This interview was originally recorded on February 26, 2018.
The Oral History Project is supported by the Arthur F. and Alice E. Adams Charitable Foundation.

Michael Fabiano, tenor 

Tenor Michael Fabiano has performed on many of the world’s leading stages, including The Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Teatro alla Scala, Vienna Staatsoper, Paris Opera, and San Francisco Opera. Renowned for his passionate performances and vocal intensity, he has earned acclaim for his powerful interpretations of roles including Don José (Carmen), Rodolfo (Luisa Miller), Des Grieux (Manon), Pinkerton (Madama Butterfly), and Calaf (Turandot), which he performed in a landmark production directed by Ai Weiwei. A 2014 recipient of both the Beverly Sills Artist Award and the Richard Tucker Award, Fabiano was the first artist in history to receive both honors in the same year.

Offstage, he is co-founder of ArtSmart, a nonprofit providing free voice lessons and mentorship to students in under-resourced communities across the U.S., and serves as Chief Strategy Officer for Resonance, a platform supporting creative professionals.

Transcript

Marc A. Scorca: I'm Marc Scorca, President of OPERA America, and really a pleasure to have the first Conversation of 2018 this evening with Michael Fabiano. We're so honored that he's with us tonight. Thank you so much for being here, and for taking time out of your very, very busy schedule. We did meet backstage for a couple of minutes to go over my questions and never have I had one of our guests be just so thoughtful about how to respond and how to shape the questions; it's just wonderful. So starting here, who brought you to your first opera?

Michael Fabiano: My parents. My aunt, my Godmother, Judith Burbank, was singing in The Magic Flute across the Hudson at the New Jersey State Opera in 1989. She was singing Pamina, and my parents brought me to see her sing when I was five. So that was my first opera.

Marc A. Scorca: And New Jersey State Opera, was that in Newark? Where was that?

Michael Fabiano: That was in Newark.

Marc A. Scorca: And what was your reaction to it?

Michael Fabiano: No clue; I don't remember it at all. I don't have a recollection of it. I just know going,

Marc A. Scorca: Were your parents music lovers? Was this an educational experience for you, or did they enjoy it a lot?

Michael Fabiano: Well, both of my parents pursued music. They are opera lovers. My whole family is musical in general on both sides. My grandmother was a classical pianist, my mother was a magnificent soprano, my father a tenor. I have people on both sides of my family, that music was in their blood, all down the lines of the tree. So, it's always been there. It just never really registered until I was really 18 or 19 years old.

Marc A. Scorca: In reading your bio, in high school, you were a baseball umpire.

Michael Fabiano: That's true, and in college too.

Marc A. Scorca: Do you still love baseball today?

Michael Fabiano: I'm a Yankees fan through and through.

Marc A. Scorca: Okay, good. I'm with you there. Does that skill set serve you today as an opera singer?

Michael Fabiano: Absolutely. You know, being a baseball umpire, one had to be able to be a very fair adjudicator, and look at things with a very clean and clear lens, and be able to handle lots of different and disparate people very rationally, meaning drunk parents that might jump over the fence, or players that might throw a bat at your head when you strike them out and still be completely rational and keep everybody calm and keep everything ordered. And so, being an umpire from the early age of 14 all the way to 25, might I say, has given me the ability to use rationale and pragmatism in how I pursue my career.

Marc A. Scorca: Wow. I mean, the spillover benefits of things that we do in life. Home plate umpire?

Michael Fabiano: It depended, but often, yes in the beginning when I was umpiring young games, but then it went all the way up into Babe Ruth League and other big leagues, and then there were three or four umps on the field, and so it just would rotate.

Marc A. Scorca: Through age 25? That's quite a stint, overlapping some with your musical training.

Michael Fabiano: Past when I won The Met, yeah.

Marc A. Scorca: That is absolutely fabulous. You said 18-19 was when opera sort of caught your attention. When did you decide you wanted a career in opera, that it was not just gonna be something you loved, but you wanted a career?

Michael Fabiano: So, when I went to the University of Michigan, I went with the instinct to go into business, or maybe law. It was kind of unclear. Most kids when they go to college, they usually have sort of an idea and then it might shift, or maybe they pursue that idea. My idea was that I was gonna enter, get an MBA, maybe get a law degree. I wasn't really sure which one, with the caveat that I was to study music lessons, that was one of the provisos that I was to do when I got into Michigan. I applied with extracurricular CD that I submitted as part of my application. And so I was taking lessons with the famous tenor, George Shirley - he still is my inspiration today - and George said to me, after three voice lessons, "Do you realize what kind of talent you have?" And I said, "I don't know what you mean". He says, "Do you know what kind of talent you have?" And I said, "No". He said, "You have a talent that most people don't have, and that talent requires an obligation on your behalf to the rest of the public to preserve the talent and give it to the public. And your voice is not yours, it's everybody's". And I have always thought since that moment about this (indicates throat) not being mine, but everybody else's, and it's my obligation to preserve it and protect it and share it as best as I can.

