Steven Eldredge was a member of the Met music staff from 1991 to 2018.

This interview was conducted by Met music staff member Brad Moore on September 16, 2023, and edited by Brad Moore and Dimitri Dover.

PART 1

Brad Moore: Tell us about growing up and how music - and the piano - came into your life.

Steven Eldredge: That’s an interesting question because I didn't grow up in a musical family. My mother played the piano, but she'd only had 12 piano lessons in her life. She would play by ear. She would play old pop songs, with everything like in a stride piano, but she was quite good. And I guess as a kid, I was over there clinking on the piano and trying to imitate tunes and things. I remember my mother saying, Well, if you're gonna do that, you might as well have piano lessons.

BM: How old were you?

SE: Second grade - you know, I was not a prodigy by any stretch of the imagination. But I started piano lessons in 1962, and I never stopped, right through college and everything - but I wasn't particularly precocious in that, you know. I did this and I did that. But I had an unquenchable thirst for music. I wanted to hear it. I wanted to know everything or to hear everything.

BM: Just classical?

SE: Just classical. I was the only one in the house [who liked] classical music. I think my parents had a Frank Sinatra LP and a Mantovani or something like that,  Reader's Digest “Favorite Love Songs” or something. But I had Van Cliburn playing the Schumann Concerto and the Beethoven 4, and all of that.

BM: So how did you listen to all this? Was it on the radio?

SE: Oh, no - in fact, in my whole life, I've never listened to the radio, because I don't think I've ever actually had one. No, it was on a phonograph. I had a little phonograph in my bedroom. And I'm sure the records, by the time I got through them, were just scratched atrocities. In fact, I could sit here and list the records I had when I was in sixth grade. I could picture them. I had Van Cliburn playing Beethoven 4, Beethoven 5, and Schumann; Van Cliburn “My Favorite Chopin.” I had Arthur Rubinstein playing the Liszt Sonata and Schubert Wanderer-Fantasy. I had a Nonesuch set of the Brandenburg Concertos with Jean-Pierre Rampal playing flute. And then I had something that was one of the great discoveries and great loves in my life, which came about by accident. My mother asked me at Christmas, “What would you like to have?” And I said I would like a record of the Rachmaninoff Second. Well, I meant the Second Concerto. She didn't know that, and got the Second Symphony with André Previn and the LSO. And that piece opened up in my brain whole vistas of what really romantic and emotional music can be. It's still to this day one of my favorite pieces.  Oh! And I had Walt Disney’s “Great Composers,” where they had these little 10 minute blurbs - that was Bach, and that was Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven and Chopin and Mendelssohn and Brahms and Tchaikovsky. I remember that much.

BM: Did you listen to any opera during your…

SE: [emphatically] …not a note of it! And even when I was in high school, there were only two operas that I would entertain because I thought it was silly and just was not interested in it. The two operas that I would allow, as a snobbish teenager,  are still two that I love to this day, Pélléas et Mélisande and Boris Godunov. So obviously I like the “talky bits” [in reference to a famous and true incident in which a Contessa cancelled at the last minute a performance of Nozze at Sadler’s Wells. A replacement was found in Manchester and she arrived in London just in time for a brief rehearsal with the conductor before curtain. After setting a tempo for “Porgi amor” he played the chord for “Vieni, cara Susanna” at which point she said, “Oh no, luv, I don’t do the talky bits, just the numbers.”] … so there was no Traviata, there was no Bohème, there was no any of that. It wasn't until my first year in college that I discovered opera.

BM: Wow. So in high school, did you do other things like the choir and orchestra?

SE: I did. I did concert band and marching band because I could get away with never practicing the clarinet. I was the world's least accomplished clarinetist. I never took it home. I never practiced because I knew I would play fourth clarinet, which I would in concert band, and my part usually consisted of two notes, C and F. In fact, to this day when I hear the overture to Candide by Leonard Bernstein, I hear in my brain and feel in my fingers the clarinet part. Bop, bop, bop bop. There was no singing. And I just, you know, played the piano.

BM: What else did you do? What else were you interested in?

SE: I was interested in reading. I was interested in history. I did anything I could do to avoid getting entangled in sports. I was one of those weird kids who did not like games, did not like competition. I was pretty much a loner, I was into my own things, I was a complete Anglophile. I remember I had a cork board in my room over the bookcase and I had pictures from a National Geographic of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. All because I, you know, just love the pomp and circumstance and the Westminster Abbey of it all.

BM: Fabulous. And so what about college?

SE: I applied to several schools and got accepted at Cleveland Institute of Music. So I went to Cleveland in 1972. I was just not ready for it. I was not ready. I was not mature enough to discipline myself to do what I needed to do there. I was supposed to be a student of Victor Babin, who had been the head of school, and then he died the summer before I arrived. So I was part of the shuffle to move some of his students to his wife, Vitya Vronsky. But I was sent to somebody who was not a good match, because I had this desire and idea in my mind that I wanted to be the next Glenn Gould and play, you know, Bach and Hindemith and weird, intellectual things, and he wanted me to play Liszt and, you know, things were just yecchhh. So I didn't really do all that well in school that year at Cleveland.

But that's where I discovered opera - at the school. Well, actually the school dormitory, because one of my friends who lived in the dormitory, David Hall, was a complete opera fanatic. And he had just brought in huge crates of records and things. And it was through him I discovered Joan Sutherland singing Norma and Leontyne Price singing Tosca. And then what really changed [everything] is that the Met still came on tour to Cleveland. And David said, “You have to go with me.” He was going to every single show because they were doing a different opera each night. So I went with him to Tosca and I went with him to Carmen. And the Tosca! My first Tosca was Dorothy Kirsten and Franco Corelli. And then I went two nights later and saw Carmen with Horne and McCracken. Game changer. And also, at the Cleveland Institute at the time, all pianists were assigned a singer, to play for their lessons. That's how they got around having an accompanist for the studio, and it was good because it made you learn something other than, you know, Liszt études or something. I played for the Chinese bass Yi-Kwei Sze, and I also played for Eleanor Steber. And then I didn't return to Cleveland, because I just wasn't doing well. My parents just said, “Well, we're not paying for that if you're not going to….” You know?

So I came back to Sacramento where I'm from, went back to school at that university, and ended up studying with my old piano teacher who I always had. And I did the thing that children of the ’70s did, which was to major in changing your major. So I'm not one of these people who had a direct line and got a bachelor's and a master's in accompanying and blah blah blah - I was all over the map.

BM: What else did you major in?

SE: History, humanities? Then I finally thought, You're spending all your time in the music building, what is wrong?  So I switched back to music.

BM: And that took you through your bachelor's?  

SE: Yes. Back then, we were able to squeeze four years of college into about seven. Because, you know, it was the ’70s, or early ’70s. There was no rush. And it didn't cost much because I was living at home and it was a state university, Sacramento State, or California State University Sacramento as they call it now. And then I was getting very busy at the time - I played everybody's senior recital, on anything that can be blown, scraped, or twiddled on. I kept a whole bunch of programs. I don't have them anymore, but I remember once going through things and seeing that I had played the Creston Marimba Concerto. Now, do I have any memory of playing the Creston Marimba Concerto? No, but I was a good sight reader. And that's how I started playing for singers.

I was playing for a singer from Sacramento who was going into San Francisco once a week to have lessons for Leopold Simoneau at the Conservatory. And I went with her and would play for her. After a couple of lessons, he just asked me point blank if I was looking for a job. And I said, “Well, where?”, and he said “Here, as a staff accompanist.” So that's how I ended up at the San Francisco Conservatory in 1977, which is where I met my mentor Susan Webb and where I first played a professional opera. You know, where I first prepared an opera and played - it was Nozze di Figaro, and I played harpsichord continuo. And that was the beginning of it.

Susan Webb was the head of the opera department. Even though it's a small school, we had an opera department. She was also prompting at San Francisco Opera at that time. And we just became instant buddies. It came about not through music, originally, but through Russian history. I remember running into her in the faculty lounge where I certainly didn't hang out. But I went in to get a cup of coffee, and I had this book with me called The Icon and the Axe, which is a fantastic history of Russia, and she grabbed onto it and started just vibrating. And that's how it started.

BM: I’m so glad you brought her up. I was going to mention her later on.

SE: Oh, I always have many things to say about Susan Webb - her memory is very, very sacred to me.  First of all, she was the most single most brilliant person I've ever known intellectually. I mean, that was a mind. A mind like a steel trap and a mind 20 miles wide open for you know, experiencing things. She was just  so talented. So focused, so good with the singers - the singers loved her. And we just talked about everything - we shared so many interests. Both of us are very interested in any sort of Celtic thing - Irish mythology and Welsh mythology, all of that stuff. And we had a shared interest in Russian church architecture [lapses into thought].

BM: [here a story about Susan Webb leaving the prompt box to conduct the piano dress of The Gambler and everything going correctly for the first time…]

SE: She was brilliant. And she was the perfect combination of what I was just talking about earlier, about the difference between theory and practice. She knew so much, she could speak so many languages. The brain was phenomenal. But she had a great devotion to her work. And she said to me once, “the Met can have every ounce of blood they want out of me while I'm there - not after work.”

She also said something…she was talking about bad experiences, where you have a particular run of something - we've all had them - where it’s either the conductor, the director, or something that just sours you on it so much. She said, “I will not allow my interaction with him to ruin my relationship with this music.” I thought, That's very interesting. She said, “My relation to the score is still pure. Just because he's making it unpleasant, that experience cannot make me not love this piece.” I thought, That's the kind of armor you have to have.

BM: So you were at San Francisco Conservatory…

SE: … playing voice lessons, playing in the opera department, and playing recitals, recitals, recitals. In two years, I think I played seventy recitals. A lot, a lot. And that's where I learned the repertoire. I was the studio accompanist for Leopold Simoneau, who was so interesting to me. Talk about old school. He had retired from singing early. He said, “I don't want people to say, ‘Why doesn't he retire?’  I'd rather they say, ‘Why did he retire?’” And it was through him that I learned Mozart and Mozart style and French mélodies and all sorts of stuff. Brilliant. I still have a score of Idomeneo that he gave to me and inscribed. It's still over here on my shelf.

BM: So what happened next after that? Take us through your career.

SE: I decided while I was there that somehow I wanted to get in at San Francisco Opera. I didn’t want to spend forever in this little school. I didn't really have a plan. Most of my career was never planned - every time I make plans, they don’t work. And whenever I am just receptive, something falls in my lap and changes things. So I got a call in the beginning of summer 1979 from San Francisco Opera asking if I was free on a particular day because their pianist for something was out of commission and they wanted to know if I knew Così fan tutte.  I lied and said, Yes, I did, and of course I didn't. And I had no idea at the time that it was a rehearsal for an ensemble, there were six singers, there was a director, there was blah, blah, blah. I knew at the time that this was a secret audition that they were putting me through. And I played the rehearsal, and didn't even stop playing when a rat ran across the floor. We were at this place called the Annex, which had been a paint storage something - it was near the opera house and it had rats like crazy. And I didn't even stop. I didn't miss a beat. So after that, San Francisco Opera just started giving me a bunch of stuff. Would I like to play what they called the Brown Bag Opera? People brought their sack lunch. And so I started doing that. And I ended up, in one year, doing Brown Bag Opera, the Affiliate Artist program, Spring Opera Theatre at the Merola program, and finally, working in the fall season. So I went from not working in San Francisco at all to working at San Francisco Opera about 75 hours a week.

BM: Wow. And so how long were you in San Francisco? I mean, at the opera.

SE: I was actually at the opera for a very short period of time, from ’79 through ’81, but very, very, very, very, very busy. I was the busiest pianist at the San Francisco Opera. I was a young kid. I was 25-26, you know, and I was literally learning in the room. You know, when they say “sink or swim,” I sometimes think that is the best way to learn this business, because the opera business is not calm. It’s not like, you know you have so much time to prepare this and you do that - you have to deliver right now. And you have to know what you need to deliver and what you don't need to deliver. That's how you learn.

Kurt Herbert Adler, may he rest in peace, was the great director of that great company. He was of the old school from Vienna -  he didn't want to entrust calling the curtain and light cues to a non-music person., i.e. the stage manager whose job it is. He insisted that a member of the music staff do it. Light cues, curtain cues, all of those cues. Well, guess who did it? Me. With no instruction. I had like 10 minutes of someone saying this is what you do. I didn't know what I was doing. And I remember the first thing I had to do was to call not a dress rehearsal, but something close to a dress rehearsal, for Simon Boccanegra, with the director Sonja Frisell screaming at me because I was you know, screwing up the light cues right and left…but I learned very, very, very quickly how to do it. And it's so cute - in San Francisco we didn't have a closed-circuit TV to watch the conductor. To see the conductor if you needed to, honest to God there was a brick - because I was sitting down in the side of the proscenium arch on the right side, in this little chair with a little music stand -  there was a brick in the wall that had a handle on it. And you would pull it out like a shoebox and look out at the conductor to see how he was doing the bows and things. That's how you would call the the bow lights and everything. And then you would put it back in. It was so high tech. It worked, but it was just like Ugghh.

In that 1980 season, which was Kurt Herbert Adler’s penultimate season, he had pulled out the stops with what he was going to do and who he was going to hire. I remember that season I did lights and curtains for Samson and Delilah, Simon Boccanegra, the old Chagall Magic Flute from the Met (which had more cues than God in it), Jenufa, Arabella, Cav/Pag, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Traviata, Don Pasquale, and something else.

BM: And did you play rehearsals that season as well?

SE: Not many. I was doing everything else that they wanted. But I was playing ballet rehearsals. Occasionally I would be called into do something, but I was always the fill-in person. But at the same time that I was doing performances every single night, I was out in the daytime, playing these Brown Bag Opera things in which I had chosen the singers, chosen the repertoire, put it together. So I was just insanely busy, and I loved it. Loved it.

BM: And you must have met some colleagues during those years that you ran into again over the years - singers and conductors. Who was there with you during those years in San Francisco?  

SE: That’s interesting. Well, I mean, some of the great singers, of course, I ran into again at the Met - Luciano [Pavarotti] and Kiri Te Kanawa, those people. I'm gonna have to come back to that question to remember who my colleagues were - of course Susan Webb, who had moved on to the Met. Hmm…I don't know. I don't know how to answer that question. Because when I came to the Met, it was such a new volume in my life that I kind of forgot who had been at San Francisco as far as conducting and all that.

BM: So after after the ’80-’81 season in San Francisco, what happened?

SE: Well, here's the black mark on my story. I had a falling out with the San Francisco Opera because I had been promised something, and they reneged on the promise. They were starting this experimental festival season that had four operas.  They promised me that I was going do The Coronation of Poppea, and they didn't offer me anything. Kurt Herbert Adler said that they wanted someone with more experience. I thought, Well, wait a minute, who's had more experience in this actual theater? I know how it works, I know how it runs, I know the technical things. And so I quit. And I just said, I don't know what I'm going to do. But I'm going to go back home to Sacramento and figure it out, if I have to change my career path, because I will not be treated this way. You know, the arrogance of youth and all.

So I left San Francisco and moved back home. And then that's when I started getting regional jobs. I worked at Des Moines Opera, I worked at Sarasota Opera, I worked at Santa Fe Opera. And that's where I met a lot of singers who lived in New York City. I mean, not famous singers, but students and such - aspiring singers - and they all said to me, "You need to come to New York. That's where you can work.” So I finally did go to New York in 1983, and that's when that chapter started.

BM: So you came to New York as a freelancer without a big gig.

