Running to Stand Still

 Up and running. Where to? Maybe the following statistics will give you an idea.

    I’ve been a so-called professional opera singer in Germany for 10 years now. Not including the miles flown over the Atlantic for my very first audition in Düsseldorf, which is where it all started, I’ve clocked almost 11,000 km (6835 miles) just traveling to auditions by train or automobile. I’ve always made a joke about wanting to drive to China. Turns out, I could have. 

    Driven. 

    To China. 

    And back.

But that’s another story.

    I don’t even want to get into the amount of hours I spent traveling from here to there (not China), because time is money, and I don’t want to be reminded of how much time I have on my hands and how much money I have in my pocketses.                             

    Notwithstanding, it is worth mentioning how much time I actually spent standing on the stage auditioning. So, let’s review:

    10,984 kilometers travelled to

    25 cities for

    25 auditions, where I sang 

    1-3 Arias, averaging

    5 minutes each, putting me at approximately

    10 minutes per audition, ergo

    250 minutes spent actually singing.

    A little over 4 hours. 10 years and 11 thousand kilometers for 4 hours?! I suppose takes a bit longer than that to drive to China.

    Now you know the numbers, and here’s how they really add up. Out of those 25 auditions, 3 turned into jobs. It hardly seems worth it, does it? On the other hand, audition number 15 eventually lead to 5 more jobs and a circle of friends where I now live (Frankfurt). Audition number 20 lead to 4 years in an Ensemble where I sang well over a dozen roles and made very good friends. And the very first audition in Düsseldorf, which I didn’t even include in my mileage chart, also brought me several performances, kicking off 10 years of experience, professional, personal and otherwise .... That’s priceless. 

    So, yeah, it’s worth it.