Marc A. Scorca: Were you singing in high school?

Michael Fabiano: I was. It was a Catholic school; it was a good school. There was a music program, but I was very active in high school debate, Mock Trial, Model United Nations and umpiring obviously in the spring, so it wasn't number one on my list. I would sing at mass. People always loved when I sang, 'Oh Holy Night' at Christmas Mass, which was great. I did it three years in a row, I remember that. But I never considered it a vocation, ever. Never thought about it like that.

Marc A. Scorca: And as a freshman at Michigan, you were able to study with George Shirley.

Michael Fabiano: Right away.

Marc A. Scorca: How fabulous that a freshman could study with him.

Michael Fabiano: It was fabulous to study with him, but there was something interesting that happened, my first semester. George gave me a rather low grade, my first semester. And most students in university know keeping a high grade point average, keeps them in contention for merit scholarships, other kinds of awards, opportunities. And his grade lowered my GPA significantly. And I was beyond furious that I got this low grade, because I'm diligent. I work hard, I admit that. And I went back to him. I said, "Why did you give me this very low grade?" And he said, "Because you can do better than you're doing now". And I said, "But so many of the other kids in our studio got A's across the board". "You can do better than you're doing now; they're doing their best". And I remember that, and there's a weird sense of equity in knowing that a teacher can see from the outside the potential of different students in different ways. And I had the burden of accepting that, and I did. And that made me work so much harder from that point, to the point where I was in the library at University of Michigan till midnight every night it closed, studying and learning whatever I could.

Marc A. Scorca: So that freshman first semester, you'd had three lessons. George Shirley says, "You have a gift". You went home for Thanksgiving, and say, "So, Mom and Dad, I think it's not gonna be business or law, but I wanna be an opera singer". It clicked that much with you, that quickly.

Michael Fabiano: Yeah. Right away.

Marc A. Scorca: And their reaction?

Michael Fabiano: I made a cassette tape of four pieces of music, something from the Messiah, a Tosti song, a Donaudy song. I don't remember what it was exactly. And I put the cassette tape in and played it, and my parents both started crying. And they said, "You're right. This is what you should do". And my father, who's a successful businessman in his own right, was always dubious about me studying music, up until really, I graduated college. And now obviously, there's not a lot of doubt.

Marc A. Scorca: You also studied with Julia Faulkner, and what I find interesting is that your bio states that you still study with her. And for someone of your accomplishment, what does study look like?

Michael Fabiano: So, studying with teachers and talking about teachers is a very big topic for all opera singers, and I think it's an open discussion that I'd like to have today. I've had a number of voice teachers in my career. George Shirley was my first. Then I studied with a man named Bill Schuman, for many years at the Academy of Vocal Arts, and past that. In that whole period of time, I knew Julia from my first year at Michigan, because I had studied in Italy all three summers that were in the years that I was at Michigan, and met Julia. And she gave me a lot of ground and base that I didn't really get from George, but George gave me other wonderful things; it's not like he wasn't terrific. Everybody had wonderful assets - Bill, Julia, George. And I also study with Neil Shicoff. I've worked with Jack LaVigni. Jack and Julia both use this facility by the way, often. I think teaching, in general, is something that's highly personal, and teaching to me is a marketplace. It's a marketplace where every idea that comes out of the mouth of a teacher should be valued. It should be looked at, like you would do at any open market, consider it and the discerning individual that's taking the information should either say yes or discard it. And the reason why I have more than one teacher - I have many, I work with many people - is because I am a discerning person. And it's important, as an individual, to be able to take ideas at their value and say, "I like this idea; it works". "I don't like this idea and it doesn't work". But still consider the idea. And many good professionals have great ideas sometimes that are in severe opposition to each other. So, artists have the burden of being discerning people about how to sing. And my insistence with younger singers is that they should try more than one teacher. They shouldn't stick to one methodology. They have to explore and understand and see what works for them, because one size fits all does not work for singing, ever. One size fits all cannot work because every throat is designed differently, physiologically. The cords come together differently in every single person's throat. Even if they come very closely, and in a very similar sense, there's always something different. The cavity of the throat, the condition of the tongue, how long someone's tongue is, their head, how much bone there is in the head, versus the cheeks: everything is different. So, every singer has the burden to figure out what works for them.

Marc A. Scorca: And every teacher teaches differently. Some take a very physiological approach, others use images. So, you really do have to choose the teachers carefully for that moment in your study.

