First Times with Janai Brugger: The Wonder Never Fades

Want to know who the best opera singers you’ve not yet heard of are? You can always rely on the Operalia Competition to tip you off there. 

No spoilers here. But if you didn’t catch the final of Plácido Domingo’s annual roving competition live from Sofia on 26 October, you can still see it here. 

Operalia launches careers, and not just for the prizewinners. That idea got us thinking: how might a previous Operalia winner look back on their own ‘first times’ experiencing opera or music, or even performing it?

Discovering Opera’s Spell

From the many distinguished Operalia laureates over the years, one name stands out in that regard. As a young Chicagoan, Janai Brugger was taken to the Civic Opera House on North Wacker Drive by her opera-enthusiast mother. Years later, she would walk away with First Prize at the 2012 Operalia Competition in Beijing. 

The latter could probably only have happened because of the former. Everything about the Lyric Opera of Chicago got under Janai’s skin, including the architecture. ‘The grandeur is the first thing that comes to mind,’ she says of the Art Deco style auditorium dating from 1929, one of the most distinctive in America. Janai remembers the ‘beautiful ceiling, gold trim everywhere and huge chandeliers…just like a castle for a little girl.’ 

Performance from the Ardis Krainik Auditorium at the Chicago Lyric Opera are available to watch on medici.tv, including this production (below) of Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice spearheaded by The Joffrey Ballet with choreography by John Neumeier. The start of the broadcast offers some great views of the theatre’s interior:

Even more than the aura of the building, it was what Janai heard inside it that led her into opera. Specifically, the transformative experience of hearing the Ohio-born soprano Kathleen Battle singing in recital there – Janai’s earliest memory of a performance at the Lyric Opera, and one that left an indelible mark. 

‘It is my most vivid memory – being extraordinarily moved not only by her voice but by the whole atmosphere and what was happening,’ she recalls. ‘I was all the way at the back of the auditorium, at the top, and she [Battle] sang something that was so pianissimo – which I wouldn’t have understood at the time – but it reached all the way as if she was singing right next to me. I was utterly in shock and so moved and remember experiencing goosebumps for the first time. I was in awe that she could do something like that.’ 

Of the fully staged operas Janai’s mother took her to, a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute stands out. ‘I loved the costumes and I loved the acting…and I loved to hear the orchestra play,’ Janai says. As so often with opera, it was the combination of elements that struck her – as it does so many other first-timers. ‘It’s extremely exciting and thrilling to see it all come together,’ she says; ‘it’s magical.’ 

All Coming Together

Opera is often so transfixing precisely because it shouldn’t really work at all; because it so often defies the rules of organisational gravity. As the late opera critic Bernard Williams once observed, in opera ‘a concrete feeling of performance and of the performers’ artistry is nearer the front of the mind than in other of the dramatic arts’.

Part of what he meant, surely, is that opera is a high-wire act. Things can go wrong, but opera’s risk factor is also one of its appeals – if only at a subconscious level. We like watching and hearing people like Janai do extraordinary things, not only because it upends our idea of what’s possible but also because it titillates us with the idea that this time, there’s a chance it might not work.   

Janai admits she was ‘beyond nervous – terrified, actually’ for her professional stage debut, when she sang the role of Barbarina in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. That was in Ian Judge’s lavish, period-piece production at the LA Opera. At the time, Janai was a member of the company’s Young Artist Program. 

First time nerves: what are they, really? In part, they’re a physical preparation for the demands of performance – including a heightened sense of arousal that allows the body and the mind to perform at a higher level (this is known as the Yerkes-Dodson Law). The release of Adrenalin is part of the process. 

Janai puts it helpfully in layman’s terms: ‘Nervousness is excitement – it helps you to focus, to lock-in, to absorb everything around you. I got tremendous support from the audience [during the LA Opera Figaro] – one of the best audiences out there, fully engaged and supportive – and from my colleagues on stage and in the pit’ (in the pit, incidentally, was one Plácido Domingo – no pressure there then). 

