Pittsinger2

“I had a much different voice then. I was a bass. But I always had the ability to sing coloratura, so for me it was always kind of a work in progress, constantly changing and constantly moving up.” By his late twenties and early thirties, he says he started to sing the most demanding roles that needed extension on both ends of the range – and thus was born the voice of a bass-baritone. He learned something else that paid dividends early on in his career – not all opportunity would be local. If he wanted to progress he would have to be flexible. When intendants from other opera companies heard him sing and asked if he would be available to travel, he never hesitated. Intendant Piere Medicini, from the Paris Opera Comique, and Gerard Mortier, who brought him to Brussels were two such intendants who opened a career opportunity singing in Europe which he took. In fact, the majority of his career, fifteen years, nine out of twelve months of each year, was spent in Brussels, Palermo, Napoli, to name a few locations where he honed his skills and developed an international following. “I’ll never be able to leave the European scene” he says of his fondness for singing opera overseas, “because that’s where I spent so many years developing my career.”

As he gets older, however, he does savor spending more time at home with his wife and two children. “If I had my druthers, I’d be singing fifty/fifty. We have some wonderful venues here in this country. I like singing at San Francisco because I started there. I loved debuting at the Met. I debuted there back in 1997 and hope to get back singing what I consider my repertoire there.” He reflects for a moment and adds, “I think I’m at a point in my life where I’m really more comfortable being able to work closer to home and spend more time with my children and family.” It’s this very ability to be selective when making his career choices, which suggests his own degree of success. And while he still frets about his schedule: [“I often worry about my calendar. How am I going to fit things in? How am I going to agree to do things I really want to do?”] he finds himself thinking about his legacy as a singer as well. “Both in my professional life and my personal life -- it all sort of melds into one as a professional because we are in the business – our lives are our business. We’re defined often by the level of performance we give. Our legacy is the performance we left behind. And my job is to be a communicator, to take my God-given voice and try and move them [the audience] and take them outside the world they live in day to day and feel a heightened sense of emotion. Now, to be able to be recognized, and recognized for the repertoire that I do, is part of my future legacy that I leave behind that will define my career and me as a person to some degree.”

“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.”

As to the question whether he feels he has arrived as an operatic star, he answers: “Do I feel I’ve made it? Not by any stretch of the imagination. Do I feel like I can support myself by singing now, maybe. And I am, and have been since I have been twenty-three, but not without great creativity and great sacrifice. I’m very proud to have been able to do the things that I’ve done, but success is something I feel you chip away at.”

Pittsinger says that while he obviously makes his own decisions and thinks constantly about his schedule, and fitting that schedule into a home life and professional career, his fate is often equally cast by the circumstances of the life he has chosen to lead. “”One has to realize there never really is a decision to be made. There is no choice. I had no choice. It’s chosen me as much as I’ve chosen it. And therefore I think you do reach a point where it becomes clear that either you can live without it or you can’t live without it; you can either be around it, or you can’t be around it.” Either way, he says, once the decision is made it’s kind of like hitching a ride on a speeding train, “and being able to jump on the train at the right time, to be able to learn music quickly, to be at the right place at the right time, and present yourself for the right things, to clarify doubts.” It’s work!

For those just starting out, or for those who have been plugging away at it for years, and just can’t seem to catch the breaks and wonder when their career is going to take off, he has some sound advice: “I remember asking a teacher when I was in college, when my career was going to start. He said it already has. ‘Don’t you get it? It started a long time ago. You have a college career; you have a conservatory career; you have a young artist career.’ The more young people look at their training as part of their career path, the easier it is.” And if you have to scrub floors or wait tables until that recognition comes along, just chalk it up to the price you have to pay. “I managed an orchestra” he says with a grin, “which meant that I was the orchestra’s janitor. I cleaned their stands – but it kept me around the performing venue.” Even at that stage of his development he says, he viewed his life as “a wonderful ride, getting better every day.”