Michael Fabiano: You do. And that's, I think, particularly the most difficult thing for young singers to do. Because what happens is, many teachers, often in academia, not ones that are independent - students are stuck with one person, and so then they are forced into a canal for four years, or six years, with one methodology, and it's very hard to break outta that methodology. And if it's not the right methodology for that throat, then the work that they have to do to repair that methodology is time-consuming, afterwards. So, singers have to be really critical of themselves at a very early age.

Marc A. Scorca: Does the same pertain to coaches?

Michael Fabiano: Same, but coaches have a different burden. Coaches can't tell a singer how to sing. They can just tell a singer what they hear and what needs to be better. That's the defining line for me between what a coach and a teacher is, because usually coaches are not singers. They don't know how the function really works.

Marc A. Scorca: Technique: who gave you the basis of your technique?

Michael Fabiano: It's a hybrid. In all fairness, George Shirley was the basis of how I sang. He taught me about talking. I mean, one of the things that I think is so important, and when I give masterclasses to students, is I always ask them to speak. Speak the text, speak what they're singing, because if they can't speak it, then that means the voice is stopping. I always want people to speak. That's something that's important to me when I sing. I speak what I'm singing; that's how I conceive it. That's George. Julia gave me a whole basis of breath. Bill Schuman gave me a whole concept of how to get my voice out there, and get my voice over the orchestra. And Neil Shicoff, who I've worked with, has really helped to streamline how I sing. Jack LaVigni, who I've worked with, has helped me figure out some more physiological things about how I sing, that I didn't realize even existed before. So, as I said, it's a marketplace. And I have gone into the market and I've picked my vegetables and the ones that I've wanted, and I've put 'em in the basket, and I've taken out the rotten ones and I've thrown them out. And I have thrown out the rotten vegetables, by the way, and some of them are now gone. So, I just want people to really remember that singing is a marketplace of ideas.

Marc A. Scorca: And of course, as you age and your body changes with age, singing changes...

Michael Fabiano: Absolutely. I think voices go in a six year cycle. I noticed a big shift when I was 24, and I noticed a big shift when I was really 30-31. And things just get harder and require a new sort of streamlining, and a new sort of evaluation of what works and what doesn't. And now, yeah, I'm older. I mean, people always say I'm young, but this is my 12th season of a professional career. And what was easy when I was in my 20's is no longer easy, and what is easy today never could happen when I was 20. So, it's interesting to just evaluate how things have changed over time and what I have to continually work on.

Marc A. Scorca: 'Cause you are so thoughtful and articulate about singing, I'm curious - an example of what you could do when you were 22 that you can't do today.

Michael Fabiano: I could sing an open-throated high C, or B, or B flat just going for it, way wide open and not worry about it, without really having it contained and streamlined. And it was exciting and thrilling, and people would say, "Wow, that's a thrilling sound. When I won The Met when I was 22, I sang wide open B flats. I did; I've listened to the video and I remember saying, "Those are so open". I would never sing them like that anymore. I can't even do it now. I can't even recreate that. But I can do it in a different way that also works, and that interestingly has more squillo and carries more, and might take on a different color. But that's just the nature of the beast; it changes.

Marc A. Scorca: And you keep studying?

Michael Fabiano: All the time. I was studying today for four hours.

Marc A. Scorca: Competitions: important in a young singer's career?

Michael Fabiano: No.

Marc A. Scorca: Why do you say no?

Michael Fabiano: Because, in my view, competitions are just really a way to collect money. This is not a disparaging comment. I think competitions serve a purpose, but they're not the most integral thing for young singers. And I was a beneficiary of wonderful competitions, The Gerda Lissner Foundation, the Loren L. Zachary Society, who gave me a wonderful opportunity when I was 23. I don't wanna disparage them, quite the opposite. I think they're wonderful, but they're not what's important first. What's important is that young singers learn how to sing.

Marc A. Scorca: Are the competitions data points in your analysis that if you're making the finals time after time, you must be doing something right? If you don't place ever, in four or five years of doing competitions, maybe I should find a different profession?

Michael Fabiano: I think there's some truth and some not-truth in that statement, because I think in the New York community, a lot of the same jurists are on a lot of the same panels for all the competitions, and so there's favorites and not- favorites. But then, there's also the case where there are really terrific singers. And when there are terrific singers, the talent rises to the top. It always does. The foam rises to the top of the pot, and the talent always comes to the top. And if it's there, you'll see it. And yep, for those talented singers, they should be rewarded handsomely, and more. I just find that what was more important in my early career was not the competitions, but the preparation to audition. And doing an audition for major theaters is wildly different than doing a competition - wildly different.

