another aspect, less immediate and perhaps more interesting.

The relationship with an agent can last much longer than a single production. The theatre quite legitimately thinks about that production, while the singer and the representative also have to think about what comes afterwards.

A new role can be worth more than the fee it brings immediately. A very well-paid production may block out valuable weeks. An apparently modest engagement may open a path, consolidate a repertoire, create professional relationships that bear fruit later.

This is why discussing the figure alone once again risks leading us astray.

Because an engagement does not exist in isolation: it fits into a career.

There is, however, one problem that the agent, by nature, cannot solve alone, because the agent represents an individual artist and negotiates an individual engagement. Some of the issues at stake — protection, social security, minimum conditions, illness, maternity, continuity of income — concern an entire professional category.

And here the Italian picture becomes interesting, because since 2015 ASSOLIRICA, the professional association of opera artists, has sought to give a common voice to opera’s independent professionals and continues to identify among the unresolved issues precisely their legal classification and their social-protection and pension safeguards. It is not a trade union in the strict sense, but its very existence tells us quite clearly how strongly the need for specific representation was felt.

On the specifically trade-union side, there has also been movement. A national trade-union organisation has created a coordinating body specifically for self-employed opera professionals: performers and creative workers who work regularly or occasionally under self-employed contracts, often moving from one production to another and from one client to another. In presenting that structure, the union spoke openly of the need to reach areas of the performing arts that remained little or not at all covered by traditional forms of regulation, and to provide representation for those who until then had remained at the margins.

This does not mean, of course, that the opera singer has no protection whatsoever or faces the contract entirely alone. It means rather that the self-employed soloist occupies a professional area more difficult to fit into established categories than the permanently employed member of a theatre, and that collective representation has had to devise new instruments specifically in order to reach such workers.

The comparison with certain foreign systems therefore takes on a different meaning, because its purpose is not to establish who is more civilised than whom, but to see what happens when some of the questions left to individual negotiation enter instead into a collective framework.

It Is Not a Law of Nature

At this point we can look around a little, while avoiding a very widespread temptation: turning every international comparison into a moral ranking of nations, because we have no interest whatsoever in proving that “people abroad are more civilised”. That would be decidedly beside the point and outside the subject of these brief observations.

What interests us is whether rehearsals, advances, cancellations and illness really are matters of fate that must remain outside contractual negotiation.

The answer, quite simply, is no.

There are systems in which some of these matters are regulated with greater precision. In Germany, for example, an agreement that came into force in 2025 for certain guest artists in dependent employment provides specific rules on rehearsals, payments, illness and cancellations, and allows for advances. It does not apply to every singer working in the country, and it would be wrong to present it that way.

In the United States we find an even more immediate example.

Under a collective agreement applying to a particular company, certain soloists paid per performance receive one third of their contractual fee within three working days of the first rehearsal.

One third. If you think about it, this hardly seems a Copernican revolution: an advance and the balance, as happens in a great many project-based jobs.

Not at the end of the final performance, but while the production is still under way.

It is not difficult to see what difference that makes to someone who is meanwhile paying for accommodation — perhaps extremely expensive accommodation — and living away from home. Nor does it mean that the theatre has somehow produced money out of thin air: it has simply scheduled the payment at a different point.

In the British system too there is an agreement for Opera Guest Artists that distinguishes between rehearsals, performances and the work of someone preparing a role as a cover, with specific rules also for mobility and for some of the contingencies that may arise during a production.

They are different legal systems, different markets, different contractual forms. None of these examples can simply be transported to Italy and assembled with illustrated instructions like a piece of Ikea furniture.

They do, however, show us one thing that matters here: the way uncertainty is distributed does not fall from the sky, but can be negotiated.

Naturally, a well-established singer might answer that he or she prefers to agree freely on an overall fee without too many constraints around it, and would have good reasons for saying so. Someone with strong bargaining power — which is not exactly a quality distributed in equal shares — can afford to choose which costs to absorb, which conditions to demand and even which risks to accept in exchange for high remuneration.

But not everyone negotiates from the same starting point.

Establishing certain minimum conditions does not necessarily mean preventing those who can obtain better ones from doing so, but rather asking what floor the negotiation begins on.

