I’ve promised to hand out of gobs of knowledge to the young singers who attended British Youth Opera’s career advice day (and also to those who didn’t) so if you’ve come to the blog today hoping to read about, say, barmy tenors, pancakes or train journeys you’ll be bitterly disappointed. You might learn a thing or two though. Some of this is stuff I said at the seminar, some of it is new.
GETTING FOREIGN WORK
Getting work abroad in the first place is pretty difficult unless you have an agent. Well, that certainly always used to be the case, but it is feasible that you can simply contact the casting department at most opera houses and see if they’ll give you a general audition. And who knows what might happen next? Certainly it shouldn’t put you off because for all the auditions you do that provoke no response whatsoever, you will possibly do one that has someone in the stalls thinking “Eureka!”
Very few casting directors will give you feedback, though there are some who will tell you exactly what they think straight afterwards while you’re still gasping and trembling in the wings.
Some companies send people to London to hear singers, but not so much these days, and if they do you can bet that the agents have all their time pretty-well sewn up.
My first work abroad didn’t come as a result of auditions. It came from British-based directors and conductors asking for me to be hired by foreign companies for their productions. And that would be true for many singers I know.
If you want to work abroad then your best bet is probably baroque repertoire (especially if it’s in English) and modern British music from Britten onwards. There are a lot of foreign companies who recognise the need to have Britten operas in their repertoire but who aren’t entirely comfortable with casting them. They know who would be best for, say, Verdi, but not for Britten. I once found myself helping a Franco-Russian director in Rome cast “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. All he could see was a list of British names but I knew which ones would be good for the piece and which ones wouldn’t. If you go to a foreign house and try and sell yourself as a Nemorino, you’re up against singers from every corner of the earth who are also selling themselves as Nemorino. If you sell yourself as a Novice (from Billy Budd), you’ve narrowed down the competition by a massive margin. So bear that in mind when you choose your rep and when you’re thinking about what it is you are trying to achieve by auditioning in the first place.
Unless you have a Green Card I wouldn’t think about auditioning for American companies at the outset. The visa issues are immense. US opera companies won’t generally consider hiring you unless it’s for a starring role or something veryspecialised for which they can’t use one of their own, and even those roles are extremely rare. The unions are verystrict about keeping American work for American singers. You will probably find that your first work in the States is as part of a visiting company on tour. Though, just because I can, I will enlighten you in future posts about some of the joys and pitfalls of working there. It’ll be fun!
On the one hand singing opera abroad can be exciting and thrilling, but on the other it can be soul-destroying, lonely and miserable. There’s no escaping this and I’d be deceiving you if I didn’t make this clear. If you are a travel junkie like me (and I use the word “junkie” advisedly) it presents enormous possibilities. You can truly immerse yourself in another culture for a significant amount of time, visit fantastic museums at your leisure, buy food at wonderful markets… always remembering though that you are there to work and you may find that all you actually want to do at the end of a day’s rehearsals is buy a frozen pizza and slob out in front of the TV. You wouldn’t be alone. It’s what a lot of singers do. More on that later.
There’s no doubt about it: singing abroad is generally good for you domestic career. Apart from the fact that it gives you a certain amount of kudos, learning and performing a role away from the acid gaze of the London critics can be very useful. What can be better than bringing a role home that you’ve conquered abroad?
The fees abroad are generally much higher than at home. I’ve been paid four times what I get at ENO for the same role. But don’t let the size of the fee fool you into thinking you have struck it rich. More on that later too. Besides, I’m afraid the recession is hitting everywhere and fees are shrinking the world over. More good news eh?
That’s it for this gob. Next time I’ll be writing about LOGISTICS. Thrilling stuff, but which comes to occupy your every waking moment once you are climbing the greasy pole. Believe me.
Whenever I’m heading off on a foreign job, my friend Stan, a writer, asks me if I am being met with a limo at the airport and transported to a five star hotel.
Ha!
Okay, okay, if the job is some concerts with a nice orchestra then there is a good chance you’ll be met and driven to a decent hotel (though, curiously, never in Berlin…) but opera is almost always a different beast and before you arrive in a new and unfamiliar city all most companies will do for you is tell you when and where your first rehearsal takes place. The rest is up to you.
DIGS
This isn’t to say that opera houses won’t help you find digs. They will, but I find that I almost never use the proffered digs because they are usually much more expensive (but also much pokier) than digs I can find on the internet. This is something that has definitely changed since the birth of the internet, and massively for the better.
Here’s a short extract from my book Who’s My Bottom? penned in the days before broadband and wifi. The prices are a little old; you can add 33% at least. I should also point out here that 99% of the time you will have to pay for your digs out of your own pocket.
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If you imagine that all opera singers are wealthy camelhair coated, Rolex-wearing types who lead a plush existence in five-star hotels and chauffer-driven limos, then you already have most of the qualifications needed to become the landlord of a rented apartment in a foreign city. Say the words “opera singer” to anyone with whom you are going to perform a financial transaction and you can virtually hear the cash-register ker-chink ringing inside their heads, or see their eyes spin like the wheels on a one-armed bandit stopping on a line of cherries.
How it usually works is this: the opera house for which you are going to work will have a list of apartments available to rent for a couple of months – these are usually owned by people with connections to the theatre – and for which you personally will have to fork out quite incredible sums of money. You can find yourself in an apartment that a “normal” tenant would rent for £200 a month, albeit on a longer let, but for which you pay £1500. How do they get away with it? First, by keeping the price slightly lower than the cost of a hotel. Second, by knowing that it’s a Hobson’s choice. Most of the time you have no idea what the going rate is until you are well and truly committed.