Marc A. Scorca: How so?

Michael Fabiano: So in a competition, the competitor has the burden of pleasing either three or five or seven people on a jury, or ostensibly a public, with a few pieces of music that are usually hits, that are really important, fun pieces. Usually Bohème, L'Arlesiana, things of that ilk that drive people crazy, and bring them into a fury. That's adapting to the jury, that's adapting to the room. That's called smart technique for winning competitions. But for auditions, young singers have to know what to be ready for, for a theater that's going to hire them. How they look when they walk on the stage, how their voice carries in a said theater, if the repertory they're singing is actually appropriate for that moment. And that's the huge delineation between a competition and an audition. In a competition, a singer can get away with singing whatever the hell they wanna sing, if it's exciting, because no one's really thinking, "Ah, this is for a specific opportunity at a theater. In the theater, it's gotta be extremely strategic, extremely strategic. From the first second, the footsteps on the stage, to the shoes, to the clothing, to the hair, to the way they present themselves, the way they speak, to the way they stand by the piano. Everything, all of it counts. Every minute counts. And here's a wonderful story for you. When I was 22, my manager sent me on a 22-audition tour around Europe. I went to Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart, Berlin, Munich, you name it. And one after another, I got nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, no jobs. And as like number 22 approached, it was even more and more depressing because I was like, "What the hell's going on?" I had won all these competitions the year prior. One year earlier, I had won a slew of competitions. And here I am not succeeding in a single audition. And it didn't make sense. And so I got really sick, and by the time I got to Paris, I did an audition at the Paris Opera on the stage of the Bastille. I walked on the stage, had my suit on, I looked nice, I had a black shirt. I never wear a tie in auditions. If you're a guy, don't wear ties; have your open shirt. I tripped on the piano and everyone laughed, and I started laughing, and so I just laughed at myself. And I sang "Questa o quella" first, and I cracked the B flat at the end, like a hyena. And then they asked me to sing Lucia di Lammermoor and I cracked the high note at the end, and I'm not known for being a cracker. I'm not a big cracker on high notes. And I laughed at myself, and I was like, (projects voice) "It was great seeing you all today. Thank you so much for inviting me. Have a great day and goodbye". And I left the stage. And 30 minutes later, I got a call from my manager that said, I got two jobs at the Paris Opera. And I was completely befuddled by that news, because it was the only audition that I could have credibly said, was absolutely terrible, a horrible audition. But the fact was, the auditioners appreciated the repertory that I presented to them, they appreciated how I dressed, they appreciated how I presented to them, they knew I had personality, and they knew that I had a cold when I was singing, so they assumed that it would be better. So they took a gamble. And so, the lesson in that moment was, "You just never effing know". You just don't. So, the point is, be ready. Be ready for any opportunity, and don't waste an opportunity.

Marc A. Scorca: It must have been great to be a tenor and get the Richard Tucker Award.

Michael Fabiano: Yeah, it was terrific. It was one of my highlights.

Marc A. Scorca: Could be a soprano or a baritone, but to be a tenor.

Michael Fabiano: Well, Richard Tucker is, of course, one of my idols as a singer. There are a number of roles that Dick Tucker sang that I don't think anyone else sang better. Don Alvaro in Forza del destino, des Grieux in Manon Lescaut. Most tenors don't even sing it, because they're so scared to sing it. And he sang it with gusto that no other tenor has ever really done - maybe Mario Del Monaco, but that's it. And there is a host of other roles that we can talk about with Richard Tucker in a league of his own, or a league of three, or two. But winning the award was important to me because I have a great reverence for him and his work. And it was a nice moment and nice to be honored in that way.

Marc A. Scorca: These days, there are so many singers who make a career of doing baroque opera and new opera, and your career is the bread and butter composers, not necessarily the bread and butter rep, but the bread and butter composers. What is it about the Verdi, the Puccini, the 19th century Italian repertoire that speaks to you so directly?

