In case you thought it was just rock stars and movie stars who were susceptible to wrecking their lives and careers with drug abuse, turns out they're not alone: the competitive, stressful world of opera singing has its share of problems as well.
"We are faced with the choice of performing and being attacked because we sing one false note, or being attacked because we are taking care of ourselves," [tenor Endrik Wottrich] told the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
To deal with the pressures, "soloists are taking beta blockers to control their angst, some tenors take cortisone to push their voice high and alcohol is everywhere," he said. "The real pressure is no longer good old stage fright but comes from a new dimension that has penetrated opera - it now lives from glamour, and normal human mistakes are a disruption in such an environment."
The mezzo Vesselina Kasarova spoke of colleagues who "are doing much too much ... and are not as robust as they think.
"They then turn to drugs to be able to cope with this kind of lifestyle," she told the German weekly Die Zeit.
Cortisone, as it turns out, can actually wreck your voice in the long run if overused, a danger some of these singers currently face; when you get paid per show, cancellation can be a costly business. I think it's a bit misleading, in fact, to compare the lives of opera singers to the lives of rock stars or movie stars, who can often reach their position of fame without actually possessing much talent or doing much work; a more apt comparison is to the world of professional athletics, where people at the top of their game physically and mentally nevertheless feel compelled to push the boundaries of their performance in some fashion. (Cortisone, by the way, is a steroid, in case the analogy isn't perfectly clear.)
But one thing modern opera singers and rock stars do have in common is the allure of fame, the allure of the trappings of a glamorous lifestyle. To the extent that glamor is pulling these singers into a sordid life of cocaine binging and alcohol abuse, they're definitely shooting themselves in the foot. Of course, when I was getting my degree in theatre, I used to hang with opera singers in training and I'm telling you, even before they were famous, they were smoking and drinking like the best of them. Some people need no excuse!