Furthermore, you usually arrive at night-time, tired and laden with luggage, too grateful to have stopped travelling to exercise your best judgement on the comfort-to-cost ratio when surveying your new home, and it is usually not until 48 hours later that you start to realise that you have been well and truly ripped off. When you search in vain for a halfway decent kitchen knife or cheese-grater you realise that once again you’ve been duped; how naïve of you to expect these things when you’re handing over such vast wads of cash! Oh yes, and the owners of these places always want cash alright, strictly hush-hush and well before you’ve even smelled a pay cheque for the job in hand.
I once arrived in Lausanneon a cold November night and checked into what was a very comfy little apartment for which I was paying enough to put the entire Family Robinson through yodelling school. The only snag was that the phone didn’t seem to work and I couldn’t ring home to say I was safe and sound, nor could I connect my laptop so that I could e-mail. The ritual of getting satisfactorily connected up gives me perverse pleasure, and to prove it I have a small sack positively bulging with phone gizmos, adapters and cables, of which I am absurdly proud. I managed to contact the landlord the next day.
“Is everything alright? It’s a lovely apartment. Very desirable.”
Yes, fine, only I can’t get the phone to work.
“Phone?! No it is not connected. You want a phone??! Haven’t you got a cellphone?”
Well yes of course but the cost of international calls is prohibitive.
“Oh (thinking: but you are surely a camel-hair coated Rolex wearer who doesn’t give a toss about the cost of a phone-call), well in that case I’m going to have to rip you off even more and charge you another £100 to have a phone connected.” (Or words to that effect.)
Blimey (or words to that effect).
In the end, outraged by such tactics, I decided to manage without a landline and opted for a Swiss SIM card for my British mobile (to make incoming calls cheaper) and spent long hours in freezing phone booths talking to my children via cheap phone cards.
The same landlord, when it was time for me to leave ripped me off again.
“Have you arranged for the apartment to be cleaned after you leave?”
“I beg your pardon? I am very clean and I’ll hoover, strip the bed etc…”
“But when you leave a hotel someone cleans the room for the next person and I have someone arriving very soon”
“But surely the person who is leaving the hotel doesn’t pay a surcharge to have the room they are vacating cleaned?”
“No no, this is not correct. I am sorry but you will have to pay for a cleaning service!”….. and I ended up, fool that I am, coughing up the Swiss franc equivalent of £85. For that price I hope they polished the floors with wax rendered from the rarest Edelweiss. But I got my revenge by not stripping the bed and leaving the place just a little bit grubby. I also didn’t own up to the fact that a knob on the washing machine had broken off in my (ahem) vice-like grip and I’d bodged it back on really rather better than was necessary with some glue and a chunk of a chopstick. That showed him.
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Recently my wife Lucy was working in Geneva. The opera’s list of digs mostly consisted of apartment hotels that cost over £3000 a month for a studio room. She found a large well-equipped flat for less than half the price by spending some time online.
Some points:
You can ask your agent to handle all your travel arrangements and digs but, frankly I think they have more important fish to fry, like finding you work. In my experience the fewer people that get involved the better; ultimately it is you who are going to live in the digs for two months so why not make the effort to find a place you like and can afford rather than risk the choice to someone else? You wouldn’t do it for a holiday so why do it for work?
Ask on Facebook for recommendations. Google “apartments for rent”. I often use www.homelidays.co.uk and www.halldis.com . Make sure you ask for a discount for a long stay. My top priorities are: location (make sure you can get back there after a show but I don’t see any real need to be within spitting distance of the theatre – just be near good public transport), internet access and laundry facilities. You’ll be living out of a suitcase for eight weeks so your wardrobe will be in the machine a lot.
Staying with friends and family will save you money but you’re in town to work and the hours you lead are often at odds with “civilian” hours. Relying on someone’s hospitality for two months can be the quickest way to lose friends.
Book your digs at least three months in advance. Don’t rush into a choice.
You will almost certainly have to pay a deposit in advance and you may have to pay for the full rental as soon as you arrive. That’s just the way it is.
Use Google Street-view to check out the area where you’re planning to stay. It’s amazing how much information you can pick up.
Keep in mind what your needs are going to be for the entire rental. If you’re planning to have friends or family over, make sure you have room. On the other hand, there’s no point in paying a fortune for a two-bedroom flat if it’s going to be just you for the whole time or if you think the odd visitor can actually make do on a blow-up bed for a couple of nights.
TRAVEL
Very few houses will book your travel for you. Again it’s something you should do yourself rather than hand over to the agent (in my humble opinion). More and more houses these days offer a “global” fee, meaning that it’s up to you to get to their city and they won’t pay any travel expenses at all.
Don’t necessarily take the view that as the opera house is paying your airfare it doesn’t matter how much you spend on the ticket. In most cases they will tax the amount they reimburse you. So if you spend £200 on a flight they say they’re going to pay, chances are they will only give you £150 and hold back £50 in tax.
A lot of companies, especially in Italy and Spain, have a habit of saying your first rehearsal is on, say, a Monday and then at the eleventh hour, say the Friday beforehand, changing that to the Wednesday. There’s not much you can do about that, especially if you’ve booked a non-changeable flight and rented your apartment from the Monday. Either turn up too soon or fork out to change your plans. Don’t expect the opera house to give a shit.
Don’t travel to a city on the morning of your first rehearsal (unless, possibly, it’s an evening rehearsal). Give yourself time to move in, get acclimatised and get your bearings. First rehearsals are nerve-wracking enough and you need to make a good impression. You don’t want to sound like you’ve just been travelling for six hours.
Make sure you know where your first rehearsal is taking place. Don’t assume it will be a short stroll from the stage door. In Milan it will probably be the other side of the city. Do some homework to make sure you know where you’re going. First impressions are very important.
