In every opera house there is one person who knows the score better than the conductor, better than the singers and better than the director, and who does not appear on the poster. In the Italian contract the job is called maestro collaboratore, in English a répétiteur. Outside the opera house, almost nobody knows it exists.
The trade is learned by doing something that seems impossible and is merely very long to acquire: playing an orchestral score at sight at the piano. Not the printed reduction, the score. Twenty staves, transposing instruments, old clefs in the voices, and two hands to produce something that resembles an orchestra. Whoever does it well does not play all the notes: in real time they choose what is indispensable, keep the bass, keep the rhythm, and with the fingers that remain give the singer the cue he needs. It is simultaneous translation, and like all simultaneous translation it is judged by how little it is noticed.
The work begins weeks before the orchestra rehearsals. The répétiteur rehearses with the singers one by one, and in those rooms ninety per cent of what the audience will hear takes shape: words are adjusted, breaths decided, difficult passages sorted out, the part learned by heart. If the singer is a foreigner, his Italian is corrected syllable by syllable. If he is young, he is taught the role. If he is famous, you go where he says and take notes, because those choices will then have to be reported to the conductor.
Then come the staging rehearsals, which last weeks and in which the orchestra is absent. In those rooms the piano is the orchestra: it starts, it stops when the director raises a hand, it restarts from a random bar, it repeats the same passage forty times while someone decides which side to enter from. Whoever sits there has, in the end, played the whole opera more times than anyone else.
The duties on stage are the part nobody imagines. When in an opera you hear a chorus singing from afar, or an offstage band, or a bell, that is not conducted by the conductor: it is conducted by a répétiteur, standing in a corridor or behind a backdrop, watching a monitor or a little light and having to stay together with an orchestra he cannot hear well. In the second-act finale of certain operas there are three separate groups playing different things in different places in the theatre, and invisible people hold them together. If they are off by half a second, the audience notices and blames the conductor.
Then there is the role that is the recurring nightmare of everyone who has done it: following the singer from the dark when something happens. A missed entrance, a forgotten word, a page that jumps. At that moment someone has to notice before anyone else and fix things without it showing.
The career, in Italy, works like this. You get there after a piano diploma and often one in composition or conducting, you enter as a substitute, you spend years playing for other people’s rehearsals. Some stay, and become the pillars of the theatre, those who know where the 1912 band part is and why that cut has always been made. Others use it as a road to the podium, and indeed a good many opera conductors come exactly from there: because there you learn the one thing the conservatory does not teach, namely how a theatre really works when things go wrong.
The point worth noting is a different one, and it is more interesting than a plea for recognition. In a country that measures people by their degrees, this has remained one of the few places where the degree counts for nothing. In the rehearsal room nobody looks at the diploma: they look at whether the cue arrives, whether the rehearsal moves, whether the singer learns the part. It is a workshop that survived inside the public theatre, with the old master and the substitute who stays beside him for years, and it is no accident that opera conductors keep coming out of it. Whoever wants to understand how musicians are really formed in Italy should not read conservatory syllabi. They should look at who sits at the piano at eleven in the morning in a rehearsal room, repeating the same page for the fortieth time.