Young People Find a Voice at Opera Camp

When the Washington Opera performs The Tales of Hoffmann this month, among the audience members will be a new generation of opera lovers. Many of the 38 youngsters, age 10 to 14, who spent their summer at the cultural organization’s opera camp, as well as their parents, have become so hooked on opera that they don’t want to miss an opportunity to see a performance.

The opera company has been running the four-week camp for the past seven years. Campers learn to perform an opera designed especially for children, take daily voice lessons, learn opera vocabulary, and get involved in set design and other aspects of opera production. At the end of the session, the youngsters hold free performances that are open to the public.

This summer, campers performed The Thunder of Horses, a 35-minute work about the Blackfoot Indians. The youngsters met one of the composers, Cary John Franklin, and learned about the dance, music, and storytelling traditions of the Blackfoot people. They also took a field trip to New York City to visit the National Museum of the American Indian and take a backstage tour of the Metropolitan Opera.

The camp alternates the focus on American Indians with a Holocaust theme built around the opera Brundibar, which was written by Hans Kraza, a Czechoslovakian composer, and first performed in Prague in 1939. It became a popular work in Terezin, a concentration camp where Jews from Czechoslovakia were sent, and the opera uses the work to teach youngsters how people enduring the horrors of the Nazi era continued to nurture their creative spirit. The opera camp collaborates with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to develop the curriculum, and takes the youngsters there several times during the summer.

Young people must audition for the opera camp. The camp charges $1,000 tuition for each participant, but provides scholarships to youngsters from needy families. Tuition fees provide about one-third of the $86,000 it costs to run the program; donations from local foundations, companies, and individuals pay for the rest.

Washington Opera makes numerous efforts to get parents involved in their youngsters’ summer activities. The parents spend a night working on the sets for the opera production and attend a professional performance with their children.

Several of the youngsters who have participated in the opera camp have returned year after year, according to the camp’s director, Debra Evans, and demand for more musical training led the opera to create a summer program for singers ages 15 to 18, in cooperation with the Catholic University of America.

While the opera created the camp mainly in the hope of producing future operagoers and donors, Ms. Evans says the more immediate results have been just as gratifying. “Kids who often feel like they are outsiders, like they are the opera geeks,” she says, “find others at camp who have mutual interests, and they make strong new friendships.”