 . . . Spring 1998
There is no opera major at Michigan. But there is Joshua Major, and many believe that voice students are giving sterling acting performances thanks to him. His degree from the University of Ottawa is in English, but the Toronto-born director was exposed to theater early on. His father, Leon Major, is a stage director and now runs the opera department at the University of Maryland.
Major directed theater, too, but only until he was 23, when he was invited to stage Rossini's La Cenerentola for Opera Omaha. "I absolutely loved it," he recalls. And since that 1985 production, companies from the Anchorage Opera to the New Orleans Opera, from Minnesota to Miami, have retained him. He has also worked in Israel, Mexico and throughout Canada. Before Michigan recruited him five years ago, he had never taught, but he had already earned a reputation for working well with young professionals.
He and his wife, Elizabeth, a soprano who teaches voice at Albion College, were happy to leave New York for Ann Arbor with their daughters, who are now 6 and 3 years old.
Major's theater background informs his approach to opera. Influenced by Peter Brook, who has brought today's audiences closer to Shakespeare's plays by finding contemporary meanings in them instead of copying production styles favored in earlier times, Major says he is a humanist rather than an authenticist. "I'm interested in illuminating the human dilemma, the human world, in whatever I do," he says.
He helps students find "their own natural understanding" of a work. When they do, he says, a performance is different and interesting. "The idea is to look within yourself and to respond naturally to a given situation," he says. Students can think about their experiences without sharing them. "I do not need to know about their first sexual experiences," Major says, separating himself from an intrusive breed of acting teachers, who demand that students explore emotional memories in class.
Allen Schrott, a doctoral student and recent Figaro, says questions are at the center of Major's workshops. "He asks what you are doing and why, as opposed to 'Do this or do that.' Acting is something you locate in yourself and do very naturally." Major let Schrott sing an emotional aria to himself, while the other Figaro in the double-cast production preferred to sing it to the audience and draw them in. "Both approaches worked," Schrott says, "and Josh was happy to allow us the freedom to explore our choices."
Major's goal is to find the internal life of a scene. Pleasing an audience with gimmicks won't get him there. "If you're always pleasing everybody, you must be doing, I don't know, mall opera," he says. Nevertheless, he does try to dazzle audiences with honesty. "There was nothing affected about Joshua Major's staging," Opera News said of his Magic Flute at Opera Columbus in Ohio. "The singers presented their roles with arrestingly unself-conscious naturalness." And of his Don Pasquale in California, the Sacramento Union raved: "Without sacrificing voice projection, Major gives us so much variety of movement that one is tempted to forget this is an opera. He takes any stodginess that may be lurking in the art form and cancels it out with a bushel of stage business."
What distinguishes Major's work is just this ability to give dimension to a libretto without sacrificing the score. "A lot of times a director will decide what he wants to do and he jams the music into a prearranged concept," notes Martin Katz, Artur Schnabel Collegiate Professor of Music in Piano, who has conducted several operas Major has staged. "But Josh always includes the music in his plans. When one of the kids says, 'When should I get the glass of water?" he tells her to listen to the music. I don't know what else a conductor could wish for in a director. Add to that he's a jolly human being and a good cook and keeps rehearsals light and moving along."
Graduate Student Kate Fitzpatrick enrolled in Major's workshop for three years and says Major helped her stretch. "He gave me Cherubino as a workshop role, even though he's supposed to be a mezzo soprano and I'm supposed to be singing high coloratura roles. For me that was a great opportunity. Usually, because of size or ethnicity or vocal range, you get pigeonholed." Armed with the new acting skills that develop from experimenting with a variety of roles, Fitzpatrick sang Cherubino in Figaro last spring.
Major's willingness to question his own work impresses those who have collaborated with him. The emotionally shattering finale of Dialogues of the Carmelites, in which the members of a convent are beheaded, proved tricky to stage, Martin Katz recalls. "There were all kinds of spatial considerations-such as, when does the blade hit the neck?"
It was a formidable problem in timing as well as space. The nuns, singing in single file, deliberately climb a flight of stairs, walk down a ramp and march slowly offstage to the awaiting guillotine.
"The trick," Major explains, 'was to have the blade sound, which is in Poulenc's score, happen after they'd been offstage just the right number of seconds. If it's too early, it sounds silly. If too late, you lose the connection between the nun and her death. We had to determine the exact number of measures each nun would start up the stairs before she would reach her guillotine stroke. If one was late, it meant all following would be late. Even a moment's slip-up would ruin the audience's feeling of the profound moment the nuns were in."
Katz says that "the night before the opening, Josh restaged it for the third time, until he had the effect he wanted. He's always willing to go the extra mile."
Davi Napoleon '66, '68 MA is a contributing editor of Theater Crafts International, an editor and columnist for In Theater, and author of Chelsea on the Edge: The Adventures of an American Theater.
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Today, Major runs the School of Music Opera Workshop, an intense class in which students analyze and perform scenes. And since he arrived, he has directed University productions of Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore and ll Campanello, Puccini's Gianni Schicchi/, Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel, Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites, and Mozart's, The Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro.