This interview was originally recorded on November 14th, 2017.
The Oral History Project is supported by the Arthur F. and Alice E. Adams Charitable Foundation.

Anthony Roth Costanzo, countertenor

Grammy Award–winning countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo has appeared with many of the world’s leading opera companies, including The Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, Opéra National de Paris, English National Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Canadian Opera Company, and Glyndebourne Festival. Acclaimed for his “brilliantly compelling” artistry (The New York Times), he is celebrated for his interpretations of Handel and contemporary composers alike, and for his boundary-pushing collaborations across genres and disciplines. A champion of new work, he has created roles in operas by John Corigliano, Jake Heggie, Jimmy López, and Gregory Spears, and has premiered numerous works written for his voice by leading composers of today. In 2024, he became General Director and President of Opera Philadelphia, marking a new chapter in his multifaceted career as both artist and arts leader.

Costanzo’s discography includes ARC, nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album, and Only an Octave Apart with Justin Vivian Bond. His recording of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten with The Metropolitan Opera won the 2022 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording. Among his many honors are the Beverly Sills Award, the Opera News Award, and Musical America’s Vocalist of the Year.

Transcript

Laura Lee Everett: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the National Opera Center. I'm Laura Lee Everett, the Director of Artistic Services and Programs. Please welcome Anthony Roth Costanzo. It's really a thrill to have you here.

Anthony Roth Costanzo: Well, thank you for having me at OPERA America; it's a pleasure to return. We did the first workshop of Jake Heggie's new opera, Great Scott, here long ago, so it has familiar and very fond memories.

Laura Lee Everett: And you've been back to perform on at least one of our Creators in Concert, because you have this great record of working with contemporary composers.

Anthony Roth Costanzo: I love to do it. That's what they've been doing for hundreds of years, is working with the composers, so why stop now?

Laura Lee Everett: Well, and it's slightly more entertaining than working with the dead ones.

Anthony Roth Costanzo: Slightly. Yes.

Laura Lee Everett: So I'm gonna ask you the traditional first question: who brought you to your first opera?

Anthony Roth Costanzo: Well, no one brought me to an opera, actually. I was doing musical theater. I was a kid taking piano lessons, and I was really terrible at it, so my piano teacher said to me, "Do you wanna try singing?" And I did, and I loved it, but the first thing I sang was Gershwin and I loved it. And so, that got me into theater and then musical theater. And then I said to my parents in North Carolina, who taught at Duke University, "I've gotta get outta here; I gotta go be on Broadway". And I was 11, and they said, '"Sure". And so, I went and did Broadway shows and tours and things like that, and plays for a long time. But when I was 13, I was asked (I can't remember if it was through an agent I had, or some connection that I'd made) if I could do Miles in The Turn of the Screw by Benjamin Britten. So I'd never seen an opera before I was in one. And the first one I was in was very psychologically complex and very musically complex. But that proved to be so stimulating that I have stuck around.

Laura Lee Everett: That's a good thing, at least for us. So, you started in and came via Broadway, obviously had musical background and music reading from piano. You also have some dance in your background. Did you actually study dance formally, or was that something that grew out of your time working in Broadway?

Anthony Roth Costanzo: I did a little dance, as one does when you have to be in a Broadway show, you have to learn how to hoof. So, I took some classes, certainly, and I worked with choreographers, but as I went through college, and even before that, I got connected to one choreographer in particular, Karole Armitage. When I was about 16, I met her and I wound up going on tour with her dance company, and I didn't really know how to dance, and she wasn't about to teach me, and I was with eight professional dancers. However, through her and through the lens of her experience, having worked with (George) Balanchine and (Merce) Cunningham and then all of these great dancers like (Mikhail) Baryshnikov and on, I got to understand what was special about dance, and what interested me, and what good dance was, and what bad dance was, and some of the perspectives associated with that. And also being with only dancers and not opera singers, I just learned and watched how to use my body, and I was very impressionable. So doing that, and then staying connected to dance, because I loved it, and getting to know people who make it, has somehow made me more aware of my body. And of course, singing is incredibly physical, so I found the two things fit well together.

Laura Lee Everett: Absolutely. Is it a love for all dance? Or specifically, do you feel connected to the modern dance and the contemporary choreography that seem to be sort of your gateway in?

Anthony Roth Costanzo: I'm not specific about modern or contemporary, but there's certainly a lot of dance I hate. I love ballet, and I also love a lot of new work that's being made, whether it's being made in the classical tradition or whether it's being made in a dance theater tradition, or I just saw Pina Bausch's company at BAM, and it was so thrilling. So, there's a whole wide variety of dance that I've experienced, and I try not to limit myself in any arena.

Laura Lee Everett: With good reason. So, when did you first hear another actual countertenor?

