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EDWARD BERKELEY: Aspen Opera Center’s Star Maker
By Kristin Cleveland
In Oz, there was a man behind a curtain. At Aspen’s Wheeler Opera House, there’s a man beside the curtain—more specifically, leaning against the proscenium arch. If not for his trademark bright white athletic socks, he might blend into the scenery. But to those who watch him interact with Aspen Opera Center students as they perform scenes from some of the world’s best-loved operatic works, it becomes clear that Edward Berkeley is, in fact, a man with a gift for helping rising opera stars find their voices and develop that special quality that has propelled many to starring roles in operas the world over.
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Berkeley has been director of the Aspen Opera Center (AOC) at the Aspen Music Festival and School for more than thirty years, and he’s been directing operas and teaching here since the early 1980s. His first summer, he was invited to direct Albert Herring for the Festival’s opera on the recommendation of Eastman School of Music faculty who spent summers teaching at the Festival. He recalls being overwhelmed by the mountains after having spent previous summers at theater festivals in the Berkshires. “All of a sudden, I went from those mountains to the Rockies. Knowing the people from Eastman, I knew that the quality of music would be good, but none of them had quite prepared me for how beautiful the town was. Of course, at that time, it felt like a very small town.”
Those early summers in Aspen, he directed just one opera each season, taught an acting or text class or two, and had the freedom and anonymity to hike and bike around the area. Today he directs and oversees the production of two fully staged operas in the historic Wheeler Opera House and coaches students in weekly public Opera Scenes Master Classes. For an artist accustomed to doing much of his work behind the scenes, he has become a recognizable figure in Aspen.
That fame has come as the opera program has grown and as Festival goers have been given a glimpse of the renowned director in action as he helps AOC students find and develop the inner gifts that have propelled the careers of such Aspen alumni as Isabel Leonard, Tamara Wilson, Bryan Hymel, Jamie Barton, Craig Verm, Benjamin Bliss, and opera superstar Renée Fleming, who was a student in 1982 and 1983.
“The key, for me, has been to observe people and say, ‘This is a great quality or thing about you as a singer,’” explains Berkeley. “It could be the sound itself, it could be what they do, what they have to say musically. It could be an emotional quality inside. It could be something big, it could be something small, but I try to see them as individuals who need to be encouraged in order to bring out the best of who they are,” he says.
“It’s always tricky because we have singers of so many different levels,” he admits, “and different singers need different things. I try to approach all of the singers as maybe less experienced— but imaginative—artists who simply need help in bringing out their gifts,” says Berkeley. “I try to treat them as adults, no matter what, and as people who are ready to grow.”
Berkeley works with the cast of the Aspen Opera Center's 2011 production of Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Alex Irvin
Berkeley knows a little something about being ready to make a leap when opportunity arises.
Born in New York City, he had an interest in drama from an early age. He played clarinet and piano in high school and was involved in summer theater camps. “I was already drawn to theater as an event,” he says. As an undergraduate at Carleton College, he immersed himself in Shakespeare, religion, history, and student theater productions, directing many of them. The college didn’t have a formalized theater major at the time, but he says, “I was able— essentially as an extracurricular leap— to commit to working in theater.” After earning his bachelor’s degree in history, Berkeley went on to graduate work, including a post-graduate seminar with Tom O’Horgan, legendary director of the ground-breaking Broadway musical Hair.
When he returned to New York, Berkeley landed a “survival” job as a proofreader at The New York Times and in his spare time, he and some friends started a small theater called The Shade Company. Located in a loft on Canal Street, they were committed to producing both classic and new works. “I think a lot of people were starting theater companies at that time,” he says, “and we got mostly good response quickly.”
One response was terrifying. Joseph Papp, producer of The New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater in Manhattan, came to see The Shade Company’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—and left at intermission. “[It was] a moment of terror,” Berkeley recalls. “We didn’t know what had gone wrong.”
Two days later, Papp called Berkeley and invited him to direct The Tempest at Lincoln Center. Immediately after The Tempest, Papp hired him to direct Macbeth, then Pericles at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, and more productions the following year. “I got a fast start doing theater in New York,” says Berkeley. “I went from directing in a very small house off Broadway—a small space, which I loved—to directing at Lincoln Center and other much larger spaces within six months.”
That work led to shows on and off Broadway and an introduction to composer William Penn and his faculty colleagues at the Eastman School of Music—pianist Robert Spillman; director Richard Pearlman, and mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani—who asked Berkeley to direct an early American ballad opera called The Disappointment. It was his first experience with opera. At the time, they were all spending summers as artist-faculty at the Aspen Music Festival and School and asked Berkeley if he would be interested in coming to Aspen to direct an opera.
Berkeley loved that first summer in the Rockies back in the early 1980s, coming back again and again. Over time, he has broadened and deepened the program. One wildly popular addition has been the Opera Scenes Master Classes. He developed the public Saturday morning classes in part to expose students to the realities of professional opera, reasoning that one of the most important things Aspen could do was to give them performance time.