OH, AND…
If you’re working in the EC (and some other counties), make sure you have your European Health Insurance card up-to-date but more importantly you need to apply for an A1 (used to be called an E101). I’m assuming you’re paying Class 2 National Insurance in the UK (£2 a week?). The A1 certifies that you are already paying NI and nine times out of ten you’ll need to hand an A1 to each foreign opera house for each job you do. It will prevent them deducting potentially whopping rates of social security from your fee.
Your agent can prepare the paperwork for you but DON’T WHATEVER YOU DO sign a form which certifies that they can act as your agent on your behalf with the HMRC. It’s a common mistake. When HMRC says “agent” they mean “accountant”. If you sign the form you’ll suddenly find all your tax stuff is going to your agent, and neither of you wants that. Believe me. My agent prepares my A1 application forms, sends them to me so I can sign them and then I send them to HMRC.
DO THIS WELL IN ADVANCE. HMRC are hopelessly slow. I applied for an A1 in April for a concert in Berlin in May. I received it in August but luckily in this case the promoter didn’t need an A1 after all.
If you haven’t received the A1 by the time the job starts, don’t panic. The important thing is that the opera house gets it before the end of the job, when you’ll be paid.
RANDOM
If you’re not flying on Easyjet or Ryanair (but there’s every chance you are!) then do join frequent flyer programmes. Some day you may get lucky and find yourself flown business class on a few long haul flights (it does happen, especially to the far east) and you’ll quickly earn enough miles for free flights and upgrades. Hotel loyalty cards too. Think like a corporate lacky.
Get a non-commission credit card. Most credit cards charge you hidden amounts of commission every time you use them abroad. The Post Office card is one of the few cards that doesn’t.
In the future you may have to consider getting a second passport. This is so you can submit one to an embassy for a visa and continue to travel for work on the other. There’s nothing dodgy about this though it’s unlikely to be hurdle you’ll have to jump for a few years.
If you do find yourself being booked for work in countries which require you to have a visa (USA, Australia, Japan, Russia…) then the employer will certainly have to help you, but you’ll probably have to buy the visa yourself. A US visa is about £200 by the time you’ve paid for all the bits and bobs. Time to turn to your agent for some help and expertise.
I’m an O2 customer. Before I go to Europe for any length of time I pay about £10 per month for the MyEurope bolt-on which cuts a fortune on roaming charges. Incoming calls cost me nothing and Lucy (and anyone on O2) can call me for free on my mobile. I’m sure every mobile company has a similar package. Worth setting up before you go. I have in the past bought local SIMs and stuck them in a second phone but I don’t think it’s worth it any more.
So how come you have landed this fancy job in a far-off land? Well, as often as not you discover that they really wanted someone else but ended up with you instead. Don’t worry. Get over it. It’s how the world works. You’ll be amazed once you step onto mainland Europe just how many singers there are in the business, most of whom you have never heard of, all singing away and scratching a living.
Don’t let it daunt you. Just be thankful for the job you have and realise that it’s OK to be a small fish (that no-one has heard of) in a very big sea. You’re in good company and you must have done something right or you wouldn’t be here in the first place.
It also makes you realise that your paranoia that various casting directors “don’t like you” is almost certainly misplaced. They have a huge pool of people to choose from, most of whom are actually (like you) terribly good. The fact they don’t hire you isn’t personal. It simply means they already have a good supply of people they know and like.
We all need to be reminded from time to time that we’re all good at what we do. Sometimes things just don’t go our way, and that’s how it goes. Don’t dwell on it. Move on. Someone who used to be high up in Welsh National Opera’s administration once told me that casting often came down to whose file happened to be on top of the pile on a given day. That’s how random it can be.
British singers are well-liked and trusted abroad. We are considered very calm and professional, hard working and not prone to tantrums or funny tricks. In some cultures, the throwing of a “sickie” in order to do a job elsewhere is quite common (though it’s pretty dumb these days when you can find who’s singing what and where at the few clicks of a mouse) but Brits are considered to be too honest for those pranks. I’ve met many foreign directors who love the British school of acting. They think we are subtle, cunning, funny and willing to try anything. Our standard of musicianship is also very high and we have the reputation for being responsive to suggestions and ideas. We’re considered to be expert at performing difficult modern music.
All these assets count for a lot and have probably helped secure you the job in the first place, so make sure you are well-prepared and live up to the standard. Or else.
So you’ve got your role, quite probably small to start with, and you’re in a foreign opera house. What can you expect?
Well, most opera houses look pretty-much the same the world over. They have stage doors, corridors, rehearsal rooms, offices and stages. The French, instead of saying stage right and stage left (which are also
reversed as far as Brits are concerned in several countries), say Court and Jardin. I can never remember which is which and I’ve survived intact so don’t fret about it. German houses will often have one dressing-room corridor for men and another for women, sometimes on either side of the stage. I have no idea why. Some houses have fancy dressing-rooms with daybeds, pianos, TVs and en-suite bathrooms. Many decidedly do not. (I don’t recommend the loos in the otherwise beautiful Reggio Emilia opera house. A hole in the floor awaits you.) In the Teatro Reggio in Turin they hand you an allowance of loo roll on your first day. The Teatro Real in Madrid has an abundance of uniformed flunkies backstage who don’t seem to do anything at all except become agitated if you try and fetch yourself a glass of water.
It’s the people who really make an opera house and while the people who work in opera houses are generally jolly the world over they do tend to conform to a few national stereotypes.