Anthony Roth Costanzo: David Daniels was my first countertenor. I was 13 years old doing The Turn of the Screw, and my colleague said to me, "You know, you have arm hair and your voice is low. Do you think your voice has changed?" And I said, "I don't know". And they said, "Then you'd be a countertenor", and I had no idea what that was. So when I looked it up, David Daniels was the thing to find. And I mean, there was also Alfred Deller and Russell Oberlin, but that was sort of a later exploration, 'cause David was exploding onto the scene. And I remember reading an article in Opera News about David Daniels, and understanding because of that, what a countertenor was. And then I listened to his CDs. I never knew that I would work with him, let alone be friends with him, and have late night phone calls after shows that we'd performed together. But that was the first countertenor. And he really forged a path for countertenors, especially in this country, to have careers for their repertoire to be a staple of the major opera companies. He changed the direction of things.

Laura Lee Everett: So, you have had the chance to work with him?

Anthony Roth Costanzo: I have. I've lost count of how many times. But we just worked together at Houston Grand Opera. And what I love about David, is that he is so genuinely caring, and so involved in other people's lives. And he's also incredibly open and honest as an artist, and I think that's what makes him such a great artist, but as a person as well. So, there's no tension, there's no artifice. There is only honesty, and when you're in the middle of an opera and you know, things go wrong, things go right, you want that person you can pick up the phone (to), and he'll call me and I'll call him. And to have a great artist you admire, and is the reason that you're sort of understanding what you're doing then become a friend is really a joy.

Laura Lee Everett: It's sort of the best part of the business.

Anthony Roth Costanzo: Absolutely.

Laura Lee Everett: Do you have a favorite experience that you've had where you all were doing a show that has multiple roles in it (as many pieces do in the baroque repertoire in particular) where a countertenor could be in multiple roles, where you guys have swapped roles, or done it in different productions that way?

Anthony Roth Costanzo: Well, we have done this production by Jim (James) Robinson of Julius Caesar. We did in Detroit, where he was Caesar, and I was Tolomeo and we've just done it in Houston with the opposite, where I was Caesar, and he was Tolomeo. And I think it is the mark of a great artist and a great person to be able to do something like that. It would be hard for me. It's hard for a lot of us to get a call and say, "Would you do this other role in it?" And David didn't think twice about it. He called me and said, "Do you think this is a good idea?" And I said, "If you do, I do", and he was incredibly supportive. And he also had very interesting and informative things to say. He's teaching a lot now, and part of the qualities that made him a great artist, make him a great teacher. And so he has a lot of information, especially 'cause he sang this role all over the world, and I wasn't shy to ask.

Laura Lee Everett: Good. Use your resources. We spoke a little bit earlier before the conversation started about teaching, and about things that you have learned from the very beginning. This is the mantra I always say to young singers: the two most important things you must do as a performer are, number one: be prepared, and number two: be the best colleague you can humanly be this side of sainthood, because you will work with all of these people again.

Anthony Roth Costanzo: True. That's very true. But I think the other thing I've realized is that the relationships you have professionally, personally, those are what will determine the kind of art you make. Whether you're a singer, or a director, or an administrator, the people that you connect yourself to - meeting Karole Armitage, meeting James Ivory (a filmmaker) at the moments that I did in my life, really tuned me into different aesthetics, different kinds of art. And the personal relationships that I've had, friendships and romantic together, they are what make me a human being. And of course, when I'm singing and when I'm thinking about, "I should ask this director to put this work on stage", I'm thinking about the emotion that can be communicated, and how we can engage audiences. And that's based on my own experience as a human, because ultimately I feel like when you see an opera singer on a stage, it gets boring when you're just watching an opera singer. When you're watching a human being, you can stay with that for a long time. So I think that those relationships really define art.

Laura Lee Everett: We were watching the segment of you with the sixth graders in the Bronx, both tying into what you just said about conveying emotion and teaching. Talk a little bit about the work that you did there, and how does making those kind of teaching moments and those interactions with people who are not opera-converted, or great opera lovers - how does that feed you? What does that do for your performance?

Anthony Roth Costanzo: Well, it feeds me in a lot of different ways, because it informs me about how people perceive this music. But I think that all audiences, and whether they've gone to an opera or not, are opera audiences, and this was kind of a litmus test. If you go to a school of kids who have not had the opportunity to go to the opera, who are not particularly interested in this art form, and you don't explain to them what the text is, what the opera is, what the tradition is, why it's a technically complicated singing - you don't explain any of that. You also don't tie it to their curriculum. So you're not making it into something academic, and this is an issue with education in schools, which is complicated, and I understand that, but I feel in order to unlock a door for a kid like that, what you have to do is get them to connect to the music. And that's what I was interested in seeing whether it was possible. Now, being a countertenor, you have this - I like to call it the 32nd window of novelty - in which people are going, "What the hell is happening", if they've never heard one before? And so, I try and use that and harness that and let them laugh, invite them to laugh in the way that I perform for them, but also give them a serious performance at the level that I would give if I was on the stage of The Metropolitan Opera, and try and see how they respond. And they do. I firmly believe that if it had to be that I explained Shakespeare, and Shakespeare wrote a play, and you're studying that in your English class, and that connects to this opera because of this, I've already lost them. I feel like if I can do this first, then I can walk it back and I can take apart the layers for them. So I think that there are different ways to approach education, but I think it's really important to get the students connected to something visceral.

