This interview was originally recorded on October 11th, 2023.
The Oral History Project is supported by the Arthur F. and Alice E. Adams Charitable Foundation.

Craig Rutenberg, pianist and vocal coach

Pianist and vocal coach Craig Rutenberg was born in New Haven, Connecticut. After studies at Georgetown University in German and Italian, he studied with John Wustman at the University of Illinois for two years before leaving for Paris to concentrate his studies on French mélodies with Pierre Bernac. While living in Paris, he also worked for the Opéra-Studio de Paris and prepared opera and vocal music for Pierre Boulez at IRCAM. In 1979, Rutenberg was invited to the Glyndebourne Festival, where he continued to coach every summer for the next 10 seasons. Rutenberg joined the music staff of Houston Grand Opera and its Opera Studio in 1980, and in 1986, he joined the music staff of the Metropolitan Opera, becoming head of music in 1989. He has also coached at San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Covent Garden, English National Opera, and the Royal Opera in Stockholm, among other companies. He remains a vocal advisor at the Mariinsky Opera. In recital, Rutenberg has appeared with singers including Thomas Hampson, Jerry Hadley, Ben Heppner, Olaf Bär, Diana Damrau, Felicity Lott, Christine Brewer, Maria Guleghina, Harolyn Blackwell, Susanne Mentzer, Sondra Radvanovsky, and Bryn Terfel.

Transcript

Marc A. Scorca: Craig Rutenberg, thank you so much for being with us for another edition of our Oral History Project. I'm so grateful to you. Thank you.

Craig Rutenberg: Thank you very much for inviting me. It's nice to be thought of.

Marc A. Scorca: I want to start with the question I ask everyone, which is: who brought you to your first opera?

Craig Rutenberg: My mother and my father, and it was at my insistance and the urging of our family pediatrician. It was up in New Haven, Connecticut, and I don't remember exactly if it was the New Haven Opera Society, which was run then by Herta Glaz, or if it was something at the Yale School of Music, but it would've been between the two. And it was a scenes program.

Marc A. Scorca: Wow. And I, of course, want to ask why your pediatrician urged this upon you, upon your parents?

Craig Rutenberg: His name was Dr. Morris Wessel, and he was a rather famous pediatrician up in the New Haven community. And he knew me from the day I was born apparently, and followed my musical instincts all those years. He was in practice with another physician called Dr. Robert La Camera, who was even more musically inclined, and during his student days had been a super at The Met. So the two of them always urged on my in gradations in music and opera, and encouraged my parents to do whatever they could to help me out.

Marc A. Scorca: Wow. How old were you when that first opera experience occurred?

Craig Rutenberg: I believe I was 10.

Marc A. Scorca: Okay.

Craig Rutenberg: I knew opera from television before that, because I was born in '52, and of course, we had things like The Firestone Hour, and we had Ed Sullivan, and I very clearly remember Hilde Güden and Jussi Björling on Ed Sullivan. I was about six years old. I just thought it was the greatest thing anyone could ever have imagined. And then on Friday nights, you would hear George London, or Risë Stevens, or Eleanor Sieber. This idea of bringing opera into television is hardly new.

Marc A. Scorca: Unfortunately, it is not entirely current, in terms of the popular mainstream. The Ed Sullivan show is where I first heard (Joan) Sutherland and (Marilyn) Horne in the great Norma duet, which made me determined to get to The Metropolitan Opera as soon as I could.

Craig Rutenberg: I think most of us owe Ed Sullivan a great deal.

Marc A. Scorca: It's so true. But what you said implied to me that you were already working hard at the piano by the time you were 10 years old and were going to your first opera. So how did piano become a part of your life so early on?

Craig Rutenberg: I was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in what had once been a German enclave of immigrants. And then it slowly became more Italian and a little Polish. It was quite wonderful, actually. And even when I was growing up, people still grew their own grapes, made their own wine, you know, that sort of thing. Some people had chickens. And it was called Goatville - about a mile from the Yale campus. And our next door neighbor was my Great-Uncle, the brother of my Grandmother, who died before I was born. And he was a pianist. And indeed, his piano history consisted of him playing in a bar (or a saloon to put it politely) in Connecticut around 1910 called Miloen's, where these two sisters from Meridan called the Ponzillo Sisters used to come in and sing. And a young guy who was at Yale, by the name of Rudy Vallée, also used to come in and sing. And my Great-Uncle Fritzi used to play for them. So, family legend has it (I don't quite believe it), that shortly after my third birthday, I insisted on learning what happened - he had a Steinway baby grand. So I was forever running next door and pounding away, pounding away. And his wife, Rosie would say, "Craig, be quiet; you're bothering your uncle". And my uncle would say, "No, he's not. Let him do it".