On the other side, the theatre has an equally concrete need to preserve flexibility, because productions change, unforeseen events exist and resources are not infinite.

The problem is not to eliminate risk from opera, but to decide where that risk should end up when it materialises.

The Work the Law Recognises

Curiously enough, the underlying principle is not even foreign to Italian law.

The 2022 law on the performing arts recognises a characteristic that seems almost obvious to anyone familiar with this world: an artistic performance may last only a short time before the public and yet, as a rule, have required longer preparation.

Put like that, it sounds like a statement of the obvious, but legally speaking it is anything but.

Because, when all is said and done, it means unequivocally recognising that an artist’s work does not begin simply when the curtain goes up.

Naturally, it does not follow from this that every hour spent at home over the score must be paid separately — that would be decidedly too much — nor that a rate for individual study automatically exists, since that would be a logical leap the law does not authorise.

The point is another: preparation also exists in legal terms as part of the specific nature of work in the performing arts.

The same legislation also raises issues concerning the availability required of workers, the protection of preparatory activity and fair remuneration for the self-employed. Some of the powers delegated by the law, moreover, are still awaiting completion of a process whose current deadline is the end of 2026.

Let us be clear: there is no need to turn this into a law lecture, but merely to note that the problem has been recognised by the legislature too, and that recognising it is not the same thing as having already determined how it must be resolved in each individual contract.

There is also a small irony worth recalling.

The practice of opera singing in Italy has been recognised as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

It is an important recognition, and not merely a symbolic one: it concerns a tradition made up of knowledge, techniques, learning and transmission.

A tradition, however, does not live in a display case. It exists because somebody continues to study, sing, teach, travel, rehearse and take risks.

And cultural prestige, by itself — it is worth writing this down — does not pay for any of those things.

It would be equally easy, however, to fall into the opposite excess and pretend that everything can simply be loaded onto the organiser, because a theatre has to pay staff, premises, productions, sets, make advance payments and bear risks of its own. If it is asked to assume an additional cost, that money has to exist somewhere.

In short, no solution is free.

The point is not to find a scapegoat, but to know what is being bought and who is financing the different parts of that work.

Staying a Singer

So far we have been looking at a production, but a career, naturally, is something else and does not end when a run of performances ends, obviously.

It is a sequence of jobs, journeys, periods of study, rehearsals, waiting, offers accepted and others left to fall by the wayside. And it is precisely when one moves from a single engagement to a succession of them that the problem inevitably changes shape.

An artist may perfectly well decide that a production which is not particularly attractive economically is nevertheless worth doing, for a series of reasons connected with the building — perhaps the farsighted building — of a career: the role, the conductor, the theatre, the repertoire, or simply the very human desire to do that particular thing.

And a good thing too.

If every artistic decision were determined solely by economic return, we would have solved the problem of creative work by abolishing it altogether.

The point comes afterwards.

How often is it possible to sustain that choice?

An expense advanced for one production may not yet have been recovered when the next one has to be organised. Enough to make your hands shake. And your wallet too.

Two engagements close together are a stroke of good fortune professionally and can even become, for a few weeks, a cash-flow problem.

A period without engagements may reduce travel costs, but it produces no income, while study continues.

In short, this is a profession in which artistic continuity and financial continuity do not always march at the same pace, but this does not entitle us to say that singers leave the profession at forty, fifty or any other age, because we would need data we do not have in order to make that claim.

We can, however, ask a more serious question: how many times can a person make the same kind of investment before beginning to wonder whether it is still worthwhile?

The answer, as one can readily imagine, will vary from person to person.

How much one earns matters, of course. But so do repertoire, the number of opportunities, bargaining strength, other income, the possibility of being offered accommodation, family circumstances, even the utterly banal ability to have a few thousand euros available at that particular moment.

And here we come to a slightly uncomfortable question.

If accepting an opportunity requires having money before one has earned it, personal financial resources can, at least potentially, affect which opportunities one is actually able to take.

Mind you: we are not saying that opera is a profession reserved for the rich. Heaven forbid. We do not have the data to support that claim and it would, moreover, be a distortion to write it.

We are saying something much simpler.

Talent, however great it may be, on its own — and without an engagement — is not enough to pay the rent or to keep meeting expenses that can become burdensome if one does not work with great continuity or if one lives in a major city where everyday life is costly even for someone with the fabled permanent job — and, as a direct consequence, a regular salary.

