This is Anthony Roth Costanzo, countertenor

extraordinaire, rehearsing one of the most

challenging pieces in opera today.

For six straight minutes, he and his fellow

castmates have to sing the word “ah.”

That seems easy enough, right?

Until you watch it.

[Sings “ah”]

It’s an extraordinary feat that happens

roughly one hour into Akhnaten, an opera by

Philip Glass about this influential Egyptian

pharaoh.

Anthony plays the lead.

Pulling off this opera takes the coordination

of hundreds of people.

There’s dozens of musicians.

Over 60 performers,

including twelve professional jugglers.

There’s stage designers, make-up artists

a costume with baby heads attached to them,

and a giant sun roughly the size of twelve

Anthonys.

Oh, and the music is in four different languages.

This all happens inside this Iconic building,

the Metropolitan Opera House in Manhattan.

Anthony has performed Akhnaten with the English

National Opera and the Los Angeles Opera

But this one… it’s special.

I’m mean come on, look at this view.

It’s pretty awesome.

And what’s even cooler is we get a peek

behind the curtain

to see how it all happens.

So I play Akhnaten, the ancient Egyptian pharaoh,

who's a totally fascinating, weird, complex

guy.

He has this idea, which changes the course

of history.

Which is that instead of hundreds of gods

that have existed in Egypt forever, there

would be one God, and that would be the sun.

He was thus the first monotheist - the first

person to worship one God.

This opera is like a fever dream of ancient

Egypt, and it all starts with the music,

which wouldn’t exist without world class

vocal chords.

[Singing]

These are Anthony’s.

Someone put a scope down my throat,

and then when you breath, they open up.

Should I walk you through some exercises?

[Singing]

How many of your neighbors know you’re an

opera singer?

I was actually going to ask the same thing.

Do you get a lot of complaints?

I don’t get that many complaints.

I can't hear my own voice the way other ears

can because it's buzzing in my head.

That’s where Joan comes in.

It’s so much to do with the way we use our

breath.

She’s been his vocal coach since he was

17.

But then we have to do it without a lip trill

and just starting on a vowel.

That’s the challenge.

[Singing: Oooo, ohhh, ahhhh, aaaaa, eeeee]

See the hardest thing in the world is the

first tone.

That first tone is vitally important during

every moment of Aknahten, but especially the

scenes where all they sing is “Ah.”

[Sings “ah”]

So that onset that he did, with no consonant,

is real accomplishment.

Because if he did, hah ah, ha ah, he’d kill

himself.

To understand how an opera could sound like

this, you have to know Philip Glass - perhaps

the most famous living composer.

Philip Glass is a minimalist.

So he uses repetition with changing rhythms

and syncopation to create a kind of meditative

state.

There’s a whole lot of arpeggios, meaning

a broken chord.

So you'll hear da da da da da da da da da

da da da da da da da da

And a lot of lyrical repetition.

In opera, there's a beat and the time is king.

And you can go 90 percent into your character,

but if you go all the way, you might get totally

lost and you can’t afford that.

The first step in not getting lost is the

sitzprobe.

So the Sitz probe is a German term, which

sitz means sit and probe means try.

[Singing]

Let me have the drums and chorus please.

This is the first time the orchestra and singers

hear what they sound like together after weeks

of rehearsing on their own.

So it's a kind of sacred moment where you

hear the orchestra for the first time, you

sing with the orchestra for the first time.

And in this particular case, it's the Met

orchestra.

They're the best.

There are two people in this room who keep

everyone in check.

Karen and Caren.

In western music we have a tendency to steal

time at the end of a phrase.

One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four,

one, two, three

Here it’s more about thinking linearly and

being really honest about the length of each

rhythmic pattern or individual note.

Okay, so, we did pretty well, orchestra.

After about three rounds we start to slow

down.

So guys playing the offbeats, don’t listen

to anyone because we tend to get slower.

I really feel like my job inside the rehearsals

is to get inside the conductor’s mind to

know exactly what her tempo is.

[Singing]

It’s hard sometimes for the performers to

remember in the moment exactly how many repeats

they’ve done, so there’s a lot of counting

down measures.

A lot of this, which means don’t sing let

me do the work for you.

I give a lot of positive feedback to them

to ensure that they’re very comfortable

on stage.

Shall I start?

Yeah I think you should start.

Yeah so this is an opera with a lot of juggling

in it.

This is Phelim McDermott and Sean Gandini.

He’s the director of the opera and he’s

the Juggling Master.

One thing is the performers are moving really slowly.

It’s true, everyone moves in extreme slow

motion the entire performance.

Like this scene here, before Aknahten is killed.

Zoom into the right side and you see Akhnaten

with Nefrititi and their daughters.

It’s another one of those “Ah” scene.

Move to the left and you the rest of the cast

moving again in slow motion.

The only thing moving fast are the balls.

Sean and Karen spent a long time looking at

the score talking about the mathematics of

how the juggling relates to the music.

I spent a lot of time saying make sure there’s

a development.

You sent me that script “balls, balls balls”

Yeah, exactly.
In the middle of the whole show there’s

the hymn to the sun, and you basically get the

the sun god, which secretly me and Sean both know

that actually that’s the god of the jugglers,

it’s the biggest juggling ball.

Big mama ball.

[Intercom: Standby, we’re about to start]

We’re about to start, I’ve got to go

Alright, well see you later.

This is the moment I realized, The Met stops

for no one.

Hundreds of things are always happening at

once, especially at dress rehearsals.

Where it’s all about getting every last

detail right.

The goal is just to get out of people’s

way because everything is a timed trial.

Over 60 cast members need their make-up done

and there are just a few make-up artists who

have just 2 hours to do it.

And here’s something I haven’t mentioned.

Anthony enters the opera in slow motion and

he’s completely naked.

Imagine taking three full minutes to descend

twelve steps, looking straight at 4000 people

and you're totally naked.

So it’s not just his face that gets makeup,

his whole body does.

There’s also some incredible costumes and

wigs.

Each individual hair is knotted into a net

to make the wig.

You don’t have to wear a wig?

I luckily don’t luckily have to wear a wig.

But he does have to wear this blue headdress.

Called a khepresh that many Egyptian pharaohs

wore to symbolise their royalty.

There’s always a Cobra on the front.

It’s amazing and also crap.

It’s like a combo, you know.

This is literally styrofoam.

from the stage in the lights, it looks expensive.

The real show stealer is this.

The baby head dress.

If you look at ancient Egypt and the rituals

of ancient Egypt, the Book of the Dead, for

example, is so fascinating.

The things they would do, preserve people's

organs, mummify them, weigh someone's heart

against a feather in order for them to ascend

into the next life.

We’re representing some of those rituals

in our own way, and the shrunken baby doll

heads somehow evoke that.

Oh I love that there’s a pen.

Oh my God that’s where it is!

The images from the Book of the Dead also

served as a visual reference for the multi-level

main set too.

The Met, the Metropolitan Opera is kind of

the stage.

Did you try singing in the house?

Absolutely not.

You do it.

[Sings “Ahhhhhhhhh”]

It has a nice acoustic!

If I told you, you're going to come see a

minimalist three and a half hour opera about

ancient Egypt where there's no real story

and it's sung in ancient Egyptian, you'd think,

man, there's no way I'm going to that.

And yet I bet you're going to love it.