Berkeley, in his trademark socks, observes an opera scene from his customary vantage point beside the proscenium arch.
Alex Irvin
“Not all students get a principal role,” he points out. “I felt we could do a series of scene classes for the public that would give singers of every level the chance to get up and perform in front of [an audience]. Then I get up there and talk to them about what they’re doing effectively as actors,” he explains. “They go through the issues— the tension, the stage fright—of singing in front of people, which is something that they all have to get used to. And then they have to develop their ability to communicate with each other—and the audience—as singers, in an exciting, dramatic fashion.”
From his perch by the proscenium, Berkeley will ask performers questions like: “What does this person want as a character? In the way that you’re singing, how can we do this better?” He makes suggestions about different ways of approaching a phrase or a movement, how they’re listening to each other or to the music, or how to use the music itself. “Then we’re able to go back and repeat the material and have it grow the way it would in normal rehearsal.”
The method has become a favorite of opera students and audiences alike, and most Saturday mornings, the Wheeler Opera House is full. He has several theories on what makes these classes so compelling.
“There’s something about the tension and release of working in front of an audience that lets performers admit how terrifying it is to sing, and how scary it is not knowing how well it’s going to come out,” he says. “The tension is going to be there every time—and having an audience watching heightens it. But when [students] start to realize that [they] can do it, it sometimes frees [them] to do it better. It’s pretty exciting.”
Past students have related that they could actually feel the moment when something changed for them on stage, and Berkeley says it almost always comes out in the way they sing—they start to sing better.
“The gift I get is really from the singers themselves, not anything I do,” says Berkeley. “It’s not that I’m teaching... vocal technique... , but rather [helping them focus on] what it is they’re trying to communicate... . Bringing focus to that seems to free up their voices.”
Tiffany Jackson—who studied at the AOC during the summers of 1990–92 while she was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan and who returned several times as a guest artist to sing roles in Così fan tutte and Don Giovanni while working on her master’s degree at Yale and as a studio artist at the Houston Grand Opera—says, “I always felt like I could be totally free and wild when I was in Aspen, no matter where I was in my development vocally.”
Jackson will earn her doctorate in vocal performance from the University of Connecticut in August and now also teaches voice. “In many instances, students feel uptight and self-conscious and think too much about being vocally perfect,” she says. “[You] lose [your] creative ability because you’re trying so desperately to impress [your] superiors.
“When I was younger, with a lot of directors and voice teachers and conductors, I always felt like I was at their mercy. Ed is the complete opposite of that. You didn’t know he was actually teaching you. You weren’t made to feel you were the subordinate or the student. You were equal in the creative process. Of course, he never said these things—it was his approach, his way of working. It was like an exploration as opposed to trying to get the absolute best out of the student. It really wasn’t about that. It was ‘let’s try and get the best out of one another. Let’s explore and see where it takes us.’
“Ed cared about vocal challenges, but at the same time, he wanted us to be free dramatically, to be where we could just express ourselves. Then in turn, that made the singing even better. I didn’t feel like a student when I was in Aspen; I felt like an artist.”
Edward Berkeley coaches Tiffany Jackson onstage in 1990.
Charles Abbott
Jackson also reveals that Berkeley would take the opera students on weekly Sunday hikes. “He would charge up the mountain and it was easy for him, but we were all dying. Ed influenced me to include fitness in my personal and performance life because of those hikes,” she says. (And she has taken it to the extreme—training annually to compete in natural body building shows. Readers may recognize her as “Necessary Diva,” the body-building opera singer who made it to the Las Vegas Round of Season 6 of America’s Got Talent.)
“In some ways,” says Jackson, “those long hikes were a metaphor for Ed’s method of teaching. I didn’t know where I was going. I was this black girl from inner city New Haven, and I’m hiking Lost Man’s Pass somewhere in Aspen! But Ed was leading us; he knew where we were going, and everything was going to be okay.”
Berkeley believes that it’s the opportunity to see that visible and sometimes dramatic change in the singers that makes the Opera Scenes Master Classes so popular with Festival audiences—so much that they’ll stop students and Berkeley on the street, often to remark on the experience of watching a singer go from simply interesting to exciting.
“The audience has become, to a lovely extent, truly engaged in what goes on,” he says. “They feel very free. I try to conduct class in a way that it is relaxed and casual; not a formal event where people feel shut out. Hopefully, it’s an event where audiences as well as singers feel completely involved. It’s become our own little religious event. And hopefully, we’re stealing people from the golf course,” he adds with a chuckle.
Aspen Opera Center Director Edward Berkeley works with students in the popular Opera Scenes Master Class.