SE: With nothing. I came to New York with a suitcase, a few thousand dollars in my pocket, and lived on friends’ sofas. And pretty soon I became very, very busy with auditions and coachings and things. But even that wasn't what I wanted. I really wanted to be back in the theater again. And at that time, the Met kept their music staff small and concentrated, nowhere near the size it is now - it was maybe 12 people or something. So I was here through the whole ’80s doing auditions at CAMI, auditions here and there, auditions, auditions….and I would play some recitals - I played for Alessandra Marc, and I played for Kurt Ollmann, and some people like that.

Finally, in 1991, Craig Rutenberg contacted me and asked if I would like to audition for a job at the Met. At the time I didn't know if he meant for a position at the Met, or for a particular thing. So I went to the Met and I played an audition for him. I played and sang bits of Pélléas, Otello, and Rosenkavalier, which was certainly not my repertoire - I've never done it since. But he said, “That's all very good. Play me something you really love.” So I played and sang through the whole love duet from Butterfly. And from that, he hired me to do the world premiere of John Corigliano’s Ghosts of Versailles. That was my first thing at the Met.

I remember going to the Met library, getting my score, coming home, opening it, and I think I burst into tears. I just thought, This music is impossible. I can't read it. I can't understand it. What am I going to do? This audition was in the spring and we weren't starting rehearsals until late October, and I just glued myself to this piano with that score. And it was terrifying. Even once I got there, it was terrifying. It was never a piece that any of us felt like we knew backwards and forwards. It was just like - oof, oof - skimming on the ice, as it were. But you know, it was fascinating to show up and play for Jimmy [Levine] and play for Teresa Stratas, and Håkan Hagegård, and Marilyn Horne, all these people. But it was an opera where, once it was over and I did it and had done my debut, I said to myself, Never again. Well, of course it was done again. I had to learn it a second time.

That's how it started, and then the next season they rehired me to do the world premiere of Philip Glass’s The Voyage, and these are the sorts of things that are completely out of my… you know, I'm a Butterfly, Turandot, Rigoletto person, not those - but I did them. And the season that we did the Philip Glass, something happened to one of the pianists who was playing Tales of Hoffmann - he got sick, or he had an injury or something, and they asked me if I could play Tales of Hoffmann. And I said of course - I didn't know Tales of Hoffmann, really. But I learned it. After that - my third season, the season that was beginning in 1993 - they hired me for six operas.

BM: Do you remember what they were?

SE: Well, I remember the biggest, which was Les Troyens, another one where I thought I was gonna have to just stab myself. But I did it. I learned it. I played it. And Figaro, which was my first time playing harpsichord in recitatives at the Met. I'm sure there must have been a Bohème in there somewhere because there was always a Bohème in there somewhere. Gosh, that's a funny question. Not important now, but it was a big, big chunk. And then I worked there every season thereafter.

BM: And when did you become full-time?

SE: That I don't quite remember. I was kept as part-time, working one week short of a full-time season, for years. And then finally, in the mid-’90s, I went to San Francisco Opera for three summers as the master coach for the Merola program. During one summer they started making overtures to me, wanting me to come and be the music director for the Adler Fellows program. And I really was considering it. I guess there were phone calls back and forth between San Francisco and Ken Noda at the Met, and therefore John Fisher at the Met. They were making overtures that they wanted to bring me to San Francisco. And so all of a sudden, I get this message from Sally Billinghurst offering me a full-time position [snaps fingers].  So it was simply fate. That would have been ’98, I guess…

PART 4

BM: So - your life after the Met. What do you listen to? Do you go to the opera, do you go to concerts?

SE: Well, I go to many, many, many concerts. I go to practically zero opera. I went last year to the Met for the first time since 2017 and saw productions of Dialogues of the Carmelites and Falstaff. And that convinced me that I perhaps will begin to go back to the opera. I'm going to the dress rehearsal of Dead Man Walking next Friday. But mostly I go to piano recitals, chamber music concerts, and I love to go to organ recitals. What do I listen to? I listen to string quartets more than anything - I’m a huge string quartet person. And I think nothing of going through all the Haydn quartets, and then all the Mozart quartets and then all of the Beethoven quartets, the Schubert, all of it. I love it.

BM: You’re an encyclopedic reader. I remember when you told me that you were reading all of Trollope, and that you had read all of Dickens.

SE: I’ve read all of Dickens, and read all 47 Anthony Trollope novels.

BM: …and Zola and Balzac. I mean, there are so many things I have read in the last 20 years of knowing you that I never would have read, just because you made me realize that normal people can read these things for pleasure.

SE: Yeah! People always say, “I couldn't read that.” And I say, “Why not? Other people have!” You know, it's just a book.

BM: Right. Ulysses - I had such a fear of Ulysses.

SE: You know, it was Jim Utz [a member of the artistic administration at the SF Symphony Orchestra], who actually had me read it. He came to New York, we had dinner, and I had never met him, I just knew him from Facebook, and he gave me a copy. He brought a brand new copy of Ulysses. He said, “Just read it. It’s a novel.”

