A tenor hits a homer: after 23 years in Bern's opera company, Charles Vail will go home to the United States at the end of the 2003-2004 theatre season. Bern will lose not only a good tenor, but also a dedicated baseball coach.
Not too many professional opera singers play baseball, but both music and sports have been part of Chuck Vali's life since he was a boy growing up in Illinois, and, luckily, he has never had to choose between them. As a young man, Vail never planned to become a singer. In fact, when he graduated from high school, he had no idea what he wanted to be. But his father was a veterinarian, so he enrolled in a two-year prevet program at Iowa State University, planning to attend the four-year vet school afterwards.
Before he left for college, he promised his mother that he would go over to the music department and audition for them. The result was a stipend that covered the cost of his voice lessons during college.
"I had had an excellent singing teacher in high school," Vail says, "and in my senior year I was Professor Hill in the school production of 'The Music Man'. I was also on baseball teams at every stage of growing up: Little League, Pony League, high school, and college. But I never thought seriously of music as a career, anymore than I did baseball."
The prospective veterinarian took physics and math, which he enjoyed, and organic chemistry, which he hated. And he sang. He was in a rock band and a madrigal group, as well as some musical-theatre productions. Then came the moment of truth. "I realized toward the end of the two-year program that I didn't have good enough grades to get into vet school. So what was I to do? Iowa State's other big program was agriculture, and I didn't see myself as a farmer. So I transferred to the music department and finished up my college years there. That's when I started to sing great parts-solos in the 'Messiah', the role of Goro in 'Madame Butterfly', and lots of others. Suddenly, it became possible to imagine music as a career."
From Iowa to Austria
Vail married in 1974. Then went on to the University of Nebraska for a Masters and to the University of Iowa for a PhD in music. There he did his dissertation on Mozart's 'The Magic Flute'. During his last year at Iowa, Rudolf Knoll, an Austrian from the Salzburg Mozarteum Conservatory of Music, came to teach a Master Class.
"l owe my success as a professional singer to Knoll," says Vail. "In Iowa he told me, 'I can improve your voice. Why don't you come to Salzburg and work with me?' So my wife and I moved there in 1979. Knoll had a good ear and was a very good technician, and he taught me a lot."
Like most professional musicians, Vail dreamed of a solo...
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