Pittsinger

Success is a term of relative meaning. To some it is illusive and will remain forever so; to others, it comes upon them gradually in stages and strikes not like a lightening bolt, but rather as cold honey flows from a glass jar, simple, steady and sure. You just realize one day that things have gotten sweeter in your life and figure you must be doing something right.

Although it’s the stuff of popular folklore, few achieve success overnight. To the extent it arrives at all, it almost always requires a degree of sacrifice. A couple months ago I asked Janice Del Sesto, General Director of Boston Lyric Opera about the sacrifice singers have to make and she described it this way: “One of the things I often say to young singers and musicians is that they’d better need to do it, not just want it – as much as they need to sleep and eat and breathe, because they’re going to give up so many other things in their lives, not only if they are pursuing it, but it they are successful. They have to feel that they can’t imagine living without it.” That pretty much seems to be the advice one gets from everyone. The rule is: however you define success, be prepared to work hard for it and make a few sacrifices along the way to achieve it.

I traveled recently to New York and posed the question about “the road to success” to someone who by every measure has achieved it in his career. He sings internationally and has been invited back to Europe repeatedly to perform. He headlined recently at the New York City Opera in the role of Figaro in “Le Nozze de Figaro” and has sung at the Metropolitan Opera Company as well as in Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston, Pittsburg, St. Louis, Los Angeles and Colorado, to name a few. His international credits include Brussels, Paris, Bordeaux, Vienna, Cologne and Calgary.

He is David Pittsinger, bass-baritone extraordinaire, and by every measure, he has a successful career. But if you were to ask him about his fortunes as a singer, he might see things a little differently. First, he’s far too modest to declare outright his own place in the opera world, and he’s just as likely to attribute whatever success he has had to the fact that it was earned, one struggle at a time. “There are so very few people who have reached the International level that haven’t struggled. Everybody struggles,” he says. Indeed, as a young man he paid his way through the University of Connecticut and then Yale, working as a waiter “trying to make ends meet” and taking whatever singing jobs came his way, incurring a lot of debt to pay for his schooling in the process. He’s very familiar with struggling to survive.

Pittsinger says he was convinced that if he was to succeed as a singer, however one measures success, he’d have to make a number of sacrifices along the way. “My father said: ‘if you’re going to do it, you can’t have a backup, because if you have a fallback position, you will fall back to it. So I took the language courses and I took the writing courses, and I took everything that I possibly could take from my experience. It was very expensive. I had a lot of debt when I graduated, and the prospects of having a career in music or being a singer, supporting myself with those debts was something that had I had any sense I would have probably done something completely different.” He reflects a moment in his narrative then adds: “But it prepared me for the present day, to be able to support my family with what I do.”

For Pittsinger the road to success started pretty much like most singers. He had a natural talent for singing as a young boy and exhibited it, singing as a soprano with the Episcopal choir in Clinton, Connecticut where he grew up. Equally important, his desire to sing was channeled from time to time by mentors who saw something special in what he had to offer. In high school it was a music teacher by the name of Bill Gagnon and a drama teacher named, Edward Byrne. After all these years he still remembers. “High school is when it really exploded,” he says of the first time he actually thought about a future as a singer. “I had some wonderful teachers at Morgan High School . . . and I was encouraged to study music and theater and the arts.”

But like every road, this one had a few detours. While he sang in various musical plays and recitals in high school -- Carousel, Godspell, Carnival, Man of La Mancha -- and even did some summer stock, and studied piano and trombone, he had other interests, too. He played sports – baseball, basketball and soccer. Indeed, after graduating from high school, while attending the University of Connecticut, he even considered politics, having worked as an intern with Senator Lowell Wicker’s office in D.C. in 1980, enjoying the experience. “When I tried to push it away [his singing] it came back knocking on my door because something was missing.”

Ironically, it was a skiing accident that changed his life and steered him back toward singing again. He describes the recovery period after the accident as a time of contemplation. “There was something missing from my life,” he said. “Missing from my social life, missing from my professional focus about what I wanted to do with my life. After I injured myself, I came back [to the University] in my sophomore year and I just changed. It was a real fortuitous turn of events in that it made me want to figure out where it was that I really wanted to take my life.”

With renewed interest in reviving his efforts to develop as a singer he sought the advice of the University of Connecticut’s music department. “I went to the music department to take my solfege exam to see if they would let me in,” he recalls. “They said you have a nice voice, would you consider becoming part of our opera department?” That invitation was one of those lucky turn of events that, paraphrasing Brutus in Shakespeare’s, Julius Caesar, “taken at flood leads on to fortune.” Somebody obviously thought he should be evaluated further. He accepted the offer to try out, and that afternoon sang for Doris Cross of the music department. Cross was so impressed with what she heard that she called her husband, Richard, in Frankfurt, Germany where he sang at the “Stadtische Buhen” as a fixed singer over the course of seventeen years. She held up the phone and asked the twenty-something-year old student to sing. When he finished, Richard Cross said: “That’s a voice and I’ll teach him.” Cross has been one of Pittsinger’s primary mentors ever since.

After the University of Connecticut, Pittsinger followed the Crosses to Yale, where they headed up the music and opera departments. “They brought me to Yale to continue my studies,” he says of the next phase of his career, and for the next two years he concentrated on the works of Brahms, Schubert and others “to learn how to use those composers as vehicles for expression which would then translate into all music, including operatic literature. That was the basis of my study.”

The years he spent at Yale were “very intensive”, according to Pittsinger, But those years paid off handsomely. Immediately after Yale he was accepted into Merola, the training program at the San Francisco Opera. “I was very young at the time. I think I was 23-years old. And there’s not an awful lot at your disposal at 23, in terms of life experience. So you bring only raw materials: your voice, your technical ability, your talent.” Something else occurred while he was attending Merola, the listening public and his peers evaluated him differently. “The minute I went to Merola, my life changed,” he says. “I wasn’t looked at as a conservatory student, I was looked at as a young professional, and that was the beginning of my being hired. I had a manager. The manager was pushing me and presenting me, and the work started coming in.”

It was at this time that the young Pittsinger began to sense his place, his roles and his repertoire.