When I was a kid, I had this weird goal…. I'll tell you what happened when I was in junior high school. We had this free study period in the library before school started, and you could actually get credit for it. And our library had a set of Grove’s Dictionary. I didn't know what Grove’s Dictionary was, and at that time I was really into Haydn, I loved Haydn. So I looked him up and saw that there were about 120 pages on him, and that the catalog of works went on for about 40 pages - just everything he had written. I thought to myself, “I want to hear all the Haydn symphonies. I want to actually hear them all.” Well, then later the Dorati recordings started coming out and I collected all of them, and I’ve heard all of them quite a few times.

But I have this weird desire, which can never be fulfilled, to know everything. At least read it and hear it and see it – just because I want to put more pictures of the big puzzle together, the big puzzle of what our cultural heritage is. That's why I read so much. This year already, I pledged on Goodreads that I would read 30 books. Well, I've now read 57 and it says, You are 91% over your goal! And I read lots of books on religion, and lots of books on philosophy and history. I'm working my way through all of Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization. But now I've discovered Harry Potter, and that has changed this old man's life. I'm reading Harry Potter in a most voracious fashion. I cannot get enough of it. I’m at the next-to-last of the seven books and I love it.

But that's the thing about retirement, it does give me a chance to read - and having had all these problems that I've had with my legs, and being in the hospital for a long time….When I was the hospital for two months, I read War and Peace again for the fifth time. And I read all of the Greek tragedies - all 40 extant Greek tragedies, nine volumes from University of Chicago Press. I do not watch TV - I got rid of my TV and I just don’t watch it. So I'm not up on whatever the next hot Netflix thing is…. I’m more interested in what Thomas Merton wrote, and things about St. Thomas Aquinas, and this and that.

BM: You were always a lifelong science fiction fan.

SE: I was. I haven't read science fiction for a while. But yeah, I used to be a huge science fiction and fantasy fan. Loved it. I have to be very careful with it now, because I can easily get sucked back into wanting to read only that kind of thing, and I am too strict with myself these days. Because I actually have reading programs that I've made for myself that I want to read, you know, this in that order, and I kind of stick to them - trying to get the education that I didn't get when I was wasting all that time not getting an education…

BM: …your seven year-bachelor’s…

SE: Cram four years into seven [laughter].

BM: You're definitely the most autodidactic person I know.

SE: I am an autodidact. That is the word for it. You know, why not? As far as we know, you only get this one time around. Grasp all you can grasp. For me, it's not just about entertaining yourself and being distracted watching TV shows. You know, I'm going into my 70s in a few months, and even now, there’s so much still to do. And, you know, was it Pablo Casals? They asked him why he was he still practiced the cello two hours a day when he was 88 or something, and he said, “because I think I'm improving.” So there, that's my final statement. I'm doing it because I think I'm still getting better.

PART 3

BM: Talk to me about coaching.

SE: Well, coaching is an interesting thing, because there are different schools of thought about it. First of all, I think the most important thing - when you're working in an opera house and you’re assigned to coach somebody on something - is to understand that you do not have unlimited time. You have maybe, if you're lucky, three hours, three sessions to work. So are you going to nitpick every single 16th note, or this or that? You can't, really! But what you can do is find a way to help them give a better performance of the piece, or help them just sing it, so they can get through it.

I think that I was kind of popular with a lot of singers because I have a very vocal ear. And I would suggest, you know, tweaking this and that, but I was not one of those coaches that I call The Score Police. Now there are some, and I defer to them, who can listen to a whole rehearsal and tell me that someone's sung a 16th note instead of an eighth. I didn't hear it, and neither does the audience. But the audience can certainly hear if you're singing flat, or if you're consistently running out of breath in phrases, or whatever…

So a lot of coaching is psychology. I realized that I was working with a lot of people who were being put on the spot, either through their own negligence - because they hadn't bothered to really study the music - or because they were going through some problems, personal problems, vocal problems, or whatever. I realized that sometimes you're dealing with some very fragile people, and that to go on the attack is not helpful. And sometimes what you're really doing is a kind of vocal and emotional triage. You know, you're preventing them from completely falling apart. And when you can do that successfully, you get a singer’s trust like crazy. And then you're the one they trust to go through the parts with. I was that way with Karita Mattila. She started using me every time she came to the Met. Sometimes she had to sing at a Guild luncheon, or this or that. I asked her, “Karita, why do you always ask for me to play?” And she said [imitating her], “Because you keep me calm.”

So I think, in many ways, that's what I was as a coach - the calming mechanism for some people. And I’m not gonna name names or anything, but I did help a lot of people get through shows that would have been rough riding for them, and turned out not to be - in fact, that turned out to be triumphs for them.

BM: So when coaching in an opera house, we have to bear in mind that we don't have unlimited time to run through the roles. How does it differ when you coach at home? Do you think you listen differently?

SE: Oh, when I coach at home, it's absolutely different. Because I want right then to get the things right that I want to be right. Then I become very fussy about rhythms and upbeats, and this and that, because I know that they're gonna come back, and I also know that they don't have to sing a rehearsal tomorrow afternoon. Right? So that's different, you know? And the people I work with at home are often on a different rung on the ladder of career development, so they're not under that kind of pressure.

I'll be quite honest with you. I think that one of the reasons why I was thought very highly of at the Met by certain conductors and directors was because I didn't lose my cool. I only lost my cool one time at the Met.

BM: From what was that?

SE: That was the time I was high on prednisone and attacked the cover conductor in the middle of rehearsal, started screaming and swearing at him.