Marc A. Scorca: Wow. Isn't that marvelous?

Craig Rutenberg: Yeah. I was very lucky that way. Sorry to get emotional... And he gave me my first lessons. He taught me to read music.

Marc A. Scorca: And to imagine that link to Rosa Ponselle and her sister. And, you know, I never want to say the greatest, but one of the great singers of all time, Rosa Ponselle. I don't know that she's appreciated today as much as she should be.

Craig Rutenberg: I don't think so; not at all. And I can remember 50 years ago talking to Virgil Thomson about great singers he had heard, and he said, "Well, there were really only three women. One was Mary Garden, who was a great dramatic projector" as he called her, like (Maria) Callas. And then he said, "Rosa, who made the most gorgeous sound imaginable and consistently, and the other was (Kirsten) Flagstad, who is like an organ".

Marc A. Scorca: Wow. Not bad. We could go on about this, but let's stick to our script here. So, here you are as a youngster, taking piano lessons from your Great-Uncle, channeling Rosa Ponselle all the time. When did the idea of a career as a pianist be suggested to you? Or did you imagine it?

Craig Rutenberg: Oh, I imagined it. I imagined it very early on. But I also imagined that, once I discovered what opera was, I was determined that somehow I would be involved with opera. Of course, I was convinced pre-puberty that I was going to be six foot two, and I would be a bass, and that I would learn Hunding. Well, that sure as hell didn't work out.

Marc A. Scorca: Although you learned Hunding, but not to sing!

Craig Rutenberg: So, Uncle Fritzi had mentioned that pianists worked in opera houses, and then there was a very wise church choir director. Her name was Margaret Jensen. She was the choir director at Trinity Lutheran Church in New Haven, Connecticut, which was my mother's church. And I sang in the children's choir, and then my voice imploded with puberty very early on. It was quite appalling, actually. But she said to me, "I think you need to be the accompanist for the church choir now", which was very kind of her, very forth seeing. And she mentioned a couple of times that I should learn opera scores, because maybe there would be a future in playing for opera. So that's how that came about. And once again, this was when I was about 11 years old - 10 or 11. It all happened very early.

Marc A. Scorca: So you weren't setting out to be a great solo pianist, and then stepped back to be a collaborative artist, but from the very outset of your career development, working as a collaborative, supportive pianist/artist is what you wanted to do.

Craig Rutenberg: Yes. I called it that, and I still call it an accompanist. Please forgive me.

Marc A. Scorca: You know, I will call you however you wish to be called.

Craig Rutenberg: Thank you. I really feel strongly about that.

Marc A. Scorca: Let me ask you why, because I think it will illuminate the concept of the role. These days we talk about the 'collaborative pianist', and that's the nomenclature, evolved from the term 'accompanist', which is how we used to refer to it. You still feel strongly about accompanist. Why?

Craig Rutenberg: Because that's what I do. I'm either a pianist or an accompanist, and I'm with a singer or a cellist, violinist back in the days when I played some chamber music. But I accompany a singer. It sounds so grand to me, so over exaggeratedly grand to say, collaborative artist. Plus collaboration for me always sets off alarm bells of being part of the Vichy government in France, during the occupation. That's someone else's problem. But it just has always rubbed me the wrong way. So I've made a point of sticking with 'accompanist' or 'Craig Rutenberg, pianist'.

Marc A. Scorca: Now, you mentioned chamber music and playing for violinists or cellists, and of course, you're playing for singers. Is there a big difference in being an accompanist for instrumentalists versus singers?

Craig Rutenberg: Yes. The primary one (for me anyway) is that there are no consonants to listen for. And that, of course, changes how I attack the keyboard, because one is always taught your fingers come to the keys right after the consonant, not before.

