Here is everything that happened before the audience at the Bavarian State Opera heard soprano Liv Redpath ’14 sing the final note of Der Rosenkavalier on opening night in May 2022. After she was cast, Redpath first studied the German libretto to understand how the sounds she would sing related to the ideas they expressed: “Why does one word sound soft or gentle, while another word is punctuating?” After that, she spent months preparing for her role—not only perfecting the notes but also practicing the breath coordination necessary to project her voice over a full orchestra, with no help from a microphone. A week before the production opened, Redpath began rehearsals with the full ensemble, establishing chemistry with her castmates and adjusting to the director’s instructions. Then, during the performance, the final preparations began: to support her voice, she started her breath before singing. “You actually have to do all of the work internally,” she explains, “before you can make the sound come out.”
But as she sang the final note, she was not thinking about any of that. Instead, gliding across the stage in a harness that lifted her into the rafters of the theater, she wondered, “Who else ever gets to have this view?…It just felt so meaningful—that I get to be in this place at this time.”
Redpath performed in her first opera—a Minnesota Opera performance of Hansel and Gretel—at 13. Before that, she’d pursued music for as long as she can remember, learning the piano at three or four and singing in choirs soon after. But she was immediately drawn to opera’s unique challenges—singing without a microphone, learning about foreign languages and cultures—and how all that effort sublimated, during a performance, into “another state of being,” she says. “I very quickly realized I could be addicted to this.”
After that performance, Redpath knew she wanted to pursue opera professionally, to dedicate her life to an art form that is competitive, precarious, and often considered—she would say incorrectly—to be “dying.” She was so certain of her desire that she decided to attend Harvard instead of a conservatory, the more conventional path. “I didn’t feel any need to go to Juilliard for undergrad and just be singing all the time,” she says. “For me, the singing is just—of course you have to figure out how to do that. That’s the requirement of the job. What you can say with that is what I’m most interested in.”
In her English classes, Redpath studied storytelling, language, and poetry—an education that remains embedded in her artistic process. Learning a new opera, she considers how its history shapes its meaning, as well as the technical aspects of the language: how vowels sit in the back of the throat in Russian, but are articulated toward the front of the face in Italian. “How can you mine the qualities of the language to be expressive?” she asks. “You really have to get down into the nitty gritty of the phonetics—of, why is language language? Why did it ever get started?” Harvard also provided ample opportunities to perform: she appeared in three or four operas every year, including productions by the Lowell House Opera and the Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert & Sullivan Players.
Her next steps were a graduate program at Juilliard, then a three-year young-artist program with the Los Angeles Opera. In 2019, she started auditioning for freelance roles—a “leap off the diving board,” she says. As a freelance performer, Redpath now moves from city to city, mostly in Europe and the United States, to rehearse and perform. Before her tenth reunion in May, she left London—where she was performing in Lucia di Lammermoor at the Royal Opera House—for Cambridge, then traveled straight to New Mexico for rehearsals of Don Giovanni with the Santa Fe Opera.
She is most drawn to operas that center women’s complicated, sometimes violent, emotions—as opposed to those that focus on “the woman suffering, as so often art is about.” Der Rosenkavalier, for example, follows an older, married woman, the Marschallin, as she watches her young lover, Octavian, fall in love with Sophie, a woman his own age. Though she played Sophie, Redpath found herself attracted to the complexity of the Marschallin, who encourages Octavian to pursue his pure, youthful love for Sophie, even though that means losing him. That bittersweet relationship between the women is reflected in the music—which Redpath says is “some of the most sublime” ever written by composer Richard Strauss: “these female voices in tight harmonies.”
Opera, she explains, also enables performers to depict emotional experiences that modern media can struggle to convey. In Sophie’s first scene, she gets ready for her coming out in society, and the music—jittery, punctuated—reflects her nerves and excitement. “Then I see [Octavian], and we’re in love,” Redpath says, embodying Sophie’s perspective, “and though I don’t know what I’m feeling yet, there’s this time-stopping music that Strauss has written to spell it out.” At the beginning of the scene, “I’m in the middle register of my voice, my speaking voice.” But when Sophie smells the rose Octavian presents to her, her voice skips into another octave—and here, Redpath transitions, mid-sentence, to singing the line: “Wie himmlische, nicht irdische...” (“How heavenly, not earthly,” she translates). Rather than depicting time realistically, the music privileges Sophie’s internal, emotional world, which is “what we’re always trying to find in music,” she says.
After more than a decade of training, Redpath has reached “the beginning of my big years of this career.” She sometimes feels overwhelmed by the scale of the art form she’s chosen: the massive opera houses, the music’s long history, the often sizable casts and orchestras. Amid the rush of performing, she makes an effort to pay attention to individual moments like the end of Der Rosenkavalier—when all the physical and mental preparation dissolves, and it’s just the performers and the audience. “It’s those moments that you wish you could take a stamp and be like—oh my gosh, I’m here,” she says. “I’m doing this.”