Alex Irvin
ON MENTORING
Berkeley counts among his mentors the late Julius Rudel, the twentytwo-year conductor of the New York City Opera who also served as first musical director of the Kennedy Center in Washington and conducted orchestras and operas around the United States and the world. For about ten years, he conducted an opera each season at the Aspen Opera Center.
“An ability Julius sustained for a hugely long and important career was a willingness to remain open to new thinking,” says Berkeley. He recalls a singer who came to rehearsal with an interpretation of a specific Mozart phrase that he could only characterize as “very strange.”
“Julius looked up from the piano, where he was conducting, and said, ‘Well, that’s interesting.’ Then he turned to me and asked, ‘Did you know that was coming?’ I said, ‘No.’
“He repeated, ‘Well, that’s interesting.’ Then he turned to the singer and said, ‘I’ve never heard that before, but I think it’s good. We can do this.’”
“That’s when I realized that here was someone who had been conducting for over fifty years, doing major performances everywhere, but who still remained open to inspiration from someone who had no experience—someone who just had the instinct of a musician to look at something differently.
“I think that’s important both in teaching and directing for me— knowing that someone may come in who has no real experience and no real development as a performer or an artist, but they still have inspiration and imagination. You have to stay open to that all the time, because you never know where inspiration is going to come from.”
BERKELEY’S “ALL-STARS”
Edward Berkeley has worked with a number of Aspen Opera Center students who, early on, possessed that special quality that propelled them to prominence in today’s opera world. Here are a few of them.
“Of course, Renée Fleming is the easiest,” says Berkeley. “She was with us for two or three summers and I [worked] with her on both new pieces and standard repertoire. It was clear that [she had] an unusual sound and gift very quickly.” In her book, The Inner Voice, Fleming recalls studying in Aspen with Berkeley’s colleague Jan DeGaetani, (one of the Eastman School of Music faculty who first invited him to Aspen), and adds, “I also met Ed Berkeley, who directed me in one of the best theatrical experiences I’ve had to this day, Conrad Susa’s opera Transformations, a setting of Anne Sexton’s poetry in which I played Sexton. We spent days on end just reading and analyzing her poems.”
— RENÉE FLEMING “The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer”
The following summer, in 1983, Fleming was cast as the Countess in the Festival’s Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro). It was in that role that Jorge Mester, then the AMFS’s music director, heard her and suggested that she audition for Juilliard’s postgraduate program, which became another important step toward her professional career. When Fleming made her professional debut at the prestigious Metropolitan Opera in 1991, it was in the same role she’d learned in Aspen, the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro. She has gone on to be unquestionably the superstar soprano of her generation.
Mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, winner of the 2007 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, is a more recent alumna. Berkeley first auditioned Barton in Houston and thought to himself immediately, “We’ve got to get her here to sing the [role of the] Witch in Hansel and Gretel.” Barton came to Aspen in 2008 and performed the role to great reviews. “She actually went on to use the aria we worked on for Hansel and Gretel for her audition at the Met and . . . she just took right off,” says Berkeley. Barton made her Metropolitan Opera debut the following year. In 2017 the Met named her the winner of the 12th annual Beverly Sills Artist Award for young singers, and she is well into the beginning of a major career, singing major operatic roles all over America and Europe. Barton returns to sing with the Aspen Festival Orchestra on August 5.
Baritone Craig Verm, who just this spring stepped into the lead role of Don Giovanni for the Dallas Opera when Polish baritone Mariusz Kweicien fell ill, studied at the Aspen Opera Center several times. He sang the role of the Forester in Berkeley’s staging of Leoš Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen in 2005. “It initially wasn’t clear where he was going,” says Berkeley. “Then he returned in 2014 to sing Eugene Onegin, which was stunning.” This summer, Verm will sing the role of Sharpless in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly with the Santa Fe Opera, and in the fall, the role of Peter in Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel with the Pittsburgh Opera.
Tenor Ben Bliss, who sang the role of Vladimir Lensky in Eugene Onegin with Craig Verm in 2014, has gone on to win major awards and during the 2017–18 season sang the role of Ferrando in Così fan tutte at the Metropolitan Opera, Seattle Opera, and Oper Frankfurt. He returns to Aspen August 10 to perform with the Aspen Chamber Symphony.
Tenor Ben Bliss returns to Aspen August 10.
Other Aspen Opera Center alumni taught by Berkeley now pursuing major opera careers include Grammy Award-winning mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, who returns to Aspen August 9 to reprise with Sharon Isbin the Spanish song program that has propelled their 2017 album Alma Española up the classical music charts; tenor Bryan Hymel, who will sing Raoul de Nangis in Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots with the Opéra National de Paris this fall; and Tamara Wilson, who in the past year has sung the title role in Aida with the Washington National Opera and the role of Chrysothemis in Strauss’s Elektra with the Houston Grand Opera. She returns August 19 for Wagner’s Die Walküre on Final Sunday.