Marc A. Scorca: Now, I have never heard that before.

Craig Rutenberg: (John) Wustman, Geoffrey Parsons, Gerald Moore, Gwendolyn Koldofsky (Music Academy of the West), all taught "Wait. Respond to the consonant, then you come (in)". Otherwise, you're always going to sound early.

Marc A. Scorca: I imagined that you were gonna say something about breathing.

Craig Rutenberg: I promise I was coming to that.

Marc A. Scorca: The singer has to breathe the way the cellist doesn't.

Craig Rutenberg: Right. Yet, on the other hand, a very good cellist will breathe like a singer, but it's different. It's not as big, it's not as intrusive. But I remember there was an American violinist who lived in Paris for decades called Miriam Solovieff. She was a great, great violinist. She also had been a member of the American Communist Party and was chased out of America around 1949, 1950. She settled in Paris. She was a duo with Julius Katchen. And I remember being in an elevator at the French Radio one day. We'd gone to hear a masterclass given by (Elisabeth) Schwarzkopf, and Miriam said to her, "My name is Miriam Solovieff", and Schwarzkopf recognized the name. She was of that generation. She said, "Ah". And Miriam said, "I always teach my violinists to listen to you for breathing". And she said, "Thank you. I always tell my singers to listen to violinsts". So it's always like that. It's just that the singers' world is slightly different, and that because of breathing and speaking, there tend to be more breaks in between the phrasing, but we try to minimize them.

Marc A. Scorca: Yeah. I want to get a little bit into the psychology of being an accompanist, and you've worked with the greatest singers in the world. Are you also accompanying their emotions in some fashion? Are you absorbing their nervousness? Are you exuding calm? Do you have to put your own emotions into a suitcase to make space for theirs? We now know you play the chord after the consonant, but do you have to do a lot more to accompany a singer?

Craig Rutenberg: A great deal more. Great questions. I took my cue from something Geoffrey Parsons once said..."When I'm playing, I do my best to set down the most perfect carpet of sound that I can for the singer. Then I can inject some personality. But the personality must always be something that's reflected off of the singer". You just don't go in like a bull. You can discuss it in a rehearsal. But as Janet Baker once said to Graham Johnson, "Listen, I'm the star here, and I'm the one who's paying you, so you do what I want". So you do your best. You bring your ideas to rehearsal, but ultimately you are beholden to the singer, and you try to create as much atmosphere and beauty around them as you possibly can. Not by a long shot did I ever come close to someone like Geoffrey or Gerald Moore, or a couple of the guys today who are just so fantastic. But that was my starting point, and that's what I tried to do.

Marc A. Scorca: And you talk about bringing your own ideas, but the singer is the star. But one singer must be a nervous performer, one a calm performer. One must love to chitchat in the wings, while another one is focused. You must have to be really a psychologist to adjust to the artist and create a blanket of safety, irrespective of the sound.

Craig Rutenberg: Let me retreat a little bit. Yes: we all call ourselves psychologists to a certain degree, but the fact is, between 1982 and 1986, while working in Houston Grand Opera, I enrolled at the University of Houston to study psychology because I had always wanted to study something other than music, and it seemed to me that was very important. I studied very hard for four years. David Gockley was brilliant. I asked him if I could do this, and he said, "If you could go to night school, except on performance nights, and if you're still free to perform your obligations for Houston Grand Opera, the Opera Studio, I support you". That was a pretty great thing to do. Without that education, I'm not sure that I could have managed a career at The Met and/or being on tour with singers. That helped me very, very much. Let's talk about the singers first, and I'll tell you (if you want), how all of that came to be. Yes: one singer is highly strung and can actually be quite destructive, both in a warm-up rehearsal and backstage. Another one can be completely supportive, but talks nonstop to the point where I have to say, "I'm sorry, I can't talk anymore. I have to concentrate". Another one can be, "Oh good, you've arrived at the hotel. I've arranged for you to have a massage downstairs at the health club. Have a good time. Meet you tomorrow at two o'clock. We'll run through the program", which you do. And then he or she says, "Okay, this is fine. I'll be back about 7.45. See you then". Everyone's completely different.

Marc A. Scorca: And you have to make space for that.

