At Vermont’s famed Middlebury Language School, opera singers perfect their German — right down to mastering the elusive umlaut.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
If you want to make a career as an opera singer, Germany, with 80 opera houses, is one of the best places to go. While mastering the German language can be tricky, a unique course at Middlebury College is designed to help. Vermont Public’s Nina Keck has more.
NINA KECK, BYLINE: On a recent Friday, Stefan Rutter and eight students rehearse in a dark campus theater.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: (Singing in German).
KECK: Rutter is music director for Middlebury’s German for Singers course. He listens intently as students rehearse an opera by Mozart.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: (Singing in German).
STEFAN RUTTER: (Speaking German).
KECK: “That’s great,” he tells them. But then he digs into it word by word. They sing it through another four times before he has them read the lyrics without singing to fine-tune their diction even more.
RUTTER: (Speaking German).
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: (Speaking German).
RUTTER: (Speaking German).
KECK: Umlauts, those two dots over German vowels, are what he’s talking about. They’re tricky for those who aren’t fluent in German.
RUTTER: The difference between the oh (ph) and the ooh (ph) because they feel similar to them. But for Germans, they’re very different.
KECK: Total language immersion is one way Middlebury tries to break through. Participants sign a pledge to speak nothing but German for the entire seven-week course.
ASHLEY SCHLUSSELBERG: The first week, I think, was just panic.
KECK: Twenty-one-year-old Ashley Schlusselberg (ph) is a soprano from Long Island. She and Orlando Montalvo, a 28-year-old tenor from Providence, Rhode Island, admit the program is intense, but the immersion works.
ORLANDO MONTALVO: You know, we have class for, like, two hours a day, and then we have to eat lunch together in German. We are, you know, going to the bathroom in German. We’re...
(LAUGHTER)
MONTALVO: ...Doing everything that we can in German. And I came in here blindsided, and I was like, oh, wow, I actually can speak and defend myself in German now.
KECK: And no, they’re not cheating. The students were given special dispensation to speak with NPR in English. Hannah Friesen, a 30-year-old who sings professionally in New York, says her biggest hang-up with German are consonant clusters, the pfs and tchs.
HANNAH FRIESEN: Yeah, I think Italian is the easiest because it’s more vowels than - I don’t know. I feel like German is more crunchy.
KECK: Crunchy to the tune of $12,000 for this class, something Friesen considers an investment. Program director Bettina Matthias says German grants and student aid mean most students pay less, but it’s a lot, she admits, which is why, in addition to history and culture lessons, she includes practical information about working in Germany.
BETTINA MATTHIAS: We talk about what do you need to know to audition for an agent? What do you need to know to audition for an opera houses?
KECK: Like many in the class, Mitchell Widmer, a 32-year-old baritone from rural Iowa, wants to work in Germany.
MITCHELL WIDMER: At the end of the day, I know after this program that when I walk into an audition room with other Americans or people from different countries than Germany, that my German is going to be so well tuned that I will have an advantage.
KECK: Widmer and his classmates will get to try out their new and improved language skills in Germany this week. They’ll perform Mozart’s “The Pretend Garden-Girl” - “Die Verstellte Gartnerin.” Yeah, there’s an umlaut in there.
For NPR News, I’m Nina Keck in Chittenden, Vermont.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: (Singing in German).
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