BM: Oh, my goodness.

SE: It was Faust - I think it might have been the garden scene with the Quartet. He was doing all sorts of subdivided cadences and stuff that the conductor was not doing at all. And he would do it while I was playing, and I was planning on saying, “No subdivide, no subdivide!” You know, because that's not what’s happening! And so finally, he just he started making 16ths - “t-t-t-t” - and I stopped playing, threw my hands up, and said, “God. Dammit! Can you do one fucking bar that doesn't have a fucking subdivision in it? Why can't you do what the conductor is doing? This is bullshit, this is ridiculous! I look at you and you’re doing fucking 16th notes. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Everybody was there. Peter McClintock was the director, Jane Klaviter was the prompter, all these singers and all these other people were there, and they're all [horrified face] [laughter]. I was in a ‘roid rage and now I understand what they are. When they say you see red - I did, I saw red! I was actually seeing red through my eyes. I couldn't stop. I cussed a blue streak for a good minute. And then I just stopped and sat down, and said, “Fuck it.”

Such silence in the room. Because, you know, everyone thinks Steven Eldredge is so, you know, nice and everything. And Peter McClintock goes, “I think we'll take our break now.” [enormous laughter]

This was in the C-level stage. I was still sitting at the piano and there was still steam coming out of my ears and I just thought, “Oh my god, you just got yourself fired.” But no. Because you know, the one thing that annoys me is cover conductors who think it's their chance to do the piece the way they want to. Well, that's not helpful. It's not helpful for the singers, if you start to inculcate into their ear a slowing down where there's not going to be one. Your job, I'm sorry, is to mirror the conductor - you’ve got to do it.

BM: You’ve taken me right to my next topic. We all learn to separate wheat from chaff, and to filter what works from all the possibilities of things that one might do. In the course of your career and your experience, you've encountered a lot of colleagues.  What are some misperceptions that you think people have, that would be helpful for them to disabuse themselves of?

SE: Are we speaking to people in our milieu - pianists and things?

BM: Sure, we can start with pianists.

SE: The first thing that I say, and I will say it forever, and I don't care who doesn't agree with me: It's not about how much stuff you can add to the score that the orchestra is playing - this little lick or this little that. And yes, sometimes if, you know, the piano score has a whole beat where there's nothing, but there's actually a chord there, then you must play it.  But I mean, adding all these noodles and toodles - it never sounds good. Because it's all in one kind of timbre - it’s a piano - and it just becomes mud. The singers can't hear what they need.

As the years went by, and I had more and more success - I did 75 operas at the Met, I counted one time - I started to become reductionist. I thought, We don't need all that. We need a very clear left hand - very clear - because that's what how a singer is going to ground themselves. And you need to hear what the Germans call the Hauptstimme, not - what is it - the Nebenstimme. The Nebelstimme, the fog [laughter]. You know, I heard some of my colleagues, bless their hearts, who were just desperate to play every single thing they could possibly add into the score, to prove that they had studied the score. But what they were playing sounded terrible. It just sounded like a bunch of muck, and it wasn't clear, and because of it, the sound was not beautiful. They were not making a sound that was beautiful and encouraging the singers, they were not giving the singer a cushion for them to sing beautifully on. If it’s an ugly, jabby cushion, they’re going to start to sing ugly and jabby.

So you know a lot of my scores have lots of extra cues that I’d written in back when I believed all that, and the score is ridiculous looking. If I played it from now, I would just ignore all that nonsense, and just play what they put in the piano reduction.

BM: Yeah, I remember Jimmy [Levine] telling me one time that he didn't understand why everybody had to carry around Bärenreiter and write extra things in, because he learned all of his operas from the Schirmer piano-vocal scores, and that was perfectly fine.

SE: That’s right. That's right. Because it is not your job…. Well, this is another thing where I'm gonna say my own opinion, and here it is: I realized that my job was not to recreate the orchestra all the time. My job was not even to make the conductor happy. My job was to help the directors and help the singers in their rehearsal to put the thing together.

BM: Yeah, I remember when I first met you, and had finished the young artist program, I got my first music staff contract at the Met and was very proud of having a contract that said “Assistant Conductor,” because we still had a “Rehearsal Pianist” tier on the staff at the time. My first contract had been a Rehearsal Pianist contract and then when I finished the program, I got an Assistant Conductor contract...

SE: …the big-boy one…

BM: Exactly. And I was talking to you about something - about the conductor this and the conductor that - and you said, “Darling, the only two people that are necessary to make an opera happen are a director and a pianist, and you don't work for the conductor, whatever they call you. You don't work for the conductor, you work for the director.”

SE: Exactly. And I don't know, I might be the only person that thinks that way. But that came from years and years of experience. Sometimes to the conductors I just want to say, “Please go away. You know, don't give me cues that I'm not going to play.”

BM: Any other advice for younger colleagues that are starting out at this?

SE: Yes. Know the repertoire. If you haven't done your Carmen and your Butterfly or whatever, you know, learn the damn things and listen to them. Get them in your ear. Don't let don't your whole repertoire be only what you are playing.

