Why I love my job: Walter Huff, chorus master, Atlanta Opera

> What I do: Behind the Luciano Pavarottis or Leontyne Prices on every opera stage are dozens of singers in the chorus, many with aspirations of stardom and most with day jobs.

It’s Walter Huff’s job to train, blend and encourage those voices at the Atlanta Opera, where he is the chorus master. From a core group of 50 to 60 regular singers, he holds auditions and selects anywhere from 15 to 50 members of the chorus, depending on musical needs and the budget, for each opera. He’s always listening for new voices, he added.

“I’m responsible for their performance, seeing them through to the end,” Huff said. “Whenever the chorus is there, I’m there,” he said.

That includes warming up the singers before the performance, listening and critiquing each singer from rehearsal to rehearsal and performance to performance.

The chorus’ work begins as much as three months before the first performance. “We start working on the music and the language,” he said. Besides Italian, many operas also are sung in German and French.

“Every opera can be a different mix,” he said, with some works requiring “big” voices and others another blend of men’s and women’s voices.

The chorus has a primary role in any opera, more than just backing up the principal singers. “We live on stage with them; we interact,” Huff said. He and the chorus also coordinate with the opera’s director and the orchestra’s conductor, who deal directly with the principal singers.

Unlike a choir, Huff said, members of an opera chorus must memorize their music, and members also have to be the supporting actors who must react to the action in the play and move around the stage.

Huff just completed a European tour with members of the Atlanta Opera’s chorus, where they performed “Porgy and Bess” to acclaim in conjunction with the Opera-Comique of Paris.

> What got me interested in this: “I started playing the piano in the second grade, and I sang very early in the church choir,” Huff said.

In college, he majored in piano while working with singers as an accompanist. “I enjoyed the interaction and the repertoire.”

Huff said he attended his first opera when he was 9 or 10 and took tours of the Metropolitan Opera in New York when he was a child. “I started listening to opera at a pretty early age,” he said. “I’ve been surrounded by singers and choirs as long as I’ve been around.”

While he has studied voice, Huff said, “I wouldn’t get up on stage. I have a very good instinct for singers and can choose the best techniques to help them sing.”

> Best part of my job: “The people and their creativity,” Huff said.

Part of that, he added, is “being able to be exposed to the great masters,” being able to develop singers’ creativity and talent and being able to pull in and communicate the music to an audience. “It’s the people and the music and what music can bring to us.”

“And eight weeks in Europe wasn’t bad” this summer, he said.

> Most challenging part: “Schedules, schedules, schedules,” Huff said.

Because most members of the chorus are not full-time musicians, they have day jobs and conflicting demands.

“The people I work with are very busy people,” he said. And because the chorus works as a group, having everyone at rehearsals and performances is important.

> What people don’t know about my job: “The actual technique of what a chorus does,” he said. Besides memorizing music, chorus members “never know where they will be standing or what costume they will be wearing,” including hats or wigs that might interfere with their vision of the conductor.

A singer who is a soldier in one performance may be a townsperson in the next. And voices are not amplified with microphones in the opera, he added.

> What keeps me going: “Eight hours of sleep,” Huff said. “And I’m a fan of vitamin water before rehearsal.”

Huff said he tries not to do a lot of other things on the day of an important performance or rehearsal.

“I’m not a multitasker,” he said, as he tries “to be very positive oriented.”

> Preparation needed for this job: “You can’t do what I do without piano skills,” said Huff in the chorus’ rehearsal room, where he leads the singers from behind the keyboard.

In addition, a chorus master must know the operatic literature, the languages and the music. “You have to understand choral technique and how to get a unified sound from a group of people,” he added.

Sometimes, he said, that takes “a lot of psychology. There are a lot of talented people in one room.”

Huff said he must keep them motivated and working as a group while maintaining a sense of community. “We see a lot of each other,” he said.

Huff has a bachelor’s degree in music from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio and a master’s of music from the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

He has been with the Atlanta Opera for 18 years while also serving as choirmaster at Morningside Presbyterian Church. In addition, he also gives private voice lessons and teaches voice classes at Paideia School.

“Working in opera is constant study,” he said, which means listening frequently to his “extensive” collection of LPs and CDs.

Karl W. Ritzler For the AJC Got an interesting job that you love? E-mail your story to jobseditor @yahoo.com.