Laura Lee Everett: How often do you get to do that work?

Anthony Roth Costanzo: I do it as much as I can. What's wonderful about performing with opera companies is they have education departments. So, their mission is to work with kids, and so, I try and go to schools that aren't necessarily primed and ready, and shock them. I sort of like that. And also to audiences outside, to see how they react. And also, sometimes it doesn't work. You know, sometimes what you're doing just doesn't interest them. And then you really have to see if in the 20 minutes you have, or 30 minutes you have, you can find a way in. What's wonderful at the very end of the video, was the girl - when people are talking about their experience - says, "Well, I think it's that you connect to the words and the music and you understand it. But what we are connecting to is your emotion. And we feel it through you". And that's really what is happening in opera. I find that when I go to the opera, and it's an opera I don't know, I'm not so preoccupied with the supertitles, which I think a lot of new opera audiences think, "Oh, I'm not sure I'm gonna understand it. I don't know. If it's in English, will I understand what they're saying, 'cause it's hard to understand. And if it's an Italian, I don't know...". But I'm not so preoccupied with everything that's being said. I think two minutes reading a three-paragraph summary of the opera, you can sort of see, if you have a good director, what's happening on stage, and take it in. And then if you want to go back, and look at particular line readings. But I also feel that's my job as a singer. If I'm vocalizing on a vowel, sometimes I will choose an emotion to vocalize with, in addition to just the vowel, because it gets you outside of whatever technical thing you're trying to beat, at any moment. And a lot of technique is just getting out of your own way, so that you can let what you have come out. So, if you choose an emotion with which to vocalize, sometimes that charges a phrase and you get the high note or the low note, or whatever it is you're trying to get. So, I think a singer is able to communicate an emotion in the pure vowel or sound that they're singing. And so, I try and make the colors of my singing clear, even if you're not following every flash of the supertitle. And at the same time, if you are, I wanna make sure that I know exactly what I'm supposed to be saying or what I am saying, and have it be really well-rendered.

Laura Lee Everett: You mentioned the 'if you have a good director', and that you can read a quick synopsis, and the singers have done their job, we get the emotion. Let's go back to some of those directors you first worked with. So did you start first with Broadway, or first with film?

Anthony Roth Costanzo: I started first with Broadway and got to work with a whole bunch of different directors doing the Broadway tour of Falsettos, which was a James Lapine production. And understanding the intricacy of interaction - one thing that I feel we do better on Broadway sometimes is listen, as performers. In opera sometimes, there's so much going on inside your body as you're preparing to sing this aria, it's hard to actually listen to your colleague on stage and be there as an active participant in the scene. And that's very important, I think, in making the scene feel vital. But then I went on to work with James Ivory, making a film. And Merchant Ivory had a reputation for making all these really beautiful films, and I knew nothing about them. And so understanding that, and working with a camera is, in a way, a different kind of performance. I guess the best way I can describe it is that when you're on stage, you have to create a performance, and on film it feels a little more like you're capturing a performance. You're still creating that performance, but you are sort of making a patina, I would say. And within that, the director comes in and grabs these little things and pieces them together. You don't know what exactly the performance will be. That's up to the editor and up to the cinematographer and the director and how they're capturing it. You have a little more control as an opera singer, but because of that, you have to be incredibly honest at all moments, and you have to find a way... I remember he kept saying to me, "You know, I love the exuberance, and that's what the character is that you're bringing, but in a way, you have to bring it in smaller gestures". And I thought about this. About 10 years later I was on the stage of The Met, where you think you'd need that (opens arms widely), but in fact, specificity is what reads really, really well and what works really, really well. And it's the same thing in film. So, when people say, well, do you change your performance for an HD broadcast? I say, "No, I'm very specific, and a very specific turn of the head reads really well on HD, and it reads really well from the back of The Met as well. So, I think you have to have that kind of specific performance, no matter what you're doing.

Laura Lee Everett: It's about the focus of your artistry.

Anthony Roth Costanzo: It can be about the focus of your artistry. It can be about the physicality of your artistry. It can be about the color of your singing. It can be about a lot of different things, but it has to be specific.

Laura Lee Everett: Now, you weren't supposed to sing in that movie originally, were you?