Role Debuts

When we talk, Janai is back at LA Opera – not as a trainee, but as one of the world’s leading sopranos, used to freelancing on major stages. This time the opera is La bohème and the role is not a supporting one but a lead. 

Surprisingly, Janai has never sung Mimì until now. Her debut in the role should have come in 2020, but was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Now is the right time, she asserts. ‘Back in 2020 I probably thought the role was too big for me, but my voice has changed and now I feel ready.’ Does it feel like a moment? ‘Yes, because it’s the biggest “staple” role I’ve done. Everyone knows Mimì. So it’s huge, monumental!’

There’s something special about it happening in the very same place where Janai made her professional debut fifteen years ago. ‘It’s definitely a feeling of “full circle” to get on that stage as Mimì,’ she says. ‘LA Opera is like a home theatre for me and one of the greatest things they do is put their Young Artists out there – put us on stage. I’ll always be grateful for that.’

And yet, we shouldn’t read too much into this particular First Time. Partly because it almost certainly won’t show. Janai’s preparation for role debuts is astonishing. When preparing to sing Tatjana in Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin, she translated the entire libretto from Russian to English, word-for-word, before undergoing intensive language training with a native Russian speaker. 

‘I did that so I could focus on something other than the language, so I could focus on the music,’ she says. ‘I was proud of the effort I put in but that’s what you do – that’s what we all do to prepare a role. We do our homework. The idea is that as your career progresses and you have less time because you’re working more, you’ll have developed tools so that you can pick things up faster.’

Janai counts herself lucky to have had the chance to ‘create’ a significant operatic role from scratch, as when she sang Mary Jane Bowser in the world premiere of Jake Heggie’s opera Intelligence at the Houston Grand Opera in 2023. 

The twist here was that Bowser is a historical character who actually lived – a slave-turned-spy in the era of the American Civil War. ‘When you are playing a character who was a living being, you really want to honour that person,’ she says. 

Most familiar operas have been performed across centuries and territories, traversing social, theatrical and musical contexts. We have some source material referring to reactions of the first ever performances of pieces like Figaro and La bohème, but it’s near-impossible to imagine what the ‘first time’ atmosphere at those performances was actually like – how, in other words, the works were born. 

So what does Janai remember of the first audience for Intelligence in Houston? ‘Hearing the audible gasps from the audience as they were discovering our characters is one of the most satisfying things I have experienced to date,’ she says. ‘It was exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time, because you don’t know how it’s going to be received.’

First Time Every Time 

Every first time, says Janai, is the start of a journey. ‘One of the things I love about opera is that no matter how many times you sing a role, there is always something new to discover and something to learn,’ she says. ‘It might be because your voice changes, because you’ve experienced more about life that you can channel into what’s happening emotionally or because of the energy that your colleagues bring. I always go in with a student mentality, where I’m open to learning and to different invitations.’

Many artists talk about approaching every performance as if it were the ‘first’ – even of a familiar work. Critics, too, talk of performances or recordings that make them feel as though they’re hearing familiar music ‘for the first time’ (usually a good thing).

It’s an idea reflected in TS Eliot’s famous poem Little Gidding, a reflection on ‘ceaseless exploration’ and its effect on familiarity; that along the journey of a truly searching life, an extremely familiar place or thing can be experienced ‘as if for the first time’. 

The most obvious manifestation of that, in recent cultural history, has been the arrival of Historically Informed Performance – the research-led movement that has sought to play music of the Baroque, Classical and later eras with more consideration of how they were conceived, including using instruments built with the materials and to the designs that the composers of the era would have known. The movement saw the creation of countless new ensembles including the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin and Les Arts Florissants. 

So perhaps we should see ‘first times’ as something not just to look back on, but something we aspire to recreate time and again. Certainly, they shouldn’t be confined to the past.

‘I don’t think you ever forget your firsts,’ says Janai. ‘You don’t forget where you were, those feelings, everything leading up to it. It’s the things never leave you.’

And winning Operalia way back in 2012? ‘Of course, winning is amazing – you certainly never forget that! But it was a shock to win Operalia. Never in a million years would I have said that I would have come out of that as a winner. I was just completely humbled by it.’