Prompting the Prompter

Any top-level performer will tell you that prompters are among the unsung heroes of opera. They toil in obscurity, all alone in a cramped, airless box embedded at the front of the stage, unseen by the audience but ever on call to help the performers. Armed with a score, they conduct, cue, and mouth, whisper, or speak phrase after phrase. Just imagine doing that for hours at a time, keeping track of dozens of roles. The composer Richard Strauss thought highly enough of their noble work to bring a prompter to life as a character onstage: Monsieur Taupe, in the opera Capriccio.

Conductors get all the glory, but I’ll let you in on a little secret: the prompter is just as important, and occasionally more important. There are more than a few conductors who don’t look much at the stage, instead focusing their attention on the orchestra. And a good singer knows when it’s prudent to ignore the podium entirely and pay attention only to the prompter.

The performers see only a head and a pair of hands constantly in motion, keeping the beat with sharp movements and eyeing whoever needs help or has the next major entrance. To do this, of course, the prompter always has to know the conductor’s beat. The conductor, though, is directly behind the prompter, begging the obvious question: how do prompters see the conductor? No, they don’t look over their shoulder and then back to the stage over and over and over; talk about a recipe for whiplash. For decades prompters used tiny mirrors angled at the conductor’s podium — think rear-view mirrors, like those on a car. These days major opera houses have a closed-circuit television system that provides a live feed of the podium. The already-cramped prompter’s box now must also accommodate one or two tiny video monitors.

To get a singer’s attention many prompters make a quick kissing sound that provokes a near-Pavlovian response: when you hear it, you mentally check yourself or sneak a peek at the prompter’s box. After all, the next entrance might be yours! A split-second before you have to sing, you’ll hear the first few words of your phrase spoken quickly in a low voice or hoarse whisper, and this will trigger the rest of the phrase in your head. If you have any doubts about timing, you’ll see the prompter’s hands indicating the beat and the moment of your entrance. A good performer takes in all of this information and sallies forth, while the audience is never the wiser.

San Francisco Opera prompter Walter Ferrari.

On this somewhat bizarre arrangement, performances soar — and occasionally crash.

Prompters are especially important at repertory houses, where several productions are rotated over a long period of time. There can be weeks between performances of a given opera. And singers, understandably, can get a little rusty. Such was the situation for a production of The Merry Widow at Zurich Opera in 1962. The opening had taken place some weeks before, and the original director was long gone. It fell to me as head stage director to supervise all subsequent performances, and I anticipated nothing but smooth sailing.

The company employed retired choristers as prompters. I thought this was a neat arrangement. After giving their all for decades onstage, these artists could continue to play a role from the prompter’s box. For The Merry Widow we had Frau Knüzel, a retired mezzo-soprano of indeterminate years. The cast consisted mostly of veterans — no big names, but all well-known to Zurich audiences. They reminded me of old-time vaudevillians, perfectly suited to the lightheartedness of The Merry Widow.

Act Two includes a long stretch of dialogue between the dashing cad Danilo and the unscrupulous but clueless Baron Zeta. This scene is especially crucial for guiding the audience through the farcical twists and turns of the story. On this particular night, even though it had been weeks since their previous performance, Danilo and Zeta were in top form, keeping the audience in stitches. But at some point during the lengthy dialogue in Act Two they got lost. Even I don’t know what went wrong, and I was watching the whole thing! It was a minor malfunction, and I assumed that, with a few whispered words from Frau Knüzel, my two vaudevillians would get back on track. From the prompter’s box, however, came nothing but a conspicuous silence.

Danilo and Zeta did what any old pros would do: they began to improvise. It started out with little riffs on what they’d already said. Clearly they anticipated that Frau Knüzel, presumably following along in the score, would see that they were lost and jump in. No such luck. They couldn’t very well stop, so they kept up the improvising. The little riffs got longer and more elaborate. New characters were introduced and situations invented as the two played off each other with practised ease. It was beginning to drift very far from the plot but it felt genuine, like two old friends catching up. I was impressed. Apparently so was Frau Knüzel.

By this point, Danilo and Zeta looked to the prompter’s box out of the corners of their eyes — only to see Frau Knüzel looking back at them with a breathless, I-wonder-what’s-going-to-happen-next expression. She was completely captivated. As the dialogue unfolded she had become less interested in prompting and more interested in the now fascinating and crazily elaborate story. In short, she was having a ball! In her tiny box, hands folded on top of the score, she had become another member of the audience.

As the minutes stacked up, Danilo and Zeta discreetly looked to Frau Knüzel with increasing frequency, the story nearly taking on a life of its own. This might have gone on all night, but finally Zeta took Danilo by the arm and escorted him downstage until they stood right in front of the prompter’s box, the tips of their shoes just a few inches from Frau Knüzel’s face. In a breathless, conspiratorial tone, as if bringing up an unspeakable scandal, he said, “By the way, have you heard anything lately from … Frau Knüzel?”

Without missing a beat, Danilo responded in a shocked manner, “No. I wonder how she is.”

Jolted back to earth, Frau Knüzel let out a screech perfectly reflective of a mezzo-soprano past her prime and scrambled back to the task at hand. My only regret was that this would be the one and only night for this amazing little play-within-an-opera.