Anthony Roth Costanzo: That's true. I went to audition for a role of a poor violin player, who loved opera. And I was 15, and so I had gotten a little bit into opera, and I'd had a chance to sing The Shepherd Boy in Tosca with Pavarotti, which was really exciting. And there was a monologue about this boy in the script, that this boy went to see Tosca, and he was telling his best friend about it. And I went into audition for James Ivory, and of course, I'd memorized the whole third act of Tosca, 'cause I was, of course, standing in the wings. So I thought, "Well, it would be so fun if this boy just sang (sings) 'O Scarpia, avanti a Dio' in the middle of this monologue, but it was not called for in the monologue. So I went in, never having auditioned for a film, not really knowing who James Ivory was, and I sang in a very high, loud voice the last line of Tosca. And I remember the look on James Ivory's face, he was quite taken aback. And at the time, what happened - that was sort of the last round of auditions - and he said, "Let's have a coffee". And we did. And at this coffee (I think he wanted to see how crazy I really was), I brought a cassette tape and I said, "You know, I recorded Cherubino's aria on this cassette tape, and if you want it, here you go". So, I guess somehow I've always been sort of proactive, but I don't think I necessarily had a goal in mind. And Jim Ivory later told me that he was driving that day to his house upstate. So, he put the cassette in the car, and as he was driving along, he said, "I know that this is based on a real story, and it's based on a novel, but I'm gonna call up the novelist and ask if we can make this an opera singer instead of a violin player". And he is one of the few filmmakers who does this, 'cause now everyone is so anxious to cut away. But he puts the entire aria, and we did not do what most often happens in film, which is you record it and then you lip sync to it. But rather we just did two takes where we did it live. And the piano teacher who convinced me to sing, Pei-Fen Liu flew to Paris to accompany me, because they didn't have a pianist, and no one had thought that through. And so I said, "Pei-Fen, will you come to Paris?" And she said, "Of course".

Laura Lee Everett: Because no one in Paris can play the piano.

Anthony Roth Costanzo: I don't know what we were thinking; that's what we did. But it looked like Jane Birkin, Serge Gainsbourg's wife and wonderful singer in her own right, was playing the piano there. The other thing I remember about making that film, which is really funny, is my co-star, Leelee Sobieski, in these scenes - they forgot, because they were filming me, and it was a whole school filled with school children, and none of the school children (they were actual school children) knew what was gonna happen. So, it was kind of like that Bronx video, and they got all their reactions, but they forgot to get the closeup on the main character of the film, Leelee Sobieski. So, the next day they said, "We have to go back and you have to sing again". And I said, "Okay, but I'm not gonna sing the same aria for her", because we were having fun. So, I sang Schubert's Ständchen, and they shot her listening to this, and she had never heard it. And I sang it, at 15 with great commitment and grandeur, and she started crying, because it's a very sad, moving song. So, if you watch the film now, I'm singing 'Voi che sapete' and she's crying.

Laura Lee Everett: But the honesty and the vision of James Ivory to say, "Here's a 15-year-old boy, who is going to sing Cherubino, in his love and passion and earnestness". What a brilliant stroke to be willing to go back to the novelist and say, "I think I wanna do this", 'cause when you see it, and I know a lot of this is editors, but when you see it, there's such great honesty in their response and your performance.

Anthony Roth Costanzo: Yeah, it's a magical moment, and I think that's why Merchant Ivory films, still to this day hold up as classics. I just saw Howard's End, a film they made, which came out again, and I thought (I was going into the theater) "Will I be bored? I can't remember...". It's not, it's so alive; the performances are so honest. And so I learned from film, and I learned from dance how I want to perform opera. I also learned from seeing opera, how I wanna perform opera. But less, less, because I'm not so interested in keeping a traditional style of performance the same. I'm interested in evolving the way we perform opera, in conjunction with other art forms and making sure that it feels like it's alive.

Laura Lee Everett: This rolls directly into your biggest influences as you were coming up as a young singer, beyond David and clearly Tosca.

Anthony Roth Costanzo: Well, things were changing on a moment to moment basis, but the first singer that ever captured my imagination totally was Ella Fitzgerald, and what I would do, when I was like 9 or 10, is I would listen on repeat to her live performances from Berlin, where she would scat for like six minutes long. So by the time I was 11, I was so fixated on this, that I decided I wanted to see what would happen if I could transcribe the scat. So, I would have a CD player and I would press play-pause, and I would get like three syllables and I'd write them down, and I would go like that, and I'd have pages and pages, 'cause she was scatting syllables a mile a minute. So, I was really fascinated with Ella Fitzgerald, and that opened up a whole world of jazz, which continued to fascinate me. And then, on the classical side of things, I was always drawn to people like Leontyne Price, who seemed to have a great authenticity. Also Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, classic choices like that. And I was eventually then going to the opera and going to The Met in New York where I was, and seeing things, and being exposed to all different kinds of singers. But I took many turns, and so an artist who really inspires me, who I was exposed to many years ago, is Justin Vivian Bond, a cabaret performer, because the way that there's humor and the way that the humor then leads to great sadness, is something I think in Handel is very applicable. I mean, Handel writes opera seria with these lines of recit, which are too often interpreted as a straightforward thing, when really they're meant with a tongue in cheek, or they're quite hysterical. And smart directors and smart performers will find a way to make this sort of recit come alive and be very funny, and then two minutes later, you'll find yourself in a world of sadness for nine minutes. And I found that Justin Vivian Bond was doing the same thing with cabaret. So, I'm always looking for artists who can give me something.

