Opera Singing in Germany and other adventures....

A very dear friend of mine recently asked me for information about practical opera matters which are the things that might only interest singers (or not) and anyway, I wanted to provide the answers that I'd be typing to her in an email also to all of you, so that everyone could benefit from what I'd be typing anyway :) (and also because I'm a stickler for not doing 'double-duty' when it comes to everything, lol).  Therefore, I will try to pose the answers to these questions in a series of posts- because when I considered what my answers to her questions would be- I realized they'd be WAY too long for just one post.  So, the first of these posts will be this one, and it will deal with: WHAT TO DO BEFORE YOU GO TO GERMANY (OR EUROPE) FOR AN AUDITION: First off, I have to explain that I do have a boyfriend in Germany and extended family there, so I never had to really worry about finding a long-term housing situation (which will probably be something that...

So, I have been notoriously bad at keeping abreast of the wave of things that have been happening here lately, however, I am making it up to you all right now by filling you in! This post will be dedicated to my positive experience in Stuttgart at an audition for their Bundesagentur fuer Kuenstlervermittlung (which covers the German States of Baden-Wuerttemberg, Saarland and Rheinland-Pfalz, and that's it--I think!) and which is basically a different branch of the same government agency that I visited in Cologne in June, but only covers the regions listed above in the parentheses. This particular experience was much MUCH easier and enjoyable than the one in Cologne from the very beginning. It was a four-hour drive to Stuttgart (closer to 4.5 more likely) and it was a gorgeous day! The sun was shining, it was hot and the sky was blue- so far, so good. Then, miraculously, we did not encounter a single traffic jam on the way there (which is a miracle considering that summer is ...