Profile | Canadian mezzo-soprano on finding her feet at the Metropolitan Opera, the anxiety to perform well, and why singing Carmen scares her
- Carolyn Sproule was sure from a young age she wanted to be a singer, but put so much pressure on herself as a Juilliard student she began to have doubts
- Now, she tells Kate Whitehead, she accepts the butterflies that come before a performance such as the title role in Opera Hong Kong’s production of Carmen
The sound of music I was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1988. I’d wanted to be a singer since I was four years old. My father is a lawyer and my mother a risk manager – they are both open-minded, curious people and were happy to nurture me doing whatever I wanted to do. My mother rented The Sound of Music movie when I was four and I fell in love with Julie Andrews. Every week we went to the video store to rent a movie and every week I’d ask for The Sound of Music.
When I was five, my mum bought me a Fisher-Price recording device and I’d go to the basement for hours and record myself singing over and over. I had the usual short attention span of a kid, but when it came to music, I could spend hours fixated. My mum tried to get me singing lessons when I was five, but no teacher would take on a five-year-old and they suggested she start me on piano. So I started learning at five and then started dance and acting lessons. In eighth grade, I sang O Holy Night in the school Christmas concert and felt very comfortable on stage.
Laser focus Throughout my teenage years, my goal was to learn one new song a week – to really learn how to play it properly on the piano and sing it. When I came home from school, I wouldn’t watch television, I’d go straight to the piano and play and sing. Pretty consistently, my singing and music teachers were telling me to take it a little easier; I was so keen.
There were so many amazing artists to listen to and learn from, there are so many interesting aspects to this art form – the languages, the style, the acting, the tradition of the artists that have done it before you – I found it an endlessly fascinating world.
When I was 14, my mother remarried and was moving to South Carolina (in the United States), I didn’t want to move there. I heard about an amazing boarding school called Interlochen Arts Academy, in Michigan, and applied and was accepted. I was there a year – it was a wonderful place, set in nature, where you did half the day in academic classes and half the day in music and acting and languages – and then I transferred to a similar school outside Boston, where there was a voice teacher who was amazing.