Michael Fabiano: First of all, I think we spoke a little earlier about knowing oneself. I know what works in my throat and I know what doesn't. And singers have to develop a really keen sense of knowing themself at a very early age, and not depending on others to know them. And that's a really hard thing to develop. It takes time; it really does. And when I talk to younger singers, I try to counsel them on this. I have to be my worst critic and my best cheerleader to survive. That's the reality. So knowing all of that, I know what works for me and what doesn't. I know that singing Mozart, for instance, I cannot hold a candle to other singers that have a more streamlined approach to Mozartian singing. And Mozartian singing requires an incredibly deft technique. I think about Margaret Price, for instance, who was maybe one of our greatest Mozartian singers of all time. And the reason that she was so great was because she was so technically astute, not because she was trying to become technically astute, she was. And that's why, for instance, Mozart is something reserved for very special people. Verdi and bel canto serves me the best, because at a younger age, and now my middle age, it allows me to have some élan, some ability to be free, but still be within a boundary. And sing big, and then come back to sotto voce and sing nothing, and then sing loud and big and do a big phrase, and then come back to something as tiny as five p's, when I need to, (sings) "Ah, sì! che feci! Ne sento orrore! Gelosa smania, deluso amore", for instance in Traviata. Or in Bohème, in the quartet at the end of act III, (sings) "Alla stagion dei fior". You know, those are moments when I have been singing and singing, and then I have the responsibility to pull it back to something as small as five p's. That's the kind of rep that suits me right now, though I will say that there's other repertory that I have not done that I'm excited to do - exploration of some of the Russian works and Peter Grimes, which is something I'd really like to do. And to be really frank, I'm looking forward to being able to do a couple of new works when they present themselves. It's just they haven't yet. So, when a composer presents something that is viable for my type of instrument, you better believe I'll go for it. A hundred percent.

Marc A. Scorca: A quote here, and this is you, "I'm very big on preparation. I take prepared gambles". What does that mean?

Michael Fabiano: Well, I sang Don Carlo at the age of 32. I accepted the job when I was 28. In a sense, many people would say, "How can a 28-year-old know that they can sing Don Carlo at the age of 32?" But again, a singer needs to know themselves. I know what works for me. No one else knows really what works for me. Every singer needs to know inside of themselves what they can do to survive every single day. And if someone else tells them, "Oh, this is for you, this is not for you, this is for you, you've gotta do this", then that person ends up becoming a sort of a 'states of affairs' where they're oppressed by others, and they're oppressed by others' opinions, and they actually can't negotiate on their own what really works. And I knew at that age, because I took it into a studio, and I worked on it day in and day out for two weeks, and knew even at the age of 28 that I was able to manage it pretty well, and in four years, I was fairly confident that I would be able to manage it even better, which I did. And there will always be detractors. There will always be those little assassins that throw the darts of poison and say that this singer shouldn't be doing this, or this singer's not singing well, but the singer is where the buck stops. The buck stops here with me, and I'm the one that makes the decisions about everything. And no one else does. And that's a relief. That should be relief for every singer That they know that no one else is controlling them. That it's everyone's own destiny. In our country, we have a country that individual rights are fundamental to who we are. And so I take that and apply it to my own work. I have a burden to my own work and to my community. And I know in myself what works and what doesn't.

Marc A. Scorca: So, you talk about preparation and prepared gambles. How do you prepare to suddenly sing the end of the act I Bohème Rodolfo aria half a tone down?

Michael Fabiano: You don't, and that moment was a surprise because I've never, in over 90 performances of Rodolfo, sung the aria out of key. And so when I heard the key change, Marco Armiliato and our prompter, all three of us heard it. We were all frozen for a second, and then scrambling, and I missed even grabbing Mimì's hand at the beginning of "Che gelida manina", because I was on the other side of the stage thinking, "Okay, how do I sing these five phrases differently to survive the whole aria?" And by the time that first G instead of A flat came down, I was about 20 feet away from Mimì, rather than holding her cold, freezing hand, which is hysterical if you think about it. But thank God not many people knew. And that was something that I reminded myself after. One must be prepared for all contingencies. And that was one I was not prepared for.

Marc A. Scorca: For the layman, does half a tone matter to a singer?

Michael Fabiano: No, not at all. In fact, in Puccini's letters, he said, in two different cases, that he didn't care what key the tenor sang "Che gelida manina" in, and a few other pieces that he wrote, because all he cared about was that it was sung beautifully. That's all he cared about. So, if a tenor opts to sing it in a different key one tone lower, even two, fine, if they sing it beautifully - that's the standard. And I have no beef if a tenor chooses to sing it in one or two tones lower, because they're taking an active choice, their own right to take a choice to sing it in a key that works for them, so they could communicate in that piece really terrific text and words, which is so important to that moment. Those two introductions, "Che gelida manina" and "Si, mi chiamano Mimì" are so integral to the whole plot of the story, and if a tenor's worrying about singing a note or two, well then lower it a half step, because what matters more is communicating beautiful music. In my case, singing it in the lower key is not about the high C or the B ostensibly, it's about all the notes in the middle. I don't care about the high note at the end. It's gonna be what it is. In the course of a night, a high note is what it is. It's good, it's bad. What matters at the end of the day is an arc of an entire performance. Does someone go from A to Z and give and commit to a story that really moves people? And singing, for me, that aria in the higher key, I'm more easily able to do it, because my voice feels more comfortable in it, just naturally.