German houses tend to be kunst factories, knocking out one show after another. The fest system does tend to ingrain a clock-in, clock-out mentality into a lot of contract singers. German opera houses are generally efficient places with well-run canteens serving German food but not filled with much joie-de-vivre. Many, except the top Stadt houses, do all their rep in German. You really need to speak German to get on in the German system.
Italian houses are everything you expect them to be: chaotic and crazy. It’s piss-up in a brewery time. There are swarms of people who probably inherited their job from a relative and who have very little to do except sit around and gossip. The volume of backstage chat during a show can be astounding. And yet for all the huge number of people working in the house, you can find it very difficult to speak to someone who can actually deal with a particular problem you’re having. Bring a lot of patience to Italy and smile at the chaos.
Spain and France are more organised, the latter prone to strikes and walk-outs. The French divide singers into Lyrique (singing over acting) and Comique (acting over singing) and can be a bit snotty about the latter. The Dutch and Belgians are laid back but efficient and generally very helpful.
American houses are by far the friendliest and most welcoming. Performers are treated with respect and politeness, though you are expected to return the compliment by attending large numbers of fund-raisers and social events where you rub shoulders with immensely wealthy patrons who know next to nothing about opera but whose pockets are deep.
Never swear in American opera houses. It is NOT done. Don’t wear perfume or aftershave either. A lot of houses have strict rules about these things.
Your first port of call is the company manager or artists’ liaison. Be nice to this person as your happiness can be in their hands. They usually speak English, though not always very well. Some will give you a welcome pack full of useful information about the house and the city. Some will not. The rule of thumb tends to be that the smaller the house the more helpful the company manager. Big houses often have several and they’ve seen it all. They’re hardly likely to be impressed by a squirt like you.
The other people you need to cultivate are the stage manager, the assistant director (if he or she is on the house staff) and the music staff. These are terribly important people and your relationship with them can make all the difference not only to your immediate work but to your career. They will also, in my experience, be the best people to talk to about local knowledge; where to eat, where to buy groceries, how the trams work etc. Often they can become your friends. (Many music staffers are also more than happy to earn a few extra quid on the side if you pay them to coach you on something you have coming up.)
Most houses plan their rehearsals on a day-to-day basis. You’ll be telephoned or emailed in the evening with the next day’s planning. If you’re doing a small role this can mean you end up with days and days of no rehearsal but without the luxury of being able to make any plans, let alone pop back home. It can be very, very frustrating, especially if you’ve had to turn down, say, a concert because you’ve been expressly told that the opera house cannot spare you any time at all and they won’t give you the NA. Don’t moan about it too much. It happens to us all.
Use the free days to sight-see, to do something you don’t always allow yourself the luxury of doing at home (for me it’s reading), to get some exercise, to learn your next role. You probably won’t though. You’ll end
up doing what a lot of us do – getting up late and wasting the day doing sod-all.
It is usually stipulated that you can’t leave the city without permission to do so. That doesn’t mean you can’t do a day trip on a train but you should think twice before flying off anywhere without asking the company manager. Once the show has opened, presuming you have a couple of days off between performances, you can go further afield (though you’re still supposed to ask) but you will have to be back in the city the night before your next performance.
The Icelandic volcanic ash episode made it quite clear how you can’t casually assume that you are always able to get anywhere in Europe in an hour or two. I was performing in Amsterdam at the time of The Ash and had to spend all day on trains getting back to the Netherlands Opera from London in time for my next show. Our mezzo, trying to get there from Sweden, didn’t make it, losing thousands of pounds on cancelled flights as well as the fee for the show she missed. Between shows is a good time to go off and do some auditions for other houses, if you can get them, but don’t venture further than you can travel back with an alternative to flying. Just in case.
German houses usually rehearse in the morning and evening with the afternoon free. It can be a culture-shock and it is worth bearing in mind when booking your digs. You don’t want to make the mistake I made of having to spend all afternoon travelling back and forth to a dreary flat in the suburbs of Frankfurt from the opera’s equally dreary rehearsal space many miles away in another corner of the city. In Germany it pays
to live near the opera house.
Some houses have very flexible working hours and you can find that there’s just one rehearsal a day, say from midday to 5 pm with a long break in the middle. Very civilised. In smaller houses with a limited season and no other shows on the go you may find yourself rehearsing on stage almost from day one.
Rehearsals, particularly the further south you go, can be scatty and erratic. I’ve grown quite used to having pretty-well no direction at all. I have done whole productions where I have barely exchanged two words with the director. There’s a lot on this in Who’s My Bottom? My advice: bring lots of your own ideas. Don’t expect to be told anything apart from where to come on and where to go off. Be creative. They’ll love you for it and won’t hesitate in taking all the credit.
In Germany there’s every chance that production will be heavy on Konzept. There’ll be machine guns instead of swords, comedies will be played as tragedies and, god help us, someone will sing an aria into a mobile phone. In America everything will probably be very old-fashioned and literal and all the baritones will have regulation goatee beards. There are no hard-and-fast rules on this. Except the German bit.
As for conductors… there are some real doozies out there and many of them work in opera houses. In Italy I have experienced the strange phenomenon of the maestro (and do call them maestro, especially in the States) who won’t come to any staging rehearsals but who thinks everything can be sorted out in music calls.
It must be a hangover from the park-and-bark era where people didn’t really move much on stage; they just assumed a position near the front of stage and bellowed.
Again, don’t assume you’ll ever develop much of a working relationship with the conductor. Sometimes it happens and often it doesn’t. Many aren’t that much inclined to give you notes or discuss anything with you.
That’s the job of the music staff, in the bad conductor’s opinion. They may also insist on a prompter, in which case you have the joy of someone hissing words every few seconds, slapping the stage to keep time and generally being a nuisance bang in the middle of the front of the stage. If there is a prompter you won’t get any cues from the conductor. That’s not his job. His job is the orchestra. It’s seriously strange.