Craig Rutenberg: Oh, absolutely. That's part of the job. I did turn down the chance to do a tour with a really fantastic artist and singer, who was simply known for temper tantrums and rudeness. And I finally said to the manager, "I will do this if you can promise me that artist X is taking his/her medication". And I got a very rude answer back saying, "Well, artist X is a great artist". I said, "I'm not disputing that, but I can't put up with this".

Marc A. Scorca: Yeah, there is a limit.

Craig Rutenberg: There is a limit. Some of my colleagues who have much more courage and stamina than I do, have put up with it. I just couldn't.

Marc A. Scorca: Yeah. You are an artist too, finally. For those who enjoy opera, but don't necessarily understand all the nomenclature: a voice teacher teaches you to sing, to breathe, to support, to sing on pitch, that sort of thing. But a vocal coach? I think a lot of opera lovers will hear that someone has a vocal coach. But what does a vocal coach do that's different from what a voice teacher does?

Craig Rutenberg: Sometimes it's different, and sometimes there's a great deal of crossover. As far as I'm concerned, a vocal coach is responsible for diction - and I don't mean just spoken language, but how to sing it, because there is a difference. Part of the problem, to my ears nowadays, is that people try to make sung words sound too much like natural speech. And we've lost the beauty of the language and the beauty of the music. So, diction, style - and I do mean style, - as I learned it from listening to the great singers of the past. And fortunately listening to some of the great singers who were still alive and performing when I was very young. These days, it's absolutely insupportable not to do research and listen to all of the greats, particularly those who were around at the time of the creation of certain works. Then I think one has the right, if you really know enough - or if you have the confidence of the singer and that singer's voice to say, "Listen, that doesn't sound quite right. That doesn't sound like what Miss X, Y, Z or Mr. X, Y, Z would say in your lesson. And I think it behooves you to go and have a lesson as soon as possible, or just check in on the phone or video or whatever, and show what you're doing, and ask if that's really what they mean for you to be when performing". But you have to be around a long time, and you have to know a lot to be able to say such a thing.

Marc A. Scorca: A couple of questions emerge from what you just said, which I find fascinating. The simple question: did you ever study voice to understand what it feels like, what the vocabulary means physically?

Craig Rutenberg: You bet I did, and I started quite young. There was a couple in New Haven, of a certain age - Maestro Francesco Riggio and his wife Hilda. And they were THE voice teachers in New Haven, away from Yale. And in those days, Yale wasn't very strong. Blake Stern taught, and he was good, but he was mostly for oratorio and song repertory. I used to play a lot in Hilda's voice studio - and, by the way, she was the first voice teacher of a local girl called June Anderson.

Marc A. Scorca: Oh, my word.

Craig Rutenberg: June Anderson and I grew up together. We used to make our pocket money from evening gigs with Hadassah or the Elks, or one of those things. And I think we got paid 15 bucks a shot, and in the late '60's, that was a lot of money for a teenager. Yeah. 15 bucks cash. You could buy a three record opera set for 15 bucks back in those days, you know? So it was pretty great. So yeah, I learned a lot listening from her, and sometimes I took some lessons with her. I also listened to Herta Glaz. Herta gave me my first job as an opera company pianist, and also fired me the same night. And she had every right to do that. I was simply awful. It was Ernst Toch, The Princess and the Pea and I had no idea what I was doing, so she fired me. But she kept an eye on me, and she would ask me up to her house from time to time and taught me a lot about singing. I did my undergrad work at Georgetown, which was in German and Italian linguistics. And after that, I went out to Urbana, Illinois, to study with John Wustman. And on the faculty were William Warfield, Mark Ellen, whose name may not spring to mind immediately, but had a great career in Germany, was a fabulous voice teacher, and of course was attached to George London at the hip. So, he had a lot of good things to say. There was - forgive me for saying - a very dear old-maid voice teacher called Grace Wilson, who taught Erie Mills, taught Jerry Hadley. And as they both said, "It's not what Grace taught us, it's what she didn't do to harm us". So while out there and playing in their classes, you can't help but learn a lot of great stuff, and I was very lucky to be able to pick it up.

