The other evening, I attended a university opera program featuring two Puccini one-act operas. After the production was over, the Dean of the College of Performing Arts spoke to the Director of the Voice and Opera program. Her remarks were largely about the female leads, talking about how talented and impressive they were.
As I’ve mentioned some time back, this sort of talk infuriates me, especially from someone who should know better.
Why? Because the two leading singers she mentioned came to the university several years ago with nice but hardly outstanding voices. The head of the voice area worked with them, and many other students, over that period. They didn’t come as stars, as most singers don’t. It took time and effort and the expertise of the voice professor and others to bring out the best in their voices, but all the dean could rave about was their “talent.”
Singing that well isn’t just talent. It requires not only hard effort on the part of the student but a good technical and artistic voice professor to develop that “star” quality. It requires good accompanists and instruction beyond the mechanics of singing. But that effort by faculty is seldom if ever recognized. It’s as though such “stars” arrived at the university as stars.
This lack of understanding is hardly new. I’ve watched it for nearly thirty years at the university, but it’s not just here. It permeates American culture. The students did it all. The actors or actresses did it all. The athletes did it all.
Behind every “star” is a plethora of individuals who contributed to that “stardom.”
Society isn’t built on stars; it’s built on the people who developed them and who continue to support them. Stars – or billionaires – wouldn’t be possible without that support, and the excessive praise of talent and stardom is just another factor behind the current social unrest and discontent.