Today, a diversion from our audition tour travels: Enjoy this audition season poem for light lyric sopranos, courtesy of a talented yet anonymous WTO alumna poet.
Measuring Stick
The measuring stick that is used for sopranos has quite a varied hue,
And if the height of talent reaches a certain mark, still no one will no what to do.
For colors shift twixt good and fair and if the soprano is too tall or too short,
The hue will clash with her hair or dress, and she’s left with a lukewarm report.
If her diction is great we might as well say that she is lacking some beauty of tone,
But if she sounds too glorious throughout the scale, she’s not smart, so hang up the phone.
The flexibility and technique may be brilliant with coloratura and trills,
But she clearly needs to work on legato line and sink into a phrase that thrills.
There’s no way that a soprano can prove in the room that she is all that and more,
Please put us on stage, put us to the test, and let us crack open a score.
We’ll dance and we’ll sing and bring the house down with our diction, our line and our tone,
Only rarely to hear the word on the street that she perhaps got the job done.
Meanwhile, the basses, the young and the old, sit backstage sipping their tea,
With no diction or charm, simply two working arms, some low notes and a mighty good fee.
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