What a neat conversation. There's such an opportunity for interesting anecdotes when one has the chance to talk with opera professionals. If anyone has a chance to hear from a stage artist and not hear about some of their more fascinating-sounding events in performance, then it's kind of like cheating yourself out of a smile (or a chuckle). I know it seems like such a "stock-interview-question," but I'm entertained by the responses, all the same.

Here's one that's probably new to you. It comes by way of soprano Margaret Jane Wray. At a MET performance of "Götterdämmerung," she was slated to sing Gutrune (Gunter's sister, who becomes the 'artificial' love-interest of Siegfried). Well anyway (so the story goes), preparations are under way for the opening of the opera, and a rather indispensible character for the very moment of the curtain-part, 3rd Norn, is unaccounted for. (I believe that the first option was somehow physically indisposed, and the 'cover' was on the wrong side of the George Washington Bridge, stuck in brutal traffic.) So... running out of options, someone approaches Margaret.... can you do 3rd Norn?! It turns out that she had sung that role in the past- but (I believe) she admitted to making clear that she might need more than the usual assistance from the prompter's box. So, after one of the MET's patented last-minute costume alterations, she took the stage for the prologue. Ms. Wray said that her biggest concern was actually a physical mechanic of the drama, as she's the Norn who has to pull on the rope of fate and do so firmly enough to make it sever (Es riß!). So, happily, she sang, the rope snapped, she scrambled back-stage to get into her 'Gutrune' costume, and also earned some extra fees for a noteworthy 'double,' and hopefully a story that'll be interesting to her grandkids one day, as well as many of the rest of us.

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The hardest knife ill us'd doth lose his edge. Shakespeare- Sonnet 95