About the artist

Sydnee Waggoner fell in love with opera at the age of 11. As one of her graduate school instructors explained, she must weave a sense of literature and history through her artistry.

2018 Project Award

She will continue her operatic training and take advantage of performance opportunities in Europe, with a base in Prague. She will focus on learning European style, working on nuance, detail, and perfecting pronunciation in applied settings as she understudies and performs leading roles.

Coloratura, cabaletta, cadenza

The Foundation partnered with 49 Writers, a literary nonprofit, to profile Individual Artist Award recipients from 2017 and 2018.

Profile by Corinna Cook

Blue light bathes the stage. An orchestra waits. As if deep underwater, everything is still. Or perhaps everything is swaying, as even the bottom of the sea is tied to forces playing out at the surface. As the stage grows strangely permeated with the sense of things beyond, soprano Sydnee Waggoner enters. Her gown slices the blue and the stillness and the silence and now the audience is standing, applauding, whistling. She will sing.

At 6 years old, she saw a community theatre production of “Snow White” with her mother. Waggoner, knew that from that moment on that she needed to be onstage.

Waggoner first took voice and piano lessons from frequent Anchorage Opera performer Marlene Bateman. Then Waggoner’s purpose came into focus came when she saw her beloved teacher Marlene sing the contralto part of Maddalena in Anchorage Opera’s production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto.” Waggoner writes, “I remember it like a snapshot: watching from the Atwood Concert Hall balcony as Gilda, the soprano, dies in Act Three singing the entire finale lying on her back. I was in awe.”

That awe is what one of Waggoner’s graduate school teachers, Neil Rosenshein, calls visceral impact. He sees it as the key to keeping opera alive in today’s world. “The art itself is unbelievably brilliant and worth the effort,” he says. “But it takes a certain amount of effort to understand what it is you are experiencing.”

Intellectual understanding is not, however, what Rosenshein means here: in Rosenshein’s eyes, subtitles and superscripts (live-time textual translations of the singing) have failed the opera community. “Subtitles were supposed to be a way into this complex art, but they make it too right brain, left brain,” says Rosenshein. In other words, reading along with an opera interrupts the important thing—the experience of the heart.

Indeed, it was 11-year-old Waggoner’s experience of Rigoletto that hooked her on opera in the first place. But it was not only visceral appreciation she felt during the performance’s thrilling combination of music and acting. More precisely, it was self-recognition. “I felt most like myself onstage,” she writes. “This was what I needed to do.”

And she did. Waggoner pursued professional vocal training as an undergraduate at Boston University. In 2009 she was crowned Miss Alaska and served a term competing at the national Miss America level. “When she was crowned Miss Alaska, she was ecstatic,” says soprano Maria Spacagna, Waggoner’s voice teacher at BU. “It was a major event that Sydnee experienced in her senior year which contributed to her growth.”

Waggoner continued her vocal training as a graduate student at the Manhattan School of Music. Finally, Waggoner went to work with a master voice technician to develop her “coloratura” voice type—she has a very agile, light soprano well suited to runs and complex ornamentation.

“Singers are born with the gift of song and must be careful to cultivate their voices by taking care of their health, being in good spirits, [and] being disciplined in their preparation of the music they will perform,” says Spacagna. “I think that Sydnee has worked hard to achieve the successes she has had thus far because she adhered to these important things.”

Singing, though, is only one part of what opera requires. “When you train people for [opera], what you’re doing is training people not only vocally,” says Rosenshein, “but you’re actually trying to train them aesthetically and artistically so that people have a sense of literature, of history. Most other disciplines, you won’t have to deal with the sense of history that you do in opera.”

From classical to contemporary, history permeates opera. Perhaps it is this consciously deep lineage — musical, theatrical, political, psychological — that permits opera to reach through its own ornate formalities to impact us so viscerally.

For Rosenshein in fact, professional training in opera is only secondarily about technical form. First and foremost, he says, is to understand “that this is not a job about sound. It’s a job about communication.”

That is why community connection is paramount. And in Alaska, separated by geography and time zones from the rest of the global opera community, opera companies’ connection to local people is paramount. It is especially fitting, then, that Waggoner made her professional debut back in her home state of Alaska. In 2013, she sang Giannetta and covered the lead role of Adina in Donizetti’s “L’elisir d’amore” with Opera Fairbanks.

In her hometown of Anchorage where Waggoner first recognized her calling as a soprano, the local opera company is building new and culturally responsive relationships with Alaska Native communities. Reed Smith, director of Anchorage Opera, highlights “Aklak & Nayak,” an Alaska Native adaptation of Hansel and Gretel that combined operatic traditions with an Alaska setting and Indigenous storytelling traditions. The opera was performed in Anchorage and toured in Unalakleet and Nome. In future seasons, Smith hopes to bring a Victoria and Vancouver opera about missing and murdered Indigenous women, “Missing,” to Alaskan audiences.

As an individual, Waggoner also has a part in building cultural bridges. Most recently, Waggoner’s Rasmuson Foundation Award helped her spend a year performing in the Czech Republic and furthering her training in European style. “Europe is still a hotbed of classical music and the birthplace of many operas,” Waggoner writes. “It is essential to immerse oneself in the art form’s cultural origin — to be living, working and breathing in the place where opera was born.” This cross-cultural and multi-lingual foundation positions Waggoner to bring a great deal back to Alaska’s performing arts communities.

On that blue-lit stage in Miami Beach, Waggoner’s delicate high attacks touch on human yearning and her character’s simplicity. She relishes the aria’s fluid, legato phrases as her melody sails over the orchestra. Then comes the “cabaletta,” the aria’s second half featuring rapidity, ease and excitement: now dexterity and accuracy become king and queen. Waggoner’s voice leaps and flashes like a whole school of silver fish. There is joy, yes, but she rides special depths toward the aria’s final cadenza. She’s singing “Caro nome che il mio cor” — “sweet name that made my heart” — as “Rigoletto’s” Gilda.

Listen and watch  Sydnee Waggoner perform in “Rigoletto.”

Writer Corinna Cook’s first essay collection, “Leavetakings,” was published in fall 2020. Her current essays-in-progress focus on Alaska and Yukon artwork, biomes and histories.