I'm now going to make my great confession. In your career as an opera pianist, you don't choose the opera you're gonna play - you don’t!  You fill in the slot. So the one standard opera in my entire career, except for that one rehearsal with a rat, is Così fan tutte - somehow I just never got hired to play Così fan tutte. I did hundreds of Nozze di Figaro, I did lots of Don Giovanni. I did lots and lots of Magic Flute and Abduction. But I never played a note of Così fan tutte, except that one rehearsal, all the way up to the time I retired. It's so funny. If I tell people, they ask “How do you not play Così?” And I say, “Because nobody asked me to. That simple.”

I did do the Met premieres of, you know, Stiffelio by Verdi and the Busoni Doktor Faust, but I didn’t play Così fan tutte [laughter]. I think I jokingly said once to the Rehearsal Department, “Don't give me Così, because I don't know it.” I mean, of course I know it, but I've never done it. But you know, you don't really know it until you've gone through the first few rehearsals with a conductor and actually realize that you can do it and follow it. Otherwise, you're just fooling yourself. Which is why always, even into my last season, if I was playing an opera for the first time, I was very nervous. The first couple of rehearsals, I thought, “Oh, geez. What's gonna happen?” You know, the first time I did Werther, I thought, “Oh, my God, this is hard.” I was fine. But you know, when I finally had gone through the whole opera with Ed Gardner, I thought [relieved sigh]….

BM: Now, how to say this: your time at the Met ended before you would have planned.

SE: Absolutely - it was not what I planned. I had thought that I would go on for another…maybe three years - you know, retire at 67 or so. But I had a bad accident that put me in the hospital and put me through four different surgeries. So I was out on sick leave for a whole year. I was at the end of a Met season. I had three things left to do for that season: we had the gala for the Met’s 50th anniversary at Lincoln Center, and Bobby Morrison and I had prepared all the singers for that. And I had my last two performances of Don Giovanni at the harpsichord. Then I had this accident. And thank God, Robert Morrison, my dear colleague, had been assigned all the keyboard duty on this gala - you know, the piano in the orchestra, and the harpsichord - because that would have been a mess. And I remember calling Bryan Wagorn on the phone from the emergency room at Mount Sinai at midnight, saying, “Honey, you’re going to have to play these last two performances of Giovanni.”

I went home one Thursday afternoon after a rehearsal - I remember the last thing I played was the Filippo/Inquisitor duet from Don Carlo with Yannick, and he gave me so much praise about how I did, I was so pleased with myself - and then I never went back to the Met. They had offered me a new contract - this is after a year of not really being able to play the piano - and I just couldn’t, because I couldn’t even sit at the piano with my leg still in a brace and all that. I started preparing the season, and my first thing was Fanciulla. I just thought - I got through a half hour - "I am exhausted, just exhausted, I don't have the strength that it takes anymore.” And the job takes some strength, to sit there all day long and play those scenes over and over and over - the sheer physicality of it. And that's when I thought, “I wonder if I can retire?” I remember going to the HR department and saying, just because I had never checked, “I just want to check - when can I retire? And he goes, “Let me check…[computer keyboard sounds]…oh, last February.” I said, “Does that mean I can retire right now?” He said “Well, yeah.”  I said, “Well, what do I have to do?” He said, “You have to sign two forms and talk to your supervisor.” And so I went up to John Fisher and said “Oh, John, by the way, I'm retiring.”

So I never left with any kind of fanfare. Not that I wanted a fanfare, but I never left with any kind of recognition from anybody that I had retired. I just disappeared and didn’t go back. I was two years short of getting my Cartier watch. I would at least like a plaque or something that says “Also Ran.”

BM: “Participant”

SE: [laughter] Yes. “He only did 75 operas here.”

BM: Do you have any advice for people on the music staff based on these experiences of the end of your time at the Met? You've talked a lot about things not being planned…

SE: Well, if I look back on it all, I think my best advice to anybody who does this job is to maintain flexibility. I mean, maintain flexibility in your mind, in your emotions, to realize that these things are not personal. And that you're not always going to make a great showing. And it's not about you anyway. You worry about this note, or that somebody heard when you played a wrong chord….  Do what you're assigned to do, which is to help this particular show get onto the stage in as good a fashion as it can, which does not mean fussing about open and closed vowels. And it does not mean fussing about 16th notes. “Is-a Putinpao!” - just do it!  Be encouraging to the singers without just telling them it's wonderful when it's not, but don't be confrontational with people, with the singers. I mean, what was it you told me that Jimmy said about it not being about proving what you know, or something? When you're coaching people?

BM: I don't remember that, but that's good advice.

.

SE: Also what people don't understand: Singers are always telling me, “I can't hear it!” Because they're used to a certain texture of a piano, which has an immediate attack, and now they're up there on the stage, far away, and with strings, which are so different. So when they tell me, I can't hear what's underneath me, I believe them.

BM: I too! Oh, my goodness, the first performance of La Bohème when I came out onto the stage with the band and was standing at the top of those stairs, I lost my count before I ever did anything, because I realized I couldn't hear the orchestra. And I didn't know what I was going to do. And that's when I remembered that Joe Lawson had said, "Wait until the chorus says this, and then count to seven.” And I thought, “Thank God for Joe Lawson,” because where I was standing at that time, he knew that I was going to hear the tenors who were standing right there say “Largo, largo, eccoli qua!” and then I would count to seven and go. I couldn’t hear a thing in the orchestra, and Musetta was down there singing her head off. And I'm like, “Is someone singing? What's happening right now?”