Laura Lee Everett: Who are the folks that you look to today, in any genre, that pull that same sense of turn and style from?

Anthony Roth Costanzo: That's a really interesting question. I can say that I've been privileged to know and see a lot of work of Justin Peck. And at the ballet, I find what he's doing...he creates a visual world. He also creates a complete performance. And he, in addition to that, finds a way to market these things, both in his own presentation on social media, and in the way that he designs promotional videos, in the way that he talks about his work, in the way that he constructs something, and for me, he's a very complete artist. And that is, I think, essential in today's world. We can no longer say, "An opera company will hire me. I will learn the role. I'll go. I'll sing, and that will be my career". And frankly, if that's all that my career was, it wouldn't be very interesting to me. So, I'm looking to people who are engaging communities outside of their box, and seeing how that's working. I think Beyoncé does it incredibly well. And I think she changes herself constantly, and she explores different facets of her world and other people's worlds. I think Björk does the same thing. So, I'm looking for artists who are having success - there's such a stigma to the word 'crossover,' so I hesitate to use it, but in its purest form - crossing over into another audience, into another genre is I think the future, and cross-pollination, interdisciplinary collaboration, that's how we can move forward.

Laura Lee Everett: Let's talk a little more about that. Both you as a performer and that interdisciplinary sense, because so much of the repertoire that you have been doing, in particular in the last five years, has incorporated more and more different things. There's folks who would look at Julius Caesar and Prospero and Akhnaten and Nero and go, "Those are just bad dudes", and that's so not who you are. How do you do that? But then you look at then portrayals like Prince Orlofsky and Orpheus and the stage manager in Great Scott - totally different kind of guys. So, how do you immerse yourself in that vast range of characters, and what is it with the multidisciplinary aspects of some of those performances and productions? Certainly, the Akhnaten, which was a whole separate physical regimen, and the waxing. Talk about your preparation and how you get immersed in those, and what you see happening with the way those roles are being put on stage in the variety of productions.

Anthony Roth Costanzo: Well, there's a lot of preparation that one must do before they arrive in the room. And so, with a role like Akhnaten, I first looked at the score and the libretto, but then I was reading about where Philip Glass was in his career, in his life. He'd written Einstein on the Beach, he'd written Satyagraha; this was his third opera. So, I saw Einstein on the Beach and I saw Satyagraha; let me go back and listen to those again. And you see how the structure changes and what I imagine, and I could be totally wrong (although that doesn't really matter in this preparation stage), I imagine what he was trying to do, how he's trying to make his structure for the opera better, as he got to his third piece. And then, Akhnaten is in the whole opera. So, from Acts one to three, how do I reflect what his structural thinking is? And then what's the journey that I want to go on? And Akhnaten is this Egyptian pharaoh who was probably the first monotheist, and he destroyed an entire religion, essentially. Or, maybe he got a better one. I mean, there are all kinds of different ways of thinking about it. He also united upper and lower Egypt into middle Egypt, so there's a whole bunch of history. And then there are people like Freud who wrote books about Akhnaten that are not really based on the history, but are imagined and all kinds of different accounts of Akhnaten. So, I was interested in reading those, and I like to have all of that there, but I don't want to go into a rehearsal room with a director and a cast knowing what I wanna do, and knowing what the journey is. And in fact, I went into a rehearsal room with Phelim McDermott, who's a brilliant director, and he had researched a whole bunch of things I'd never looked at, like the Book of the Dead, which had rituals and all this stuff. But he hadn't looked at a lot of the Akhnaten stuff I did. So he, being an incredibly open person, said, "Well, tell us, the cast, about what you looked at", and he would tell us what he'd looked at. And together, we came up with - I mean, of course he directed it - but as a collaboration, it was a process of finding these rituals and finding them in this dialectic between good and bad that Akhnaten really embodies. And from that, we were able to create a whole show, that I feel is really exciting. Now, at some point early on, he said, "So, I want you to enter completely naked and with your head shaved, and your entire body waxed". And I asked an Egyptologist, and he said, "Oh yeah, the Egyptians, for them hair was evil". And they're actually hieroglyphs that illustrate this. And they would shave their heads and they would wear wigs and they would sleep in the wigs, but they would sleep on wood pillows so as not to mess up the wigs. So, I thought, "Okay, well, you know, if it's all historically there". And I said to Phelim, "Why do you want me to enter naked?" And he said, "Well, you know, this character's father's just died. His father's been a king, and now he's about to go from a teenager to a king in a ritual. And I want it to be like this rebirth". And that made sense to me. And he identified these four movement qualities that Chekhov's nephew, Michael, had written about, and they were, not to give away too many secrets, molding, flying, floating, radiating. And he explained in detail what those were, and we all did a bunch of exercises that revolved around these four different qualities of movement. Molding is like moving through the air as if it were a substance, and that substance can get thicker, and you can also mold without moving. You can look through the air as if it were a substance, and that alone changes your quality of performance entirely. So, all of a sudden, when I had to open this sarcophagus and enter completely naked and walk down a flight of stairs very, very, very slowly, completely naked, looking at thousands and thousands of people, I was walking through a substance. I was molding, I was going through air that was blurred. And I noticed when I looked, at the dress rehearsal, at the audience, and it takes me about three minutes to get down 12 stairs. So, I watched them. And if there was any tension, like in my shoulder, because I'm standing there completely naked and very cold, 'cause I have no hair on my body, if there was any tension, I could feel the tension in the audience, that sort of, "He's naked" tension. But if I had total conviction about it, and I looked honestly as if this was part of the ritual through the sort of blurred air, there was a complete acceptance of the stage picture. And I think that's what made it work. So, we found a way to make it not really sensational. It's really fun to talk about in a sensational way, but I don't think it is actually so sensational when you see it. You, of course, have this reaction, but it is part of a stage painting, in a way. But it took a while to be able to get there psychologically, and I also wanted to be in really good shape. So, I started a whole new fitness regime, sending electric current through your muscle that I found in London, and I've since opened a business in New York, believe it or not, of this fitness regime because it's unbelievable, and it transformed me in six weeks. It's called EMS. My company is called EPulse now, so it's wild what opera will do sometimes. But I thought, in a way, it was parallel to the ritual that was happening on stage: that I was gonna change my diet - not drastically, 'cause I didn't wanna sing badly. But be healthier, be more fit, and all those things. And then, the six hours that it took to remove all the hair that was on every part of my body was also a part of the ritual. And you do, when you shave your head - the thing Phelim said to me is "When you shave your head, and then we shave off with a razor all of the things, you will feel like a different person". And you do; you enter that stage. I mean, you walk around in life, with hats and feeling strange, but then when you walk on the stage, it feels like that's who you really are meaning to be. Because when I'm covering up my head, and then, I take it off, and people look at you like, "Is something wrong?" Or, "What's going on? Why have you shaved your head?" And you say, "Oh, well, I'm in this...", and you have to explain it all. But when you're on the stage, all of a sudden, this is what all of this is for, is to be this. So, you actually become yourself, as opposed to taking something out and becoming someone else. It's an interesting reversal that happens.