Marc A. Scorca: When Eric Owens was here a couple of years ago, he shared with me how - I'll say - imprisoned, how cornered he sometimes would feel by social media and the commentary that goes all over the internet at the moment of a performance. And he was wrestling - he told me it was the broadcast of Götterdämmerung, and he wasn't feeling well. And he thought, "If I cancel, they'll say I'm over-singing. If I go on and don't sing well, they'll say I'm over-singing". Do you also just feel kind of cornered by the social media commentary that's there that night, the next morning?

Michael Fabiano: I think it's part of a game that we're in. I think that we're in a world now that is so integrated, that everything is live. Everyone is being watched all the time. 20, 30, 40 years ago, singers could go on the stage at The Metropolitan Opera and sing a run of, say, eight performances of Forza del destino, and often not be recorded unless someone had a sneaky mic in the house, and then later put it on CD or cassette tape, which we know exists out there. But they weren't held to account like singers are today, where everything is really live all the time, and where, at a second's notice, it can be on YouTube, and suddenly if a singer has a bad night, they're in trouble and their career is a disaster. But that's not the case. You know, careers are made of what I call peaks and valleys, and the goal of a career is not necessarily to just draw some sort of weird straight line, but to have a line that does this, (illustrates a rising line with occasional short dips) where it continually moves up, even accepting the fact that there are some valleys, that there are moments in time where yep, it's not as good. There are family problems, there's some issues, there's a cold, there's a few other things that happen. Life happens. That hits here (indicates throat) first, and the public should be more accepting of that, and often they're not. And so, to all my artist friends that have struggles, or deal with nasty feedback from people online, ignore it. It's just noise. It's just armchair quarterbacking.

Marc A. Scorca: You talked about going into the studio for the Don Carlo, and you spent a couple of weeks. You're taking on a lot of roles for the first time; you're thinking about more new roles. How do you prepare a new role? Where do you start?

Michael Fabiano: Great question. It depends on the title. It depends literally on the title. With La Bohème, La Vie de bohème of Murger, the play and then the book and other material. So usually, it's either subject material, a book or play, or a poem. Corsaro, which I'm gonna do, there's a Lord Byron poem about the Corsairs. So, I look at the subject material, and then I do what I would call a diagnostic test of the music. I just sing through the music as best as I can in a couple of drafts. Just go for it, just throw the spaghetti on the wall and see what falls and what sticks. And then I work piece by piece, dissecting it, understanding the theory behind the music, harmonies. I speak Italian and French and Spanish, so translating - I don't need to, it's real time for me. And with Verdi, in particular, he often uses things like the passato remoto, a weird past tense. So, I have to understand sometimes a little bit of why he's using that. And then I meld it together and I put it together, and ultimately I create what I do on stage.

Marc A. Scorca: Do you play piano enough to get yourself through the score?

Michael Fabiano: I studied the piano for 15 years. I'm not a great sight-reader on the piano any longer. I know how to bang the piano around, but it's harder for me to just play it consistently, but I know how to play it enough to teach myself music. But to be really frank, I have the luxury of having a magnificent coach named Laurent Philippe, who is one of my best friends and confidants, who is with me to help me learn what I need to learn. And I owe a lot to him for my success.

Marc A. Scorca: Memorization: do you just memorize it as you're going through this process, or do you have to do something special to memorize a role?

Michael Fabiano: I look at a page, and I usually have it memorized after two minutes.

Marc A. Scorca: Not bad; it helps. We're talking back in the green room a little bit about the fact that the life of a successful opera singer is a hard one. I've talked to many, many people here at the Opera Center, even. They're now teachers or they're doing something else, but as much as they had talent, airplanes, hotels just didn't appeal. I look at your schedule: London, New York, Los Angeles, Sydney. Where is home and how do you preserve a sense of home in your busy life?

Michael Fabiano: Home is where the luggage is.

Marc A. Scorca: That's hard.

Michael Fabiano: It's hard if you don't accept it, but if you go into the career knowing that that's the career you're entering, its not hard. And that's the pivot point that singers have to grasp at the beginning of their career. They need to make that active choice, that the life is one where they're gonna be on the move. And if they don't accept that, they should not enter into the career of opera, period; end of discussion. Because it's not worth the stress and the difficulty of managing and navigating a career like so. And I do my best to make home in the places where I work. So, wherever I am, I find the coffee shops that I love. I find the restaurants that I like. I find a gym that I like to work out at. I find all the things that I know make me comfortable in the vicinity of where I'm sleeping. I always make sure that I have a good bed, a good shower, good wifi, and a few things that are just essential to good wellness. And that's home. All I need is a couple of suits, a few pairs of shoes, a few shirts and a few trousers. I don't need anything else. What else do I need for?