Marc A. Scorca: I wanna go back to your talk about style. You learn from the greats; you get back to those who sang for the creators. And that's one thing, if you were in the 1950's and Callas studying with (Tullio) Serafin, who was around to talk to Puccini. We're farther from that now. So how does interpretive style, how does Italian style, French style, German style get taught today? How does a singer learn it?

Craig Rutenberg: Well, they could talk to me or, as I would tell them - get on YouTube and listen to the following singers, and then the following conductors, and really listen to what the conductors do. But I do this day after day, when I do my online coachings. It's invaluable. And I've got to say most of what's passing for Italian style is off the mark. For me, what passes as French style is completely off the mark. When I left Urbana, I went to Paris. I'd asked Pierre Bernac if I could be a pianist in his studio, in 1976. And he wrote back and said, "Yes, but you know, I've had a pianist for 30 years, Madam Soucy, and I can't fire her, but if you have a way to support yourself, come over and let's see what we can do". So I moved over to Paris. I had $1,500. I stayed in the apartment of Madame la Baronne de Turckheim-Martine, who was a very good friend of Nathan Milstein, and the day I arrived in Paris, I was walking on the side of the Louvre, crying because I was so scared and thinking, "What have I done? What sort of crazy mistake have I made?" And I got hit by a car, had a couple of cracked ribs, nothing worse than that. Bernac was in much worse shape, because he had a heart attack. So he was out of commission for a couple of months already. But he very kindly made several phone calls to a few of his old colleagues and said, "This young American guy has come to study mélodie with me. Do you have any need for a pianist in your studio?" So, quite shockingly, I started getting phone calls from Jacques Jansen, Irène Joachim, Leila ben Sedira. With a bit of distance, Régine Crespin. That eventually developed into a great friendship and relationship. But here I was, this kid scared out of his wits, who didn't yet really speak French, side taped up, going to play maybe the first scene of Pelléas, with Irène Joachim, with one of her students. Or the Tower Scene of Pelléas, with Jacques Jansen. Or, not so much Pelléas, but a lot of French operetta with Leila ben Sedira, who of course was the Yniold on that great recording of Pelléas. And she had recently had a stroke. Her mouth was terribly twisted, but she could still play chords. And she would do the Rossi exercises with her students, and then she would slowly get up to the piano and say, "Monsieur Craig, asseyez-vous", and then we would do Rossini songs, or we would do Fauré. And my God, what a world that was. I was so lucky. Yeah; so bloody lucky.

Marc A. Scorca: I just find as we get farther and farther from the creation of the European literature that we know and love, it becomes more challenging for the young artists to find the reference points to really, really learn. Now so much is recorded, so much is available now on YouTube particularly. It's there, but it's no longer available just in your voice teacher, but you have to really search for it.

Craig Rutenberg: You have to search for it, and you damn well should, because if you don't have that discipline, if you don't have that sort of curiosity - what Regina Resnik used to call the hunger - then don't bother, just don't bother, because there are too many people trying to do it. And the world's too crowded.

Marc A. Scorca: Let's talk about masterclasses. So, there are masterclasses that are just showcases for the star to show what he or she knows. Then there are masterclasses that are truly beneficial to the young singer who has an opportunity to work for 20 minutes, half hour, hour with a master. What makes a good masterclass?

Craig Rutenberg: Well, what makes a good masterclass to start off with, is that it has to be given by someone who is a master, and not someone who's been singing for five years and is invited by their alma mater to give a class. I'm sorry: that really rubs me the wrong way. And if I offend many people, I sort of apologize, but I don't. You have to be doing this for 30 years, 35 years, and then maybe you've earned the right to be called 'master', and you could use the term 'masterclass', but I find it thoroughly offensive in most cases. Now, assuming that you've done that, a great singer or accompanist like a Geoffrey Parsons or watching Gerald Moore back in the old days, they can tune in immediately to the singer's weaknesses, and then find a way to say, "I think you need to address this". Don't say "This is wrong". Do not put down the student immediately. (Elisabeth) Schwarzkopf, who was brilliant, was very tough, and she acquired rightfully or wrongfully (that reputation). I don't know. You can decide by watching her YouTube classes. I mean, people called her cruel. I don't think she was cruel at all. I think she was just a very tough businesswoman who said, "Okay, we've got half an hour. We better cut to the crux". And I appreciate that. I respected her so much in classes, I used to beg to be allowed to play for her classes because I wanted her to be tough on me. I did play for two weeks of classes with Gundula Janowitz in Baden-Baden, and Janowitz is a tough lady. She was perhaps a little softer than Schwarzkopf, but she would just go right to the heart of the matter.