Laura Lee Everett: We clearly need to find more things for you to do, because you have time to start another whole business, and there's your dining culture, and a recording contract and all of these things. But it's exciting to hear you talk about that. And that piece was about your preparation, your collaborators' preparation and being in that great collaborative environment. Then there are these pieces and Akhnaten had some, but not as much as some others you've worked on, that technology has become a collaborator. Talk about what you're seeing with that, in particular, how that has been used in the baroque repertoire versus the contemporary repertoire.

Anthony Roth Costanzo: Well, opera's one of the first and most interdisciplinary art forms, because in its nature, the Camarata got together in 1599 and said, "We got music going on, and we got drama going on, let's put 'em together and let's do it with fashion, aka costumes, and let's do it with art, aka sets and architecture". And then classical dance, of course, came from opera and began in opera to a certain extent. (There was a lot of dance going on before that in a lot of different traditions). So, I feel now that technology is another discipline that we add, and that it must be a part of opera. And at times in contemporary operas, it's a part of the music in the way that they modify sounds, in the way that they use it to create different orchestral textures. But of course, the production is where it happens a lot. And so I've used, myself, in producing things, I've used projections in baroque opera as well as contemporary opera, and I think projections are often par for the course. But there are all different creative methods for incorporating that, that I think are really important to continue exploring. Because even now, when I go to see an opera that just has projections, I find it to be run of the mill. So, as technology changes, we have to explore. And that often means failing. I've done some operas that I can remember where technology has taken away from the opera. And I think that there's a fine line... I'm glad that I had that experience to understand where there was too much focus on the technology, and what was actually happening live felt nominal. So, you know, you have to find that balance.

Laura Lee Everett: What are the technological effects you have found most effective, or that actually enhance and add to the piece?

Anthony Roth Costanzo: I'm saying things that sound really simple, and they are really simple. So, I think even if they're recontextualizing a piece entirely, that is when the director has to look most closely at the text so that it all fits together and makes sense. I think the same is true of the technology. It doesn't work when it is just imposed upon an operatic piece. When there is something in the libretto, or the music, or the concept, or the psychology that inspires a projection, it is captivating. And when we did a production at Sawdust this summer, and working with Christopher Alden and Mark Grey, and trying to understand what their process was, we really wanted each visual scenario, which was a video design actually, that was being projected to come out of the psychology of the moment. And so it was very abstract often, and it wasn't necessarily literal, but it was very tied to psychology. And that made it somehow feel organic. I think when you say, "Oh, look, we can do this really cool thing, we're gonna put it here", the opera falls away and you watch just the technology. When it's tied together, it feels right.