Marc A. Scorca: If you take a month or two off, you're doing some role preparation, you're giving yourself a break, where do you go?

Michael Fabiano: In the last 13 years, it's been Philadelphia. I've owned a home in Philly, and now I'm engaged, and we live in Battery Park now. So, it's New York for now. Who knows where we'll be in a few years. And it's good to be in New York, because I'm working at The Met, but when I'm working, I'm working. I'm home, but I'm working. It's a different dynamic than just being home.

Marc A. Scorca: Right. Tell us about ArtSmart.

Michael Fabiano: Our foundation. So, me and a few of my dear friends formed an organization two and a half years ago called ArtSmart that provides free weekly one-on-one voice lessons to children in a number of cities across the country. And we conceived of this program because we saw two problems. Problem A was that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, under 2% of music graduates from distinguished universities every year enter into full-time careers in music. Which means that 98% of people that are graduating with degrees in music are not seeing the full dignity of their work valued. They're not having valued careers in music. So, the first question was, how do we help people like that, that are working really hard, graduating, going into immense amounts of debt in many cases, and ending up waiting tables, or temping, or doing things that they don't wanna do. And the second question we had is, we are watching arts programming being cut and slashed in states blue and red across the country, wherever you go, because it's always the first thing that's on the chopping block. People always think that culture and arts are the least important. And me and my co-founders, John Viscardi and Brian Levor, we all said we wanted to really prove that that's not the case. And there are lots of studies that have attempted to make this case, but there's never enough causal evidence to go to Capitol Hill and say, "Look, here's the causation. Arts does solve for X, Y, and Z". So, we merged the two, and we created a foundation where we were able to make higher distinguished graduates of high quality music programs, hire them at a respectable wage and place them into music schools that have little or no arts programming, and give children one-on-one weekly voice lessons. And we're expanding the program to roughly 11 schools, 200-250 kids next year, up from three schools this year. And what we're seeing is the rate of attrition, meaning kids not showing up, we're seeing every single child staying and coming to all their lessons. We've seen an average grade point average of the kids in our program go up 0.9 from a 1.8 to 2.7. We have been studying the behavior of our kids in our programs, having children going from having 100 detentions or suspensions in a year, down to one or two. And one would be hard-pressed to say music had nothing to do with that. In fact, I would argue that we are not just a music program, we're a mentoring organization. We're functioning similar to the way Eagle Scouts might, or a national debate society will. We're a community that fosters critical thinking, and accountability for kids to own their work and teach them how not to just be good musicians, but to be responsible for the great work that they're doing, at the behest of really wonderful teachers that care deeply about their kids.

Marc A. Scorca: And what you're doing is so wonderful, and it is completely consistent with the literature that we see in other studies about how the benefit of arts integrated into the school, graduation rates, grade point averages, just the social benefits of less detention, better behavior. Let alone the whole concept of practicing, of mastering material.

Michael Fabiano: Well, yeah, of course. Practicing. But one thing that we've been trying this year is we're having our kids interlink their studies in our class with studies that they're doing in English and Social Studies, for instance. So we're liaising with English teachers and finding out, are they teaching Romeo and Juliet or Shakespeare? And we're linking that to the music that we're having them sing in our program, so that there's an interdisciplinary work, so they can see the cross between the work that they're doing in the classroom and the work that they're doing in music. So that there's a marriage of two things. So that ultimately they have a even greater value of the music and of the studies that they're doing, not only in music, but in their English classes.

Marc A. Scorca: How do you select the schools?

Michael Fabiano: We have a list of roughly 150 schools around the country with a map of schools that have little or no music programming right now, and have 80% or more of the children on a SNAP program, or breakfast and lunch program. And leveraging my personal connections in the cities, and with city government, I have gone one by one and made relationships with a number of schools. Now in San Francisco, we've gotten the federal school district, fortunately behind us. Now we have four schools in San Francisco to be open next year, up from one, and the whole weight of this district is behind the program, which is a real golden kernel for us, because it means that the school district values the work that we're doing.

Marc A. Scorca: That's really fabulous.

Michael Fabiano: Let's see where we go.

Marc A. Scorca: Can people learn more about ArtSmart online?

Michael Fabiano: Artsmart.org. Very simple.

Marc A. Scorca: That's absolutely fabulous. You pilot a plane?

Michael Fabiano: I'm a pilot. Yeah.

Marc A. Scorca: When did this interest come to you?