So, all-in-all it can be a thrilling, bumpy ride. Oh and just to make it even more interesting, in some houses the first night audiences are made up of über-wealthy subscribers who secretly hate opera but who love showing off their latest mistress/boyfriend/shoes/jewellery. You bust your balls trying to get them interested but they are simply not. Not unless you’re a household name. It can be seriously dispiriting when the patter of applause at the curtain call is drowned out by the sound of Porsches revving up outside the opera house doors.
It’s time to talk about money. But let’s not get our knickers in twist about whether or not we should. We should. We are professionals after all. This is how we earn a living and anyone who does it because they think it’s a lark, and that a fee is some kind of fun bonus, will probably end up on the scrap head faster than a soprano can flutter her eyelashes (albeit in vain) at a casting director.
When I was young no-one told me about tax. When you sing abroad, with very very few exceptions, you will have tax deducted from your gross fee at source. The only places that don’t, off the top of my head, are the Netherlands and Monaco, though don’t ask me why. The tax rate varies wildly from nation to nation. Last time I was there, Italy and Spain took 25%. That’s about the going rate you should expect, and as I said in Gob 1, they will usually take it off your airfare too.
In the USA you pay not only 30% Federal tax but a State tax too. In California it’s another 7%. In Germany there was a time when they were trying to discourage footballers from living over the border in Lichtenstein so they hit any non-resident earners with a massive surtax. Add onto that the reunification tax and singers found themselves having over 50% of their fee withheld in taxes.
At the end of your job, the opera house will send or give you a fee statement which will show how much tax they have withheld. They may also give you a tax certificate. Either way, these are EXTREMELY important documents. Put them in a safe place. When you come to do your annual tax return back in Britain, you give these documents to your accountant. He then gives them to the Inland Revenue as proof that you have already paid so much tax and, in principal, this is offset against any tax you are due to pay on your annual earnings. If you work abroad enough in a year there’s every chance that you will end up paying no income tax in Britain because you’ve already paid enough abroad. So, the fact that foreign companies withhold tax can seem a bit rich when it happens but at least it saves you the bother of having to set aside a chunk of your fee for the tax man, which is what you sensibly should do with every job (but which practically no-one I know actually does).
I’ll spare you a long and dreary discourse on more complex matters to do with this tax stuff. Be warned that some accountants don’t fully understand the complexities of “foreign tax credits” so make sure you have an accountant who does. From time to time the Inland Revenue gets snippy about the issue and threatens various measures that would be bad news (like we need more of that…) for the struggling singer. But so far so good.
Reading an opera house’s pay statement can be a baffling experience. In France it will have all kinds of things that seem to be deductions from your fee but which (so long as you have given them the precious E101/A1 that I warned you about in Gob 1) are in fact all paid by your employers. If you haven’t got the E101/A1 then a whole slew of your dosh will be winging its way to various organisations from which you’ll never get it back.
However, the nice surprise in France is Congés Spectacles. French theatres are obliged to pay you holiday pay. The amount depends on the length of time you have worked there and the fee you were paid. With your payslip you will be given a small blue Congés Spectacles slip. It’s another important document. My first, because I had no idea what it was, ended up in a bin. These days it’s all done online and here is the website with an English explanation of what it is.
http://www.conges-spectacles.com/congesspectaclesite/jsp/index.jsp
It may seem like a lot of faff, but come the spring after you have done a French job you can find yourself picking up a nice little bonus. It’s well worth it. Quaintly, you can even book a discounted holiday train with SNCF. I’ve never done that bit but it does conjure up wonderful images of French theatricals pottering off to the seaside à la Monsieur Hulot. (Mon Dieu, I hope you get that reference…).
The ONLY theatre I have encountered in France that refuses to pay the CS is the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris. I think they’re breaking European employment law but they say they’re not. It’s a long and frustrating story and too dull for these pages.
If you work in Germany you may find yourself subscribed to a German pension fund. I’m sorry, at the moment I have no more info on this but it’s something to look out for (and something which somebody might like to comment on at the bottom of this post… hint hint).
American houses will make you join the union, AGMA. You have no choice. It’s $500 to join and they take 2% of your fee. There are benefits though, the best of which is their Health Fund. You will end up with a pot of money they hold which can be released to pay medical bills (including visits to your dentist or a new pair of specs) – though they only pay out in dollars of course, though the expense can take place at home in Britain in pounds.
If you earn an awful lot in France then you’ll end up having to do a French tax return with the help of a French accountant. German fest singers will have to do the same. I’ve never had to do either.
So, your massive fee that you thought was going to keep you in champagne and frocks for quite a while is already looking a lot smaller. You’ve had to pay for digs and you’ll have to leave behind the tax. That’s about 35% of your fee already accounted for, if you’re lucky. You’re probably going to have to pay your agent at least 12.5% of your gross fee too (plus VAT). Take off various other expenses like local travel and food and the fee is down to half what it was when you signed the contract. And that’s your usual rule-of-thumb. Any foreign fee: slice it in half for an idea of your take-home pay.
I talked in Gob 3 about the people you should befriend in an opera house. I didn’t mention one other person: the money guy. Somewhere there’ll be a man (well, it’s usually a man) who you have to see about money. Normally you’ll take him a copy of your air ticket and your A1/E101. He’ll ask you where you want the fee wired at the end of the job (though in Barcelona they open a Spanish bank account for you into which they pay your fees and leave the rest up to you). There are some houses, but hardly any, who will pay you a rehearsal fee or per diem of some sort. If not, some houses will let you take half or a whole fee (minus tax, natch) in advance of the first night so that you can pay some bills. Some won’t. Your agent should be able to find this out before you get there. That advance can be a life-saver.