Laura Lee Everett: Sawdust. We will now roll to you as producer. You curated programs there, as well as you as the curator/producer for the Orphic Moments. I wanna talk about the Opera Party, and Tale of Genji - three completely different projects that you were both the performer, but also the creator/instigator for those intensely collaborative and widely diverse projects. Pick your favorite of the three at the moment, and talk to us a little bit about it.

Anthony Roth Costanzo: I have to talk first quickly about how I first got a sense of why to do this, and how to do this. I was at Princeton University and our final project was either, you write like a 200 page paper, or you convince someone that you should do something else, which was what I wanted to do.

Laura Lee Everett: That's a shock.

Anthony Roth Costanzo: So, I'd been studying the music of the castrati and I found these forgotten pieces, some manuscripts that we had to transcribe, and I wanted to link them together into a pasticcio with spoken dialogue. And I wanted Karole Armitage, this choreographer, to direct it. I wanted James Ivory to make costumes. I wanted Andrea Branzi, an architect, to make sets. And I wanted to do it with the university orchestra. And I said to the university, "This is a great chance to have high caliber artists and students working together". And they said, "Great, here's a thousand dollars". And I said, "But I don't have to pay any of these people because they're all gonna donate their time, but we need to have real costumes and real sets, and we need to make this a real thing, and that's gonna cost $35,000, I made a budget". And so slowly, what I wound up doing was going to the English department and saying to the English department, "Look, in the spoken dialogue, I've read these books and we are referencing this style. And wouldn't you, chair of the English department, have $4,000 in your discretionary fund for the semester? And wouldn't you wanna be a part of this very exciting project?" And 11 departments later, we had our money. And I said to the dean of the college, Nancy Malkiel, at the time, "Listen, now we've got 11 departments, we've got famous artists, and we should be documenting this, because Princeton should put itself forward as a school that is devoted to the arts. I have an Emmy award-winning filmmaker, he can film it for $22,000", and she said, "Well, who will edit it and make it into a film?" And I said, "I can't tell you that right now, but I can say that we're gonna start rehearsal next week, so $22,000?" And she said, "Okay". And we did the performance, and we filmed it and the film director said, "You know, if you want this to go on PBS and be a 22-minute thing, you gotta go to Italy. You gotta film the places that castrati (sang)". So, I went back to the president of Princeton and I said, "I got a budget and it's $80,000 to finish this film". And she said, "Do it". And we did it, and it won a bunch of festivals and awards. And meanwhile, Karole Armitage, who had directed it, said, "You know what? I need an executive director for my dance company and I think it should be you". So I was fresh out of college, I needed a job, and in the two years that I was the executive director of her dance company, I raised $3 million for her and wrote grants. And I was not only the executive director, I was the development director, I was the press director, I was the marketing director, I was all kinds of different positions. But the education that afforded me was priceless, and together working with Karole and understanding how to do that, how to run a company, how to throw a gala, how to fundraise, how to deal with all of that was fantastic. So, now I can say when I went to National Sawdust and when they approached me, they said, "Do you wanna do a concert? What do you wanna do?" And I said, "Well, you're doing only concerts here, and they said, "Yeah, it's a concert venue". I said, "No, we can do an opera here, and we can do an opera where we serve food during the opera, with a full orchestra and a full chorus, and a set". And they said, "How?" And I said, "I think we can do it, but I need money". And they said, "Well, this is all we've got". And that was not enough. So, I raised the money. I chose people who I felt could do things for very little. I called in a bunch of favors from artists and singers and orchestra members and partnered with Manhattan School of Music to get an orchestra and a chorus and all kinds of things. But the feeling of it was very much a raw and vital sense of young people and old people and all these people getting together and making opera. And I think that's what was most exciting about it. And so, the question going forward is how do you then do that again? But do it in a more polished way, and then not make it feel staid or like, I'm going uptown, as it were, but have it be of a high quality. And can you ask the same people for money again, when you're not really a non-profit and you're doing things which are having an impact and people are responding to, and you're making art. But how do you continue to do that outside of an institution, inside of an institution, in ways that are compelling, with collaborators that you wanna work with, which ultimately is how all great art has always been made, is that people wanna work together and they work together and they make something great. So those are the things I'm trying to figure out.

Laura Lee Everett: For your next steps.

Anthony Roth Costanzo: For my current steps, and next steps, and all of that.

Laura Lee Everett: I wanna ask you about a particularly interesting piece of your history that I've heard you talk about a little bit. You're a cancer survivor.

Anthony Roth Costanzo: Yes.

Laura Lee Everett: Tell us a little bit about that diagnosis, treatment and journey, and how that's influenced the way you look at and focus on your art now and its place in feeding your soul.

