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An Interview with Tom Reed, chorus
member
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It started thirty-one seasons ago. A friend of mine who sang at
the Saint Mary's Cathedral mentioned the San Francisco Opera
Chorus to me. He auditioned and got in, and I said, “You
mean they pay you to sing?” At the time I was working
at Wells Fargo Bank, and the thought of making money singing
was like, “Oh boy!” I’d been singing all
my life, but never professionally. So I auditioned the next
year and got in. As a chorister, it's just about everything.
We are sometimes the heart and soul of an opera, we are
sometimes filler, background, individual characters or mass
group characters in mobs. I've done my share of being drunk
and attacking principals with clubs. It's a wide range of
everything.
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Some of it is so chilling. I remember
the first time we went over the choral music where we
sing the dialogue of the discussions of the planning
of the targets, and it's almost chant-like. It's done
very dispassionately. I remember we were singing about
the various cities, and we describe Kyoto as a primary
target. Thirty years ago I had been to Kyoto and observed
the overwhelming beauty of the great temples and the
city. And as we were singing this music so coldly, so
dispassionately, I was thinking, all of that would have
been long gone. And yet thirty years before that, my
dad was a marine fighting the Japanese in the Pacific
and had been forced to invade the mainland of Japan.
If you think about it, he could have been killed and
I would not be here. And all of this is encompassed
in John Adams's music – this balance of good and
evil and coldness and the harsh reality and truth in
the whole thing.
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I came to this job with no stage experience whatsoever. I learned
it all here. I remember the first night I was staging – it
was a 1975 production of Norma. The first night I was on
stage with the chorus, and the Italian director, Tito Capobianco,
says in a thick accent, “Okay, Chorus, you are soldiers, you
are frustrated, you want to go to war but they won't let you, they
won't let you! Now I want you individually to walk across the stage
and show me! Show me!” I thought, “Oh no! Individually?”
So the others go, and he says, “Yes, good!” And then my
turn comes and I walk across, and he says, “No, no! You are
frustrated, you want to go to war!!” So I thought okay, I'm
going to let myself go and make a total fool of myself, and he said,
“Yes, very good!” So I’ve been making a total fool
of myself ever since. They always make me the idiot! I've been the
idiot policeman, the village idiot and the palace idiot.
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Doctor Atomic is exciting. There are some operas in which
the chorus is downright boring. You might be a one-dimensional character
in a mob. The music might not be all that interesting or what you
are singing about is just downright ridiculous, whereas Atomic
is so important, poignant and topical. It's a revelation, and therefore,
I've always approached it with a sense of energy, interest and excitement
knowing it's going to take me somewhere.
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At a time of war that we are in right now, controversial enough
as it is, it certainly could. I don't know if America really wants
to examine its conscience right now. And if I am getting the right
feel for where this opera is going, it’s going to have America
do exactly that. I don't know if America wants to do it, but I think
we all need to.
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