Marc A. Scorca: So, in a good masterclass, do they point out the weakness, or do they try to cure the weakness?

Craig Rutenberg: Both. They point it out and then say, "Try this". I did a lot of playing for Regina Resnik at The Met, because I brought her in in the late '80's to be a masterclass teacher for the young artists with Jimmy's (Levine) approval and enthusiasm. And she would sometimes say, "It's so hard, because you don't want to destroy the kids, and you don't want to, in this short period, go against something that they're working on very hard with their teachers. But you can't let it slide". And that's where that delicate balance comes. However, she was as tough as anyone else. She would say, "No, try this. No, try this". And not only vocally, but physically as well. I remember a very good young American soprano who was in the program, who had a very good career, and she was the cover of Oscar, and she was singing the first act aria. And she started, and Regina said, "Why are you sticking your tuchus out?" "Am I?" First of all, we had to tell her what 'tuchus' meant. And so we started again, and she did it again. And Regina said, "No, you are bent over. Your tuchus is sticking out. Follow me". And they did some walking around the room. It was a room that used to be known as 210 at The Met, and Regina took her around like something you'd see in Carnegie Hall in the 1940's, like the voice teachers in On the Town, teaching her how to walk. And she said, "Look, I know this isn't fun, but I had to learn how to do it too". And about 10 days later, this young lady had to go on, on an afternoon's notice, and she came back afterwards and she said, "Boy, it sure wasn't fun working with Ms. Resnick, but I'm so grateful I did it".

Marc A. Scorca: Wow. Isn't that something?

Craig Rutenberg: Those are the extra things that can be brought in a class as well.

Marc A. Scorca: It is not just hearing a problem, but it's coming up with one or two or three possible cures; they really are performance physicians in that way.

Craig Rutenberg: Yeah, it really is. You know, Mr. (Thomas) Hampson's brilliant at it. Mr. (Ben) Heppner is fantastic. And he goes about it in a completely different way,

Marc A. Scorca: Really.

Craig Rutenberg: He's really relaxed and informal. I've watched Christine Brewer give some classes. She's like earth mama. She's just so down and dirty about it. And she says, "Oh, I don't know about that. Try this". And either the kid takes it or doesn't.

Marc A. Scorca: How wonderful. Now, you've also had the title of Assistant Conductor at The Metropolitan Opera. What does an assistant conductor do?

Craig Rutenberg: An insistent or an assistant?

Marc A. Scorca: Maybe both. Let's start with alphabetical order: assistant

Craig Rutenberg: First of all, I think it's a horrible title. It's something they had to create to deal with the union to cover a bunch of various possibilities. But in the case of The Met, it means someone who coaches; someone who's capable of conducting a rehearsal in the place of the conductor. Not an orchestral rehearsal, that's the cover conductor. That's a different story. And it also covers the possibility of a prompter. But it's a made-up thing that had to be created so that The Met could deal with the unions and all of that. It's nuts.

Marc A. Scorca: Have you ever served as a prompter?

Craig Rutenberg: Yeah. That's how I came to The Met: as a prompter.

Marc A. Scorca: It must be nerve-racking.

Craig Rutenberg: It's nerve-racking. And it's the most exciting thing in the world, because as a colleague of mine used to say, "You do have the best seat in the house".

Marc A. Scorca: For looking at feet.