Imagine you’re starting a job abroad in late January. You’re paying a mortgage or rent on a home in Britain. You haven’t worked since a few Messiahs before Christmas (but for which you still haven’t been paid). Christmas itself was crucifyingly expensive what with the new Mario X-Wii Play-Nintendo that the kids had been clamouring for and the cost of having your entire family including two grandmas stay for a week. You’ve had to shell out for the flight to the new job and the landlord of your digs wants a fat deposit as well as a full month’s rent on arrival. And it being the end of January, it’s time to pay your UK tax bill. The upcoming job pays well, but there are six weeks’ rehearsal and you won’t open until mid March. Your bank account is already in the red and your credit cards are groaning under the weight of debt. You arrive in the exciting city for the exciting job you’ve been looking forward to for ages. How on earth are you going to feed yourself for the next six weeks?
Ooh, that was a bit gloomy but I hope you get my point. Think ahead. Plan. The last thing you want (but which unfortunately I know too well) is the feeling that when you’ve finished the lovely job abroad all you’ve done financially is fill a big fat hole.
Keep every receipt you collect when working abroad. Get good at managing your accounts. Being something of a nerd I have a spreadsheet app on my iPhone. I start a new spreadsheet for each job I do and in it I keep a log of all my costs, from groceries and rail fares to agent’s commission. It works a treat; in a slow moment during a rehearsal when I’ve nothing better to do, I can tap my expenses into the phone and keep everything up to date. I’d like to pretend that was cool, but clearly it isn’t.
Oh, and one last thing. I can bet you all the tea in the Coliseum canteen, that when you are in the last week of the foreign gig with the prospect of finally sending home your fee, you will watch the exchange rate turn against you (thanks probably to an anti austerity riot in Greece or a bunch of sharp-suited wide boys having fun on Wall Street) and the fee you once thought was so huge will suddenly shrink by 5%, not because of anything you have done or could have done, but simply because that’s just the way it is and no doubt will always continue to be.
Next and final Gob will be called KEEPING YOUR HEAD TOGETHER.
It’s interesting to report that of all my recent Gobs, the one that provoked the largest response from fellow old pros was the one on money. Some of them, prompted by their own experiences, felt that there were more gobbets of information that I should be sharing. I’m not remotely surprised by this. I was once at a post-concert dinner in Amsterdam where the salaried administrators were all talking about music and the working musicians (including two top composers) were talking about the best place to exchange their fees into pounds. (It used to be the Bank of Abu Dhabi near Hyde Park Corner but anti money-laundering laws came in and the bank hurriedly closed; not surprising as you could walk in with a thick envelope of foreign cash, but without any ID, and quite simply change it into pounds, and at brilliant rates. Now, if it’s cash it’s Marks and Spencer for me. Much less exotic.)
So here, in fairly random fashion, are a few more things on the money subject, some of which may have nothing in particular to do with singing abroad, but which are mind-numbingly dull:
Cash-flow is almost certainly going to be a worry at some point in your career, no matter how successful you are. As I said in the Money Gob, you will come across times when you have massive and regular outgoings but you have to wait for a good while, sometimes two to three months, before you get paid. You will almost certainly need an overdraft facility of some sort to tie you over. Personally, but it’s not everyone, I have found a mortgage bank account to be a life-saver. But of course you need to have a home/mortgage to have the account and, ideally, a fair amount of equity in the home to spare too. So, if you’re reading this as a struggling beginner who’s still living at home, then you’re probably already thinking “yeah, well, bollocks to you, thanks for nothing”. But, further down the line, when you’re up and running, it’s something to bear in mind. In the immediate future, be prepared to talk to your bank about a facility. Shop around for a bank that understands your needs. A small business account may end up being your best bet, especially if they offer you a couple of years of free banking. This is all sounding worryingly like the Personal Finance section from the Mail on Sunday.
Someone suggested I should bring up the idea of having a euro account. You can have them in the UK now but I’ve always thought they’re not worth the money; last time I looked I thought they were too expensive to run. Besides, you may well find yourself having a bank account opened for you if you work for various companies. As I said before, in Barcelona the Teatre Liceu opens you an account – a proper account with internet banking and the works – which I kept open for a while. Los Angeles Opera offers something similar, though in dollars obviously. My wife worked in Strasbourg where they did the same thing. We also have a German account, a hangover from Lucy’s days on contract in Cologne, which is handy mostly for the next thing on my list. Just a few euros in one of these accounts (and you probably should stick with one in the long term) should keep it ticking over.
German pensions. I alluded to this in the last Gob. If you work in Germany for any length of time there’s every chance you will be enrolled in the Bayerische Versorgungskammer, a pension fund. While you’re working there, payments will made into the fund, building you up a little nest egg. However – and this is the reason I bring this up – if you stop working there you MUST keep paying €150 a year into the fund or they will wind it up. If they do wind it up you lose every pfennig that’s ever been paid into it. Having a German account makes it a lot easier to set up a standing order to make sure you keep enrolled. It may not seem very exciting right now to be thinking about your old age but a little German pension when you retire could prove to be a very good idea.
