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Geffrey, far left, in a Midsummer Night's Dream.
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The opera star lost his voice...
Carmel Thomason9/ 6/2008
OPERA singer Geoffrey Dolton had never been busier - as a highly skilled and experienced performer he was in demand, moving easily from one leading operatic role to the next.
Then suddenly, without explanation, it all changed.
"It was very strange," he remembers. "I was in Love Life for Opera North and there was one note in the whole role that felt a bit strange. I didn't think anything of it because it was just one note. I went straight off to do another piece and again there was one note in the whole piece that I wasn't happy with, but it was a different note and I couldn't make it any better.
"I then went to Flanders Opera to do King Priam and during that it really started playing up. By the end of the rehearsal period I thought they were going to have to sack me. Luckily there weren't very many performances.
"I couldn't hold any notes. I went to a singing teacher, he pressed an A on the keyboard and said, `Just try to sing this note,' - I did what I used to do but the sound that came out was like four notes underneath.
"Terrified"
"I took a tiny role next because I really didn't know what was going to come out of my mouth. I was terrified. After that I just had to stop. I had loads of contracts coming up. For each one I thought, I'll cancel this one and I'll be all right for the next - then it just got to the point where I thought, it's never going to happen, I'm not going to sing again, so I just cancelled everything. I couldn't pitch the right note. I couldn't even sing pop songs with my kids - it wasn't that I couldn't sing very well, I couldn't sing at all!"
Geoffrey was referred to a specialist voice clinic where he underwent a series of tests to try to determine the cause of the problem. However, medics could not find anything physically wrong and, at 37, Geoffrey believed that his career had ended.
"I was told there wasn't anything wrong with my voice, for some reason it had just stopped working," he recalls. "I couldn't understand what was going on. The bizarre thing was I felt fine - there was nothing I could pin it on. I could speak, but for some reason the mechanism for singing wouldn't work. That's what was so odd. I could speak so I couldn't understand why I couldn't sing."
Although baffling to him, Geoffrey's experience is not uncommon. Specialist speech and language therapist, Sarah Harris explains: "Most singers probably have a crash at some point in their life - maybe started by an infection or emotional stress.
"There are many reasons why someone might lose their voice, both physical and emotional. Common physical ones are associated with extremely hard work - overload, too many singing engagements and fatigue developing in the musculature which then can no longer hold the weight of the voice so people tire early - they start singing fine and then the voice just fatigues and they can't sustain the workload."
Fine control
To sing you have to use very fine control of the muscles that stretch and thin the vocal folds - traditionally known as the vocal cords. Hitting the right note is a lot to do with being able to tune the muscular tube that goes through the vocal folds to the mouth and nose.
"There are a lot of very finely co-ordinated and finely balanced systems working together here, including the breathing," says Sarah.
"It's quite easy for that to be disturbed and it'll usually show much quicker in singing than it will in speaking. The voice box is under the emotional control neurologically and this makes it very sensitive to stress - if a person does become distressed it's possible for them to lose their voice down to a whisper or to lose their ability to sing efficiently.
"For a professional singer it can be around anxieties about singing. Singing is a scary business, every time you go out on stage you are expected to give a terrific performance. It's very humiliating and terrifying for a singer if they are not sure suddenly what is going to come out when they open their mouth to sing and, just that uncertainty, can tighten them up and take away their ability to do it."
Geoffrey still isn't clear what caused the loss of his singing voice, but it is probably down to a combination of factors. He was putting a lot of strain on his voice by travelling a lot, going from job to job without a break. The roles he was singing were very varied and challenging - for one part he would be singing very high and the next he would be singing very low. Added to this, Geoffrey had the anxiety of losing odd notes and beginning to fear for his career.
"I was told it was stress," he says. "I had all these singing lessons to try and get my voice back but nothing worked. It was dreadful. Singing really is a vocation - it just becomes part of you and I was very depressed when I couldn't do it. For a couple of years I didn't sing at all - my wife said it was really weird because I would always sing around the house then all of a sudden it was so silent. I couldn't bear to even open my mouth because it wouldn't work."
Assistant director
Unable to work in his chosen profession, Geoffrey took a job as an assistant director to keep him in the theatre. Then four years after what he thought had been his last performance he was encouraged to try again.
"It was on my 40th birthday," says the 49-year-old. "I had a party and my friends were singing all of their favourite songs. They tried to encourage me but I said, `No, you know I can't sing'. I hadn't even tried.
"They kept on: `We'll make it easy, just sing a duet with somebody, you'll both be singing at the same time and it won't be so bad.'
"I agreed because I was probably a bit drunk. I sang The Pearl Fishers Duet with a friend and, it certainly wasn't perfect, but my voice was actually working. It was a huge shock and was the point when I realised my voice might be coming back."
After that Geoffrey began taking singing lessons again and his voice quickly returned. It took some time for opera companies to have confidence in his recovery and hire him again. He took a few small roles to begin with and now is back with Opera North for the first time since his recovery, singing the role of Paris in the new production of Roméo et Juliette and as one of the mechanicals, Starveling in the new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
"Because I'm now older I've started doing a lot more character roles which are fun to do," he adds. "Fingers crossed I haven't had any problems at all since.
"There are other people it's happened to who never sing again - so I was very lucky that it came back.
"Stress is such a funny thing - I do try and keep myself calmer these days and I have singing lessons when I can to making sure someone is listening to check if anything does go wrong."
Opera North is at The Lowry theatre this week. For tickets call: 0870 787 5793 or visit
thelowry.com
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13/06/2008 at 14:06