Craig Rutenberg: May I backtrack briefly and explain to you how it got to that point? In 1982, AIDS had been upon us for a year, and a lot of friends and colleagues were dying within weeks or months. And that's why I decided I needed to do something more useful in the world than just coaching opera. I was at Glyndebourne every summer, which was a pretty terrific gig. And I was at Houston Grand Opera, and that's when I decided that I wanted to go back to school and study some psychology. Not political psychology; I knew I didn't have the time and the discipline to do that, but through educational psychology. And my own therapist down there, a guy called Bryan Guiot said, "l'll support you through this". And I knew some people already. There was a guy called Jim Beecher at Houston Grand Opera, who had left and gone back to the University of Houston full-time to become a therapist. And this went on and on. It came to 1986. I was already doing my thousand hours of field work. I was working with a lot of other guys in an AIDS residency in Montrose, which was the big gay section of Houston then. And I was working as a cook. I was doing field work as a therapist. When we couldn't get night nurses, sometimes with other guys, we'd stay up all night and we'd change the beds and we'd bathe guys. And it was pretty awful because it was Houston, and the Bissonnet was still like the Ku Klux Klan, you know? Anyway, I was so involved in it, that I really seriously considered giving up opera and going into psychology, and try to be useful that way. And in December of '85, I remember I was in my apartment. I had a little carriage house in Houston, and I was working with Phyllis Treigle, the daughter of Norman Treigle. She was at the Houston Studio. And the phone rang. Something told me to get it. "Hello?" And this voice said, "This is Ray Quinn at The Metropolitan Opera". Ray used to run the rehearsal department and was in fact the Head of Music. And he said, "We've heard a lot about you, and we'd like you to come up and do some coaching if you'd like, and by any chance, do you prompt?" And I said, "Well, at the moment, I'm prompting our production of The Daughter of the Regiment, and then I'm going to be prompting Tales of Hoffmann, both in French and English later in the season". He said, "Good, do you want to come up?" And something in me said, "You know, if you get sick and you haven't taken this opportunity, you are really gonna have ruined your life. You'll be a jerk". So I said, "Yes, I would". And he said, "When can you be here for an interview? We'd like to meet you". And I said, "Actually, in about 10 days, I'm gonna be up there because we're rehearsing Carmen in Sheldon Harnick's new translation, and we're gonna be rehearsing at New York City Opera. So it's very easy for me to come by". So I came up and I stopped by The Met one day, and we had a nice talk. And I remember I had scores of Figaro and Ariadne and Carmen with me. I said, "So, who wants to listen to me play?" He said, "Oh no - your reputation precedes you. You don't have to play. Can you come up and start next fall?" I said, "Yeah, you bet". So I had to leave Houston, which hurt me a bit because I loved my little house and David was so supportive. But I had to do this. So that's how I came to The Met, and how I started as a prompter. My first job was Figaro. The first opera I ever saw had scenes from Figaro back in '62. The first opera record set I ever bought was the old Erich Kleiber/Hilde Güden set of Figaro. One of the first operas I worked on at Glyndebourne was Figaro. I was invited to Aix the summer of '85 to prepare Figaro and to play harpsichord for John Eliot Gardiner. So it was my good luck charm. And in the cast were Tom Hampson, whom I'd met the summer before in Aix; José van Dam whom I knew from Paris; Elisabeth Söderström whom I had known from Glyndebourne; Frederica von Stade whom I'd known from Glyndebourne. Andy (Andrea) Velis and Loretta Di Franco, whom I grown up with on the radio. I mean, what a hell of a way to start out. So that was it.

Marc A. Scorca: And then, prompting: you are feeding every line a moment before the singer needs it, at a point of breath. What are the fundamental mechanics of prompting?

Craig Rutenberg: Well, clearly you obviously have to know the score inside out. You really have to be on top of that. Then in the first rehearsals, you take the temperature of every singer who's in rehearsal and say, "What do you need from me?" You have to gain their trust if you can. And they usually are very good about telling you what they need and when and how. And then you develop a rhythm from there. Some singers want everything. Some singers only want a few things. For the Countess in Figaro, Elisabeth (Söderström) was just marvelous, 'cause she said to me, "There's always one line that I don't get, so I really need you there. Please be sure you give me that one". Nevertheless, I think it's part of our job to softly still give the line, because often there will be a look of panic - unexpected panic. And you have to be prepared to give it. I do remember a broadcast of Figaro from that season. I'm not gonna tell you who The Count was. I will tell you that it was not Hampson. He was earlier in the year. This man was an excellent singer, but who completely freaked out that day, on a broadcast. I understand it. And we were in the finale of the third act, and he was the proverbial deer in headlights. And I was trying to get his attention, and Elisabeth took him by the elbow, and lead him rather firmly close to the prompt box and said to him in Swedish (no, it wasn't (Håkan) Hagegård. It was someone else who speaks Swedish) - and said to him "Why don't you look at Craig?" And he stayed there and we got the whole thing back online.

