Singing Soprano
By Katie Turner
She has sung for audiences in Europe as well as the United States, and this summer she will go to Rome, Italy, to further progress her career as an opera singer.
Flaherty has been a quarter-finalist in the American Traditions singing competition, a semi-finalist in the Singer of the Year Competition in Shreveport, Louisiana, and was hand-picked by opera great Sherrill Milnes to sing for his master class in 2009.
She was born in Ohio on the campus of Oberlin College, which is home to one of the best music programs in the nation. The Oberlin Conservatory of Music is the oldest and most widely known continuously operating conservatory in the country.
Remarkably, Flaherty would end up graduating from Oberlin as well; it seems she was literally born to sing.
“I’ve always been attracted to music,” Flaherty says. As the daughter of a choir director, she was picking out melodies on the family piano at the age of four. She sang all through high school, participated in community music theater and school musicals, and sang in her church choir growing up.
Even though she has always had an affinity for singing, she was apprehensive about pursuing a singing career at first. “I felt like I couldn’t really make music my career because it wasn’t practical because you wouldn’t make money at it,” Flaherty says.
Her doubts were quickly dispelled when one of her professors at Hiram College noticed her passion for music and encouraged her to transfer to Oberlin. Despite her ongoing passion for music, Flaherty says she was the “low man on the totem pole” when she first arrived at Oberlin. “I was far behind other people that were there,” she says. “I didn’t really get my first voice lesson until I was twenty, and a lot of people that make a career out of this start when they’re as young as thirteen.”
After graduating from Oberlin, she moved around for the next ten years with her husband, Dan, and started a family. They have a daughter, Gwendolyn, and a son, Oliver.
For extra money, she worked various church jobs, taught private voice lessons, sang solos, and directed children’s choir. Then she began to realize that her window of opportunity for an opera career was getting smaller, so she decided to finish her Master’s in Music.
When her family finally settled in Pooler, Flaherty decided to enroll in Georgia Southern University for her Master’s in Music in Voice Performance. “Georgia Southern is really the only school around that offers a Master’s degree in Voice Performance, and they do have a really good opera program that will do a fully produced opera,” she says. “You can’t find that anywhere else around here.” She earned a graduate assistantship at GSU, which pays her tuition and a monthly stipend. She says she loves living in the south, even though her time here has not come without its trials.
Last Spring, she was cast in her first full operatic role at Georgia Southern. She thought the experience would solidify her decision to make a career out of opera. “The show was scheduled to go up March 27th,” she says, “and my mom died on March 3rd.”
Her mother had lost her battle with cancer, but Flaherty was determined to perform, despite her loss.
As a part of the healing process, she felt like she had to complete the performance. “I’d worked so much on it, and my mom was really proud of me for doing it. So I couldn’t just not do it. That would have made me feel worse– like I was giving up,” she says.
Even though she missed an entire week of technical rehearsals, everyone at GSU welcomed her back, and she was able to complete the performance. Flaherty classifies this as one of her proudest moments. “I proved to myself that I could do it. No matter how hard life was for me personally, I could put that aside and do my work,” she says.
The loss of her mother also helped her realize a deeper aspect about interacting with her audience. “There’s always somebody out there in the audience whose mom just died or who just lost their job,” she emphasizes. “So it’s your job when you get on that stage to give those people something.” And Rebecca Flaherty holds nothing back when it comes to giving her all.
I had the privilege of hearing her sing at GSU in the Spring 2010 Opera Scenes, which was directed by Arikka Gregory and Richard Mercier. It was my first opera experience, and I was amazed at the talent of everyone involved.
Flaherty is absolutely magnetic on stage; I can only describe her voice as a powerful force- not only in volume and range, but in the emotion she exudes while performing.
And that reaction is exactly what Flaherty tries to elicit every time she takes the stage. “It’s an interactive thing,” she says.
Her favorite part of performing is the feeling that she is communicating with her audience. “When that happens, there’s this energy in the room where you can tell that the audience is really connected with you,” she says. “It’s almost like a religious experience.”
She maintains that communicating and interacting with the audience is essential in her line of work. “In Italy,” she explains, “one of the worst things you can say about a singer is that they didn’t say anything.” Flaherty says it is not enough to have a pretty voice and a good sound if the music does not speak to the listener. Music should convey a message.
Flaherty’s goal is to bring that message to the masses by educating and exposing more people to opera. She wants people to realize that the stories in operas are applicable to people today. With tales of infidelity, death, forgiveness, love, and every human circumstance in between, the stories of operas are the stories of humanity.
“Watching the way the characters develop and having music be a part of what they say makes it really clear what they’re feeling,” she says. “That’s why people cry at an opera, because it’s so intense.”
And Flaherty’s passion for singing is as intense as the operas in which she performs. When she talks about opera and performing, she lights up with enthusiasm and cannot say enough about the art form she loves. “The really good operas transport an audience, and teach us how to live.”
Even though Flaherty sometimes worries about the obstacles that a music career entails, she feels she owes it to herself to pursue her passion: “When you see your mom laying in a coffin, it becomes very real to you that you’re next in line. That this really ends some day. So I feel like since we get one life, we have to pursue the thing that really makes us happy and that we’re really passionate about.”
She says her husband, Dan, encourages her the most when it comes to pursuing her dreams of singing opera. “I couldn’t have done this without him. He’s been incredibly supportive,” she says.
With the many challenges in the music industry, Flaherty needs all the support she can muster.
“There aren’t enough jobs for sopranos, because there are too many of us,” she says. “Just knowing going into it how the odds are stacked against me- That’s hard.” But she is still determined to make an operatic career for herself, despite the odds. Her greatest challenge now is raising money for her trip to Rome this summer. She earned a $500 scholarship for the program, but still needs more help raising the $7,000 it will take to make it happen.
Flaherty usually makes CD’s for those who donate money via her website. “I need money!” she says with a sense of humor.
When she returns from training in Rome this summer, she will spend three weeks in Tampa, Florida, singing with well-known opera singers Sherrill Milnes, Fabrizio Melano, Joan Dornemann, David Friedman , Geoffrey Holder, and Richard Thomas. Flaherty is understandably excited about this amazing opportunity. She is taking advantage of every opportunity to achieve a career in the world of opera. And after she makes a name for herself, she plans to bring opera to Savannah.
“I’d like to start my own opera company in Savannah,” Flaherty says. She loves working with children. She taught music briefly at Windsor Forest, and from that experience, she realized that children really are thirsty for the arts. “To go to area schools and community organizations and educate them about opera–There are some really cool things that opera companies do with their outreach programs,” Flaherty says.
Rebecca Flaherty is the soprano who hits all the high notes when it comes to talent and potential, and with any luck, she will have every success in bringing opera to the people of Pooler and the Savannah area.
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