In short, singing extremely well does not magically make money appear in one’s bank account two weeks before it is needed. The money for the trip has to be there beforehand, to put it as directly as a high-speed express.

Then there are people’s lives.

A person has to leave home for a month and may have a family, or may live alone, or may have to make arrangements for pets, children, parents, commitments that do not disappear simply because a new opera title has appeared on the calendar.

All right, there is no need to turn all this into a contemporary martyrology, even though the difficulties of work — of any work nowadays — turn something that ought even to be pleasant into a daily half-climb to Calvary. We should also remember that enormous numbers of people work away from home and nevertheless manage to organise themselves in the best possible way. Even if this, to borrow from someone, is not exactly the best of all possible worlds.

The singer’s particularity lies in the meeting between this mobility and individual preparatory work that can begin a considerable time before the production officially starts.

That is why the value of an engagement is not exhausted by the evenings on which one sings, but has to be viewed across the whole span of time it demands from the professional life of the person accepting it.

Sometimes the singer will say yes, while at other times he or she may do the sums — of whatever kind, financial and otherwise, because life has millions of facets — and say no.

And neither contracting party needs to be pushing too hard for an agreement not to be worthwhile.

A theatre may simply not have the resources to offer better conditions, just as the artist may simply have no interest in accepting those available.

The problem, as always in situations of this kind, is knowing it beforehand.

The Role One Does Not Yet Know

In the end, inevitably, we return to the music.

Because among all the things a singer has to do when an offer arrives, there is one that comes even before the suitcase, the rent and the train ticket: the singer has to know what to sing, and if the role is not already known, it has to be learned.

That does not mean memorising a line of notes with words underneath them, but absorbing a text, understanding how the language works inside the music, finding the relationship between phrase and breath, knowing the structure, understanding where the musical writing supports the voice and where instead it begins to test it. And then come notes, underlinings, even tears in the score, when a particular passage proves especially troublesome or threatens to remain decidedly difficult.

Some roles will be learned more quickly and others will require weeks, if not months, particularly when one decides to begin studying them in advance simply because, sooner or later, one hopes to perform them. Some roles will remain in the repertoire for twenty years and others will be sung only once.

Once a role has been acquired, naturally, it does not disappear: it remains part of the performer’s professional capital and may prove useful again.

A second production will still require study and adaptation, but there will no longer be any need to start again from zero — assuming that second production ever comes.

And this is where our economic argument, almost without intending to, becomes a musical argument again.

If a new role requires a considerable investment of time and perhaps also money, how much does the probability of being able to use it again matter?

Here too, unlikely as it may seem, this is not at all a question for an accountant or an old bookkeeper accustomed to double-entry bookkeeping, but a question that directly concerns repertoire.

A singer may choose a role because he or she loves it, because it feels right for the voice, because the singer wants to approach a new composer, or because that role seems capable of opening a new path. Fortunately, not every artistic decision is born on an Excel spreadsheet, but desire does not erase the material conditions in which it has to become reality.

We do not know — and it would be wrong to pretend that we do — how much this mechanism actually affects the variety of repertoire that reaches the theatre. The reasons why a particular work is programmed infrequently are many, and involve theatres at least as much as performers.

We can, however, allow ourselves the question.

To stage an opera it is not enough for the score to exist, nor even for an artistic director to decide to programme it: there must be people who have the time, the conditions and the professional interest required to learn it.

It is there that the offer from which we began takes on one final meaning.

A singer receives an offer and has to decide whether to devote part of their professional life to something they may continue to sing for years or may never encounter again.

The artistic value may be enormous, while the economic return may be smaller, or simply more uncertain.

The audience will hear the result weeks or months later and will see only the tip of the iceberg; or rather, it might be more accurate to say that the audience will attend the performance while remaining completely, or almost completely, unaware of the titanic effort that went into producing it.

Before the first note, however, that work had already begun.

And before asking why certain works reach the theatre so rarely, perhaps it is worth asking who bore the time commitment required to learn them, and acknowledging the painstaking work and sacrifices involved in giving us those hours of pure catharsis that improve the life of each and every one of us.

Before the first note, precisely.