Being paid abroad. There are so many variants on this. I’ll give you as many as I can from my own experience. Most houses will ask you where you want your fee wired at the end of the run. Chances are you will just say your bank account in Britain. You will probably be landed with half of the wiring fees, sometimes all of them, sometimes none. I would strongly advise against any express wiring as it will cost a bomb. These days a normal international wire should take very little time indeed. Some houses pay the day after your last show, some leave it until a specific day of the week when they do payroll and some (tut-tut Italy) leave it a good fortnight for reasons best known to themselves. It is not unusual for there to be a flurry of emails between colleagues who have just returned home from a job along the lines of “I’m getting worried as I haven’t been paid yet!” Italy is the only country where I have not been paid for a job. It was a long time ago. I was doing three concerts in Tuscany. I got 2/5ths of my fee in cash while I was there and was promised the balance by wire. It never came, nor did it for the British soprano. In trying to get it we hit a mafia wall. Seriously. The fees had been purloined by a promoter with connections to the mob and it disappeared into a bank that didn’t really exist. Back then there was nothing we could do. Italy has long had this reputation and it is still quite common for a theatre’s money man to come round in the interval with your pay statement to demonstrate that you have been paid. This is to encourage you to continue with your performance – a throwback to the days when things got so bad that people refused to return to the stage for the second act until they’d been handed their fee in cash. Anyway, back to the present. There are still some dodgy practices around (Nice Opera had a bad record for quite a while – again, a mafia town) but though I’ve had to wait longer than I would like for my fees to come through, a little trust generally seems to get you by. Though in these straightened times I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a few horror stories getting ready to hit the airwaves.
Some houses will let you take your fees in chunks, as long as you’ve earned them, but if you’re wiring them home piecemeal be aware that you will probably have to pay a wiring charge each time, even if it’s to a euro account. Some won’t pay you until the run is done, full stop. In the USA they may well give you a cheque at each performance, which you then have to pay into the bank account they have helped you set up. It’s rather out-dated but what they’re used to. The Monnaie in Brussels used to give you a cashier’s cheque at the end of the job, which you then had to take to a specific bank to cash and from where you could arrange to wire the fee home. I’m not sure if that’s still their arrangement but it was a pain in the backside. In Milan, you never have any dealing with a money man in La Scala. Instead you have to go a particular bank around the corner, take a ticket, wait for about 20 minutes, then talk to a specific cashier who deals with the theatre’s account. It’s all rather strange but given the chaos in the opera house it at least reassures you that your fees won’t be purloined. Probably. Don’t forget your passport.
Whatever method you choose, it’s a good idea to have a record of your BIC, IBAN and Swift Code numbers before you leave home for a foreign job. These are your bank details in funny form which are probably somewhere on your bank statements. I seem to remember that this may be changing and the Swift Code at least may now be defunct. Whatever – take every scrap of detail about your bank account, including your bank’s address.
For what it’s worth, in general and if I can, I try to live within a budget determined by how much cash I can draw from the opera house as an advance on my fee plus the reimbursement for my airfare. That usually covers most of my cash needs and saves me having to visit ATMs and drawing money out of my bank at home. The rest I pay with my trusty Post Office credit card (see Gob 2: Logistics) which not only means no exchange commission but which also means, with luck, that I may not have to pay the credit card bill until after I’ve received my fee. Of course if the opera house won’t give me an advance then that whole scheme goes for nothing.
When your wire comes through from an opera house the exchange rate at which your bank will convert your fee from, say, Euros to Pounds can vary enormously from bank to bank. It’s annoying. You could possibly save some money by using a foreign exchange service like Travelex that give better rates of exchange on large amounts but I’ve yet to be convinced it’s worth it. Have a google and see what you think.
If you get a foreign bank account, make sure you can easily arrange wires home, say via online banking, or you could find yourself stuck with a pile of cash in a foreign account and no way of getting it out of the country!
It has been pointed out that some European countries are currently taking 15% in withholding tax and others, as well as Holland, are taking nothing. I wish I could draw up a chart. Not even the good old internet has a list that I can find. HMRC does a list of withholding rates for counties with which the UK has a double-taxation agreement (I can feel your eyes glazing over) but that’s for share dividends, not hard graft. Needless to say it’s complicated. “Double-taxation agreement” means that the tax you pay abroad can be offset against UK tax. If you can find a country that pays you as a singer that doesn’t do this then I will eat a very large and extravagant hat, topped with hat sauce and served with a large side portion of hat.
Somebody thought I wasn’t clear that you should take an A1/E101 to every EU country to prevent them taking social security payments off your fee. As I said, some houses won’t need one, but err on the side of caution and get one anyway. Things change.
All the stuff that has gone before in these Gobs – getting the work, doing it, and the logistics – those are in so many ways the easiest aspects of singing abroad. The hardest task when singing abroad is stopping yourself going out of your mind with boredom and loneliness.
“How can this be?” you are probably asking yourself.
Let me give you a scenario. You are in your early thirties. You career is moving along and you are in demand on the opera circuit. Your agent feels you should no longer be aiming at regional British companies but at the more lucrative world stage. It’s all part of the half-formed plan you have in your head which probably features good roles in good houses, posh concerts with the major orchestras, and some recordings thrown into the mix. Nothing wrong with that ambition. If you weren’t ambitious the chances are you wouldn’t be reading this blog in the first place.
But, as your are in your early thirties there’s also every chance you are in the depths of a very important personal relationship. You may even be married. I was, and had two young children to boot.
Scenario: You go abroad on a job, let’s say to Liege. You have five weeks rehearsal and then shows every third night over a period of three weeks. What does your partner do? Come with you? Have you ever spent eight weeks in Liege? Come to think of it, have you ever spent eight hours there? Eight minutes just about wraps it up. Believe me. And seven of those will be spent cleaning dog poo off your shoes.
Have you spent eight weeks anywhere while your partner goes off to work and you have to find something to do to amuse yourself?
Say you have children, are they in school or are they young enough for your partner to bring too? Again, I ask, what do you do for eight weeks in Liege with two young toddlers and no-one else you (or they) know in town? Beside the shoe-cleaning thing.