Anthony Roth Costanzo: Yeah. When I was 26, I was in grad school at Manhattan School of Music, and my teacher, Joan Patenaude-Yarnell very uncannily, said to me, "Oh, you have a cold. Go to the doctor and ask them about your thyroid". And I said, "Why?" And she said, "Well, 'cause you're making a funny neck thing and maybe it's your thyroid". And I thought, (dismissively) "Uh". So, I went to the doctor and I thought to myself, "Should I really ask about the thyroid?" And as you do at the doctor, I said, "Well, I could". And she said, "It's fine. I don't think there's anything, but go get a scan". I got a scan, there was a bump. They said, "It's fine. Get a biopsy". I got a biopsy. It was cancer, and the thing about thyroid cancer is that it sits on top of your vocal nerves that control all your vocal function. The thyroid sits right here (indicates neck). You can see my scar there (lower neck) where they open you up and they have to cut it off, and it's like getting gum out of hair; it's not an easy thing. And if they nick a nerve in the wrong way... So, I found out that I had cancer the week I was gonna record a little one minute piece of sound for a fascinating publication called Visionaire, and they were publishing these vinyl records, a set of six, which you can still buy online - they're fascinating, with all different people from Liza Minnelli to David Byrne, to making one minute of sound, a hundred artists. And they'd asked me to do this, and I was so excited about it. And I scheduled a recording session to record with a lutenist, and I was gonna record 'Lasciatemi morire' (Let me die) by Claudio Monteverdi. And then I found out that I had cancer. I was gonna go to Duke University where my parents were, and they have a great medical center. And I said, "Okay, but I just wanna do this one recording first". So I made it, and it's on that vinyl record somewhere. And I went down, and had a lot of questions for the doctor, and ultimately he said, "Look, I know you're worried about the singing thing, but if we don't take it out, you're gonna die, so we're gonna do the best we can". And that's a good perspective to have, and my parents both being psychologists, was also very helpful in terms of making it into a really kind of great experience. I know that sounds bizarre, but we were together, we were very close, and it reinforced how important my family was to me. And we talked about a lot of things, and they made it sort of fun. And so it was not this thing that weighed you down. I remember being in that hospital room - you know, you asked, and I'm gonna tell you - where they monitor all the fluids coming out of your body. And so I got into this, like, as an opera singer, very competitive thing about how much water I was gonna drink. And I remember the nurse saying to me like, "What is going on?" But that was like one of the things that we did and had fun with. And so, opera is a constant state of emergency, as many people have said, and when that happens and when you're feeling completely overwhelmed, it's good to remember how a crisis can be something different, because you inevitably are living out a crisis, if not during every performance, at least during the run of every performance - of some kind. It's not necessarily vocal, it's sometimes psychological, it's sometimes dramatic or interpersonal. But when I came back to singing a few weeks later, it filled me with even more joy for it.

Laura Lee Everett: It's an amazing story, and it reminds all of us a) about life, b) about family and c) about what kind of energy you have as a performer, as a producer, as an artist as a whole, that you bring to everything that you do on stage and off. So, what's next for Anthony Roth Costanzo, and for opera?

Anthony Roth Costanzo: One question is harder than the other. I have a real opportunity, I feel, at least this is how I'm looking at it. I've just recorded this album for Decca Gold, and I didn't know what it was gonna be like to record an album, because again, it's more like the capturing thing of film, and there is editing involved and I listen to all these recordings and some of them just feel so perfect, and I hate that... Perfection is so boring. It's not human, it's not emotional. And I didn't want it to be that. And so this recording, I recorded in a way that felt authentic to me. And now seeing the machinery of the record company, the machinery of, well, who wants to buy a classical CD? And we're streaming it on Spotify. And here's a fun fact: a thousand streams equals one album sale. So even if 300,000 people have listened to a track, that means you've sold 300 albums. So, what is an album sale? Do we publicize it the same way? I'm not interested in money at all, but what I'm interested in is what is the impact of this music and how can I make it interdisciplinary now that it exists on record? And what are the interesting things to do with that? So film comes back into the picture. There's a lot of things that I feel I can put together. There are also really exciting collaborations that I'm producing, things that I'm excited to perform coming up. But the question of where opera is going is a very interesting one. And I think often people say, "Well, it has to change, it has to change". I don't think that it's important for what's good about opera to be different entirely. I think we should keep what we have that's great. I think what we have to do is creatively engage other people and other art forms and bring them in. And I'm never very articulate about saying exactly what it is that needs to be done. I'm better at being proactive and just doing it. So, I would say, I will answer your question over the next 20 years, in a few different ways.

Laura Lee Everett: Well, I look forward to seeing in action you and the response to that question, as I know that you will continue to do great and amazing things with dance, with opera, with theater, with food, with all of the above, and whichever company you take over next, maybe the world. I wait with bated breath. Thank you for what you do for all of us, and for sharing your evening with us. Thank you all for being here, ladies and gentlemen. Anthony Roth Costanzo.