When Seattle Opera’s production of Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” opens Saturday night, an Edmonds couple will have what they consider the best seats in the house: on stage.
Melanie and Tom Hingson, great opera fans, are also great singers. And as longtime members of the elite Seattle Opera Chorus, they have enjoyed a front-row seat at many of the company’s most memorable productions, performing on stage with artists of international caliber and reveling in the “wall of sound” that kind of proximity creates.
But it’s not like they can just relax and enjoy the show. The demands on the chorus are high: Know the music, sing out, sing well, hit your marks, act, project, watch the conductor.
Melanie Hingson is a lyric soprano (a lighter voice) although, she says, “I can bring out the big guns.” She joined the chorus in 1992 and figures she has sung in close to 40 productions. Tom Hingson, a bass-baritone, signed on in 1999 and has about 20 productions under his belt.
The couple shared some of their experiences during a lunchtime interview recently. Tom Hingson, director of Everett Transit, was on his lunch break. Melanie Hingson has a degree in vocal performance and has taught voice; he studied criminal justice in college, and a part-time job driving a bus developed into a full-fledged transit career. All along, he kept the music going. They have two grown children.
The couple enjoys singing together, and their credits include the Sno-King Community Chorale and the Northwest Savoyards. But singing with Seattle Opera is at the highest level. These are professional positions. The auditions are rigorous, members sign contracts and are paid.
Each opera requires weeks of preparation and rehearsal. There are scores to study and music to memorize, dialect to hone (is the opera Italian, Spanish, Russian or German?) and staging to perfect. The days of “stand-and-deliver” opera singers are long gone.
Today’s audiences want singers who can act as well as sing and chorus members are generally doing something while they perform.
“Costumes can really put you in the part,” Melanie Hingson said. She has been bewigged and bejeweled, corseted into period costumes (“Traviata”), and he was streaked with grime and dressed in rags (“Billy Budd”). Sometimes they sing in street clothes, as in the modern-dress “Dutchman” in which Tom Hingson wears a hardhat. Conversely, he described his costume for a Verdi opera as “Little Lord Fauntleroy on steroids.” In “Norma,” the singers wore wigs with little strands of hair hanging out.
The director may place the chorus high above the stage, although Melanie Hingson professes a fear of heights. Or they might sing from the orchestra pit.
And there are missteps. During a performance of “Rigoletto,” Tom Hingson recalled that his attention had wandered and when he looked up the chorus room was empty. The other singers were on stage; he’d missed a cue. He hurried to the wings, smiled at the director, and walked on as if nothing had happened. “I’ve never done that again,” he said.
“Dutchman,” Wagner’s musical telling of the Dutch mariner, doomed to sail forever unless he can meet a woman who will be faithful to him, is a big-scale production in every category. It’s also a showcase for the chorus, and Seattle Opera, famed for the quality of its choral work, deploys nearly 80 singers for this production under the direction chorusmaster Beth Kirchhoff.
The technical and musical requirements are enormous, with many hours of rehearsals. When the final curtain drops on Aug. 25, the Hingsons will have made as many as two dozen trips to the opera house. The final week of preparation can be grueling.
Pleasure follows work once the show begins and the applause comes rolling over the footlights. One of Tom Hingson’s co-workers asked him if singing in the chorus is fun. The answer is an emphatic “yes.”
In a twist worthy of grand opera, chorus members cannot fully savor how good they sound. “To hear the chorus you need to be in the audience,” Melanie Hingson said.
But that day will have to wait. The first time Melanie Hingson stepped on the opera house stage she thought, “I belong here.”
Mary McLaughlin photo
Tom and Melanie Hingson backstage during Seattle Opera’s recent production of “La Boheme.”
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