Marc A. Scorca: Wow.

Craig Rutenberg: You do what you can.

Marc A. Scorca: You're also conducting, aren't you?

Craig Rutenberg: Yes. But you have to not fall into the trap, as many of my colleagues have done, that you are better than the conductor. It's easy to think you are, and you never will be, even if you are. And you mustn't take that responsibility. So, you know, in the old days you used to have two mirrors.

Marc A. Scorca: I remember that.

Craig Rutenberg: Now you've got televisions, and you hope they don't collapse or don't break down. And you just have to keep an eye on it, and try to stay a beat (sort of like accompanying) - a beat ahead of the conductor - but to expect anything to change at any point. If you were working with someone like (James) Levine or (Georg) Solti or (Bernard) Haitink - I'm thinking of older people - they were very reliable; very, very reliable. If you were watching someone like (Karl) Böhm, you had to work very hard because if you were lucky, you got this...(demonstrates small beat)...

Marc A. Scorca: Exactly, and that was fortissimo.

Craig Rutenberg: That was fortissimo. I mean, I will never forget Elektra in Paris. I was playing rehearsals and Elektra started like this (small upbeat). That was (sings opening chords of opera).

Marc A. Scorca: Oh, I know. I remember watching the Frau ohne Schattens with Böhm at The Met, and the orchestra is going wild, and he is there just conducting away (making a small beat pattern). It's so funny.

Craig Rutenberg: It was a point of honor and professional self-respect to be able to follow these guys and to give them what they wanted. When certain people started to complain about Maestro Levine's deteriorating beat, I found that insupportable, because it's our job to still give the greats what they had to give, and to try to figure it out.

Marc A. Scorca: Well said. I remember when Leonie Rysanek would take Karl Böhm out for his bow, and bow him because he couldn't stand up on his own, but he deserved the ovation and the soprano would take him out and bow him. I mean, that's giving him what he needed.

Craig Rutenberg: They were wonderful. I mean, they were just wonderful. But particularly when Leonie and Birgit (Nilsson) were together, and Regina had been thrown in, as they so often were in the mix. I mean, they were incredible days, but I remember in Paris it was really so loud from the orchestra, and Birgit and Leonie looked at Böhm and went (makes concerned gesture), and he looked up and he said "If not with you, with whom?"

Marc A. Scorca: Wow.

Craig Rutenberg: My favorite story (before my own professional days) of watching a rehearsal at Covent Garden, with Solti conducting Elektra. And it was Nilsson and Resnik and the entrance of Klytemnestra was so loud. I remember John Copley saying, "Oh, it sounds like a 747 taking off, doesn't it?" And it was just blaring and flaring and Solti looked up and said, "Regina, are you marking?" And she looked down and said, "No, maestro, are you?"

Marc A. Scorca: Craig, the stories that you have are just incredible from your experience on both sides of the Atlantic. And given that experience, the expertise you have, you must be asked for advice all the time from rising pianists, accompanists, coaches, people who want to have careers making music in a way that you have. Is there a core piece of advice that you give to the young aspirants who approach you?

Craig Rutenberg: I usually say, "Are you really sure you want to do this?" Because the world 50 years later, 45 years later, is so different. But yes, when they say they do, I simply recommend that they (as we talked about earlier) study as much as they can from the past. Listen to those recordings of great singers, great conductors, great pianists, accompanists. Learn from them. Try to emulate it. Don't copy; make it your own, but try to emulate what the greats did. And frankly, things started falling apart so badly - in my book - in Germany in the early '70's, I say, "Don't listen to anything after 1975", with a few exceptions. But stick with (Hans) Knappertsbusch, stick with Clemens Krauss. If you're learning a Wagner opera - Walküre - listen to four or five live performance recordings under Knappertsbusch or (Joseph) Keilberth, or you know, guys like that. Listen to what they did and learn from them. Then try to make it your own, and feel the responsibility to carry on those musical and verbal traditions, no matter what craziness might be happening on stage. Please try to stay true to the composer and the librettist's intentions and tell the story through the music.

Marc A. Scorca: What great advice. Craig Rutenberg, thank you so much for spending this time with us.