This is assuming your partner doesn’t have their own job which keeps them tied to your home. There’s a good chance your partner is also a singer. Which of you gives up the important job that’s on offer to look after the children? Eh?
What tends to happen (though there are some exceptions) is that someone stays behind at home with the children and the singer flies home as often as is humanly possible. This isn’t without its own set of problems. Because everything is scheduled day-by-day you won’t know until the eleventh hour when you’ll be free to fly home during rehearsals (let alone what day you are needed back), by which time the enormous fares will make you wonder how you’ll ever again afford to buy clothes for your dear offspring, and when you do get home, one of your dearly beloveds will complain of a sore throat and then cover your mouth with adoring and slobbery kisses. You get the picture.
Chances are you will fly the family out to join you for a week or so once the show has opened and you have more free time. So then you are faced with a dilemma when you first book your digs as to whether you book a large enough apartment (at a much higher cost of course) for the entire gig or whether you make special arrangements just for the time your family is with you. And that’s complicated too.
When your family is with you, you probably have shows in the evenings and won’t get to bed much before 1 a.m. Then your kids are bouncing on the bed at 6.30 the next morning, a good four hours before you normally haul yourself out of bed the day after a show. You spend the next two days trying to be SuperDad (or SuperMum) to make up for all the time you haven’t seen them in the last two months and when it comes to the next show you are surprised to find yourself utterly knackered.
But at least your are not lonely. That will kick in the moment you wave the family off at the airport, the day they return home and you are left behind to finish the job. That is the day when you say to yourself – and believe me, you will – “remind again, me why do I do this job?” It doesn’t become long before you find yourself depressed at the idea of every upcoming job that takes you away from home, and that’s not the right frame of mind in which to rehearse and perform.
So how come you will be bored? Quite simply because you spend so much time in a virtual waiting-room. You’re waiting for your next rehearsal, you’re waiting for your performance. You might like to think of yourself visiting all the galleries, sites and cute restaurants (but can I just play the Liege card here one more time…) but when push comes to shove you are in town to work, to perform at your best, to earn your fee and pretty-well any activity on your days off that doesn’t involve lying prostrate on a sofa gazing at something mindless on the laptop or telly quickly seems far too much like hard work and something that will detract in some way from the hard task of singing opera. It’s nothing to feel ashamed of. You don’t see Olympic athletes or Test cricketers pottering around the National Gallery on their days off. They’re in their hotel rooms playing Nintendo.
There has been a significant number of singers who try to escape their loneliness and boredom by resorting to rampant affairs, heavy drinking and even the odd bit of drug abuse. Guess what? It doesn’t work. I could name names but on one hand I’m far too discreet and on the other it saddens me too much to think of once-great singers who have ended up on the scrapheap or even dead.
Here’s my solution, but it’s one that can only work in a relationship which allows it to work and it only works if you are making the effort to be present, and I mean truly present, when you are at home and not working. Use your time away as “personal time”. As Billy Connolly once said, and we have it pinned to our fridge at home, “you cannot spend your whole time away missing the ones you love”. So don’t sit around moping. Get up and do something that interests you but for which you don’t have time at home. Write lengthy emails to friends with whom you’ve lost touch. Paint. Draw. Read. Build your own website (I did, in between rehearsals in Milan). Start a blog. Knit. Be indulgent in something that interests you but which is perhaps of no interest to your partner. It doesn’t mean you are ignoring their needs. It means you are taking care of your own. And by doing so, you are probably making yourself a much happier and more pleasant person to be with.
There’ll be times when the stay-at-home partner may envy your freedom to do what you want for yourself while he or she is left at home in domestic drudgery. Make sure you do your best to ease that drudgery when you get home, but please don’t think for a moment that sitting in your grotty rented apartment desperately trying not to enjoy your time away will actually make your partner feel better. Uh-uh. Let’s face it, that’s absurd and doesn’t reflect very well on the health of the relationship. It’s an easy trap though and I fell into it in my first marriage. See? I speak from experience.
Of course most of the pastimes I mention are fairly sedentary. Some people use the time away to visit a gym regularly and get fit. Many opera houses have arrangements with local gyms. I do a lot of walking and, in Amsterdam especially, cycling. Cooking is another thing I enjoy, especially in Italy and France, though it can be deflating to be constantly cooking for one in a poorly-equipped kitchen. Have colleagues round for meals. If you get into the habit of eating and drinking out with your colleagues, just be aware that you probably won’t have an understudy. Very few opera houses employ them. No-one, but no-one, is going to be impressed if you are too hungover to work or if you fall sick due to what your co-workers or management interpret as the result of over-indulgence. There’s also nothing worse than finding yourself hoarse from shouting just to have a conversation in a noisy bar or restaurant, something of which, bizarrely, opera managements are woefully ignorant when they plan cast parties.
I said it to the young-uns at British Youth Opera and I’ll say it again: a lasting career in this profession we call opera depends less on those little cords in your throat and more on what is in your head and your heart. Keep the latter two happy and your voice will thank you for it. However if you have the greatest voice in the world but neither the will nor the wit to stick at it and to endure this difficult lifestyle, all those singing lessons will have ultimately been for nought.
That’s the last of these Gobs, though there’s every chance I will think of something I’ve forgotten to wag a finger about. So who knows. I have a notion to set up a website as a singers’ resource, full of specific info about as many cities as I can, but this is a huge task. I could only do it with lots of input from other people and also if I can find a cunning way to pay for it!
Meanwhile do read “Who’s My Bottom?” which not only lifts the lid on my personal experiences as a jobbing singer but which is also now on Amazon and order-able in all good bookshops!