Volume 28 Issue 4 | February - March 2023

ON OPERA
Fons in the title role of Faramondo
at the Göttingen International
Handel Festival (Germany, 2014).
Mezzo
Emily Fons
on globetrotting, managing
your money, and those
sweet, sweet trouser roles
LYDIA PEROVIĆ
THEODORA DA SILVA
Probably the most melancholy production of The
Marriage of Figaro around, the Claus Guthconceived
Salzburg production first seen in Toronto
in 2016, is back at the Canadian Opera Company for
another run (January 27 - February 18), with a different
set of principals, other than its Cherubino, Emily Fons,
an American mezzo-soprano best known for Handel and
Mozart trouser roles.
At a crossroads
When I reviewed the original, it was impossible not to highlight
Fons’ athletic Cherubino as a case of perfect casting. Over coffee in
a Queen East cafe earlier in January, she tells me that every mezzo
excelling in boy and youth roles comes to a point when she needs to
decide whether to graduate into singing the grown men of the repertoire
(Giulio Cesare, Ariodante, Serse) or proceed to the other, more
traditionally clad mezzo repertoire. What is needed for a successful
career in trouser roles, I ask her. Voice type, physique?
“These days companies are casting more women who don’t have the
body type you would expect in a trouser role,” she says. “I think it’s
good to push the boundaries, but there’s always going to be those of
us who walk into a rehearsal room and people go, You must be singing
Cherubino. Definitely the colour of voice, the Fach, but also personality
plays a big part. If you enjoy a certain type of role, you tend to do
well in it, and people will cast you more in it.”
This is Fons’ seventh Cherubino; she has also sung Ariodante,
Faramondo, Orlando, Hansel, l’Enfant, Prince Orlofsky, Nicklausse.
But do North American opera houses generate enough opportunities,
trousered and otherwise, for a mezzo-soprano operatic career? Or
does every singer need to move to Berlin or Paris, and should they?
“I have a lot of thoughts on this,” she says. “When I first started,
about 13 years ago, I told my manager that I wanted an American
career. I had a family
that I cared about,
I had my dog that I
love to have with me
and that shouldn’t
fly on the plane.
People thought that
was highly unusual
– an American opera
singer who wanted
to stay in America. It
wasn’t that I didn’t
want jobs in Europe,
Emily and Lupita in New Orleans
it’s that I didn’t want to be away for six months at a time.” (For the
current gig at the COC, she drove from home in Wisconsin with her
dog, Lupita, in the back seat.)
The regional houses in America, she continues, have maybe three
productions a year, and only two shows per each production. “That
is a lot of work you have to string together to keep yourself afloat.
And there’s a kinda push in America to consider opera companies
as community service organizations, hiring an entirely different cast
every season.” This is problematic.
“As an artist, you are hired for many different community building
and music education programs – in cities far away from where you
live. If you’re on the road all the time, what [community] are you
serving? And a lot of artists want a life, a family, and not to travel 11
months of the year.”
What would work better both for the regional houses and the artists
themselves, Fons argues, is the ensemble model: hiring a group of
singers for a specific number of years and casting from that pool of
talent for all productions. “If companies really want a community
service model and are not saying that just to get the grant money, then
the model to adopt would be to keep the performers in the city where
they are from … People who attend opera would get to know you. It’s
hard to make an impact if you fly in and out constantly.”
26 | February & March, 2023 thewholenote.com