Michael Fabiano: Well, I am a nerd, so I'm a big dork. When I was two years old, my aunt knows that I could name every car on the street. I can just look at a car and say, "That's a Chrysler, that's a Buick, that's a BMW, that's a Toyota, that's a this and that". And as I told you, I look at a page of music and I know it. I looked at a car and I knew it. I have that weird photographic thing. I don't know where the hell I got it from, but I have it. Thank you, God. And so my love for transportation just started at that age, and I had a deep love for cars, trains, and planes. And over time, it developed into my fascination with flying. And so I decided to become a pilot many years ago and really work hard on that. And it's been just a personal private goal of mine, and I've loved being able to do it.

Marc A. Scorca: Do you fly to gigs?

Michael Fabiano: Funny enough, now I do. I was in San Francisco in November, and I was having to commute to Los Angeles. So instead of going on a commercial flight, I was renting a Piper Archer or a Piper Arrow, and flying between two smaller cities to get where I needed to go, and it was much easier. No TSA lines, no taking my shoes off, none of that. And it costs less. So, that's all I have to say. To rent an airplane for a couple of hours is no different than flying commercially in economy class.

Marc A. Scorca: Are there other opera singer pilots you commune with?

Michael Fabiano: There are no other opera singer pilots I know.

Marc A. Scorca: Because the conductor, Michael Christie is a pilot as well.

Michael Fabiano: Daniel Harding is one. Leo Nucci is a pilot.

Marc A. Scorca: Wow. And for your career as a singer, does piloting have some spillover benefits?

Michael Fabiano: Huge. So, as I talked about baseball umpiring, when I was studying to become a pilot, we talk about in-depth study. Study is something I spend 60% of my time on, in life, in general. And so when I decided to go for it, I got my license, it took a lot of work. And then I started doing a lot of flying on my own, alone. And being up in the air alone at 9,000, 6,000, 10,000 feet, wherever it is, I am one with the elements and alone. And the only thing that I can focus on when I'm flying a plane, is flying the plane, and that's all. And the goal is to take the plane off, fly the plane, enjoy the ride, but stay focused on flying and not let my mind wander and then land, and then park the plane and leave. And it's brought me a lot of peace and comfort. And so what it's given me, is a sense that when I'm singing, my mind has to be devoutly focused on singing, and what I'm communicating that's right in front of me in the moment. And it took flying for me to really compartmentalize that idea. Yes, I've always been focused on singing before, but until I really had that big experience, I wasn't able to really distill it to that level. And so flying has taught me to become an even bigger steward of music when I'm in the act of it.

Marc A. Scorca: That's phenomenal. A last quote from one of your other interviews, "Safe never wins".

Michael Fabiano: No, it doesn't.

Marc A. Scorca: What does that mean?

Michael Fabiano: Well, taking the safe road is always easy, but it's not likely to give you the greatest margin for success. There's a great margin for error, if you don't do things that are safe. But there's also a great reward if you do it with the first paradigm that I gave you, which was prepared gambles: gambling, but doing it in a prepared sense. And so Don Carlo was not safe. I was exposed. People were scared about me singing Don Carlo. Boo-hoo. I know myself and singers need to learn who they are, and they need to learn it early. And they have to learn how to turn off the voices of despair around them, and learn how to trust their own instincts. And so safe never wins. My better line is "Never stand in line in life". I don't. I have done what I've needed to do to have success in my career, and that has meant singing the right repertory for me at the right time, studying excessively at the right time, not studying, taking a break when I needed to, and not when other people told me to.

Marc A. Scorca: Is that the advice you give to young singers?

Michael Fabiano: All the time. Do not wait in line in life.

Marc A. Scorca: Is there any advice you wish you had?

Michael Fabiano: That advice? I mean it.

Marc A. Scorca: You had to find it yourself?

Michael Fabiano: Yes. And the one great fortune that I had with George Shirley, was that he let me ride free when I was a young singer. He let me sing everything. I wasn't confined to the book of 24 songs, or singing Dichterliebe, or singing a bunch of Lieder until I was 22, until my head exploded. I was given the freedom to sing, because he and Bill Schuman, to his credit - both of them - believed that singers had to be treated like wild horse. They had to run free. They have to be able to go and go and go and go. And then a teacher's burden over the course of a career is to reign in the horse, so they're able to run down that straight path even better. If you constrain that young horse at a young age, it's gonna be hard for them to run the fastest down that track at a later date. And so George just allowed me to run, and I ran and yeah, I slammed into the wall a few times. You gotta slam into the wall a few times, to know how not to slam into the wall. If people shield you from slamming into walls all the time, then when you actually do it at a later date, you're screwed. And I can't advise more strongly for young kids to just go for it. Go. Don't stop.

Marc A. Scorca: Well, ladies and gentlemen, tonight, we have heard the extraordinary substance that is behind this wonderful artist. Please join me in thanking Michael Fabiano.