SE: Well, this, this goes back to where I feel like I'm different from some of my colleagues. Since I started in the theater, since I started in a major opera house, just tossed into the water, sink or swim, I learned early on that it's all about the practicality. It's not theoretical. It's not what you learn in school. It's not what you can put down in some book about this and that. It's not about so many fine particulars, especially in a repertoire house like the Met where they're cranking operas out constantly. It's what can you do to make the piece work on Thursday night. And it's gonna be different on Saturday afternoon, because someone else is going on, in a particular role. It’s just, you know, the difference between theory and reality. And so if you work in an opera house, that's why I say stay flexible, understand what you can do and what you cannot do and what the singer can and cannot do. And if they say that they can't hear the orchestra at a certain point, you have to find a way to help them, to fix them to something. You have to get out your can of Band-Aids and start putting them on.

BM: Were there any positive things, positive changes in the business that you saw over the course of your 30 to 40 years doing it?

SE: [long pause] Well, I saw an interest in certain aspects of the repertoire…more Baroque operas, more interest in composers like Janaček, that sort of thing.  Certainly, in the age of HD broadcasts, the look of things started to get a little more sophisticated. If you’d seen some of the costumes in the old days up close, you’d be like, “Oh, really?” [laughter] They weren't so haute couture as they are now.

BM: What about non-improvements?

SE:  Well, one thing - I think the advent of supertitles, which were helpful and good, also made audiences more lazy. Nobody reads the libretto anymore, right. And in my day, that's the only way you could learn the opera. First you have the libretto. And with all the operas I learned back when I was first starting, I really studied the libretto. I mean, not so much like the text of Islam, but just what they were saying, why they were saying it, what this scene is about.

And I also think - how do I put this? - there used to be a kind of reverence for opera from the audience members. It was an important thing. It was a kind of a central thing to your happiness in a way. It wasn't just “Well, we'll go on Thursday and see what happens….” It was because Shirley Verrett is going to sing Norma that night and we've got to hear it. That.

Management does not determine who is a star, the audience does. It's the audience that makes stars. People didn't go, in San Francisco in 1975 like I did, to hear Sutherland, Pavarotti, and Shirley Verrett sing Trovatore because they were putting on Trovatore. We went because, my God, with those three what’s that going to be like? It's gonna be fantastic - was fantastic.

The real singers had this ability to set the air in the theater buzzing! You could feel the voice in the molecules of air and you're just like [gasps] - ah, like fingers. The first time I heard Kiri Te Kanawa let loose with that B-Flat in Simon Boccanegra, I just thought “[gasp] Oh my God. Oh my God.”

BM: …[sings] ruggiada dei fiooooor…

SE: Oh my God. It was just the most beautiful thing. That was in 1975. She had just made her American debut at Santa Fe. And that season she sang Boccanegra and Magic Flute.

You don’t understand how loud some of these people were in the house. The loudest, the one that was most like “oh my God,” was Leonie Rysanek. Her high notes were the…they just went into some kind of a whole [imitates soprano space] and knocked about her head [laughter].  Sutherland was loud.  But you know what I still say was the loudest note I ever heard in my life - all those years ago - was Astrid Varnay singing Herodias, when she tells the Jews to shut up [imitates]. She let loose with a sound…I mean, it was completely straight, no vibrato available, and it pinned you back to your seat.

BM: When I heard the Meistersinger last year, I went because I had not heard Lise Davidsen yet. I’d been hearing about her for five years. And they gave me a seat in DD, and Linda Hall was in EE, and we had the rows to ourselves back there, strangely. And so Linda’s sitting back behind me through the whole thing, and when she sings “Oh Sachs! Mein Freund!”…

SE: ….[sings] O Sachs! Mein FREUND!

BM: …I was like [hits the arms of the chair], I was literally hammering. Linda was just cackling behind me.

SE: That’s what we used to hear all the time.

You know, in the ’90s, and in the first decade of the of the 21st century, certainly, opera had gotten so big, and there was so much of it. Regional houses were getting bigger and bigger, with more and more going on, and then 2008 - that was really the iceberg that hit the ship. Economic times are shaky now. So you have companies closing, including the whole demise of New York City Opera, something I just can't conceive - how that was allowed to happen. Because it filled a very, very, very important niche.

I was talking with someone about City Opera the other day and I started going through my brain and trying to remember what I had seen at City Opera, and I came up with at least 25 shows that I'd been to there. I used to go there all the time! That’s where I first saw Moses and Aron. I saw that wonderful Maurice Sendak production of Cunning Little Vixen, which is one of the greatest things I've ever seen, ever. If you'd seen that production…. It was so delightful. One of the best things I ever saw. That weird …was it Rodelinda?...that had these dancers that were crocodiles? Black crocodiles and white crocodiles. It was just so weird, but I loved it.

BM: That's the first place I saw Iphigénie and A Quiet Place….

SE: And they did the original Butterfly with Uncle Yakuside singing about the monkey and the tree and all that, the 1904 version. That was the only place in New York we could see La Rondine, which they had a very nice production of. What else did I see there? You know, lots of weird modern things. Dominic Argento, and that revival they did of [Marvin David Levy’s] Mourning Becomes Electra with Lauren Flanigan. It was great. Florencia. That's the kind of stuff the City Opera did.