Opera students close semester with ‘Elixir of Love’ performance

Music from the USD’s production of “Highlights from The Elixir of Love” by Gaetano Donizetti filled the Colton Recital Hall this past weekend.

The opera is a shorter, American version of a classic Italian opera. This version takes place in the Wild West and centers around a man named Jimmy who is madly in love with a woman named Addy who he wants to impress.

When Dr. Dulcamara comes to town selling “medicine,” he buys an elixir of love to help him out.

“I’ve never been in an opera,” said graduate vocal performance student Bradley Sowell. “This is my first one.”

Students have been rehearsing their roles and working on their singing technique since the beginning of the semester.

“We get our scores from Dr. Hendrickson, and then we review the scores by ourselves,” said junior vocal music education major Brody Krogman. “Next, we start music rehearsals, then we start memorizing and we go into stage rehearsals after that.”

Mandi Steele, a graduate choral performance major, said the group will start the process all over again in January for an entirely different opera.

“We have scheduled an hour a day for rehearsals, but not everybody has that same hour,” Steele said. “Major roles have more pressure to put extra time outside of class time.”

Traditionally, operas are completely sung, but in “Highlights from The Elixir of Love” there were some speaking parts.

The original piece is actually three hours long, but Steele said this production cut the length of time to a little over an hour by cutting songs and adding spoken lines.

“I found it almost easier this time with the spoken lines to find my character, “ said graduate vocal performance student Dana Carlson.

Opera is meant to be sung, so while performing Carlson said students are not only thinking about their singing techniques while on stage, but they are also worrying about the story and the context.

“I have a hard time separating the two sometimes,” Sowell said. “I get wrapped up in the music rather than thinking about the actual text.”

The performers have to think about the music, technique and emotion in each song as well as being in character, Krogman said.

“I would say opera is more about singing and the acting accentuates the singing,” Krogman said. “And musical theater is all the theatrics accentuated by the singing.”

This is one reason why some people may think of operas as unrelatable, Carlson said, adding that the vision of the big woman with Viking horns shouldn’t be the generalization for opera as it can be more modern depending on the composer.

“Operas have the same basic themes as a lot of other performing arts, it almost always comes back to love, every single time, or darker plots like death or revenge,” Carlson said. “I think there is sort of this incorrect idea among the general public that they can’t enjoy it.”