Clare Hayes on how you prepare for an opera performance

When thinking of opera, we tend to think about staging, costumes, a big theatre. But like any other performance, an opera starts in the practice room. We have talked to violinist Clare Hayes about how she prepares for an opera and why you can’t know the piece too well.

How do you start preparing for a performance?

The first stage of preparing for a performance for an orchestra musician is to look at the music individually. We get our music from a drop box along with the score, so we can download it at home and look through it to see if there are any tricky bits that we need to prepare before the first rehearsal. I also like to listen to the opera and work out how my part fits into the overall picture.

Why is it important to listen to the opera?

Although it takes a lot of imagination in the early stages of rehearsal, you must not forget that we provide the soundtrack to a story that’s being told live on stage, so you have to be aware of what’s happening to be able to help tell that story. In the violins you are sometimes doubling the voice but even if you are playing an accompaniment figure it helps if you know what the singer’s singing. If the heroine is having a miserable time, you don’t want to be playing with a lovely, bright, and cheerful articulation and sound. You want to be mirroring her emotions and helping her present them. There are some instructions in your part, but there is only so much information these instructions can give you, so it’s vital to know what’s happening in the plot.

How far ahead of the first rehearsal do you start practising?

When I start practising depends on the opera. If it’s an opera I’ve already done, such as The Barber of Seville, I don’t have to do so much preparation. Or it might be a very familiar composer like Mozart, so I know what to expect. But even with those operas there’s always a patch which is tricky or really fiddly in the second violins and needs some extra work.

If you are playing a more modern work or a new commission, preparation could potentially take a bit more work. When we played Little Women in 2022 I wasn’t quite sure what to expect so I made sure I started preparing earlier. And then there are operas which take more practice time even though they are quite well known such as Janacek’s Cunning Little Vixen, which we did in 2021.

Does opera get boring if you practise it too much?

Definitely not! If in doubt, you always want to err on the side of doing too much preparation rather than doing too little. And that’s because a performance is a living, breathing, and therefore somewhat unpredictable thing. Every night is different. One of the singers might decide to hold a note that’s going brilliantly a bit longer than in the rehearsal. So you have to know your part really well to be able to react to all these changes. And no matter how well you are prepared, there are always situations you would never have seen coming and therefore can’t really prepare for.

Can you give us an example of a challenge during a performance that you did not see coming?

I remember a dress rehearsal where there was an awful storm: torrential rain, thunder, and lightning. When rain hits the roof of Opera Holland Park, the sound is absolutely cacophonous because it’s a sort of canvas roof to the theatre. We were in the middle of rehearsal and the only thing we could hear was the rain on the roof. We couldn’t hear what we were playing, and – most worryingly – we couldn’t hear the singers. We were relying on instincts and what we could see the conductor doing. It is hard to describe, but there’s this collective feel, you’re part of this big entity, so when we were no longer able to rely on what we could hear we had to rely more on that instinct. That’s what kept the performance together and saw us safely through the thunderstorm.

Thank you so much for the interview!