Making My First $50 as a Professional Singer

It all started with a little bottle of sparkling wine...

When I started singing opera, I never thought about making money with it. I just wanted to sing.

I wanted to sing the “right way,” study everything I could about proper classical singing technique and learn the repertoire for a tenor.

I had already been a worship leader at church in the past, so singing in front of people was something I was used to. Plus, since childhood, I’d taken private lessons for multiple instruments, including piano, trumpet, guitar, euphonium, and tuba.

I also played in a concert band in middle school, sang in a children’s chorus as a child, and sang in a chorale and chamber choir as an adult.

But all of that was just for fun because I love music.

Aside from thinking about busking for change at the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder (which I thought about but never ended up doing), getting paid to make music was not something I’d planned as an adult.

So, when I made my first money singing, it kind of hit me by surprise that this could even be a thing.

I was taking voice lessons from an instructor who had gone to Juilliard and had sung with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. This was a lot of hard work, but we still had fun from time to time.

My first “outing,” aside from the corny recitals we voice students did at my teacher’s home, was an event billed as “Brindisi: A Night of Opera and Broadway Favorites” at an art gallery in the mountains of Colorado.

Everything about it was embarrassing: the venue was beautiful, but it was embarrassingly tiny. A crappy makeshift stage was made just for the occasion, and an even crappier set of curtains was hung to create a “backstage” since there was none.

The musical selections chosen were… not what I would have picked. The backgrounds were nonexistent, the lighting was pitiful, and the acoustics were horrible.

We’d hung up little posters at coffee shops in the area to tell the locals about our small show. Tickets were $10 in advance and $12 at the door.

Overall, it was a fun evening. I sang some arias I knew by heart and participated in a few duets. But many things went wrong.

Because the whole thing was so disorganized, I didn’t know until the day before that I was tasked with singing “O Sole Mio,” a folk song in the Neapolitan language, instead of standard Italian, which I didn’t know at all.

Memorizing the chorus was easy enough (who hasn’t heard that tune before?), but when I got to the second verse on stage, my mind totally blanked, so I just started spouting out any and every Italian word I could think of, completely making it up as I went.

What was I singing about? Who knew!

I think I just started listing all the types of pasta I like to eat: penne, rigatoni, spaghetti, tortellini, and farfalle, then tried to tie it up with a bow by adding “un dolce ristoro al cor porgerà” (“will bring sweetest pleasure and nourish our hearts”).

BRAVO!

I figured nobody in the audience was Italian, and even if they were, they’d probably find it funny and think it was a clever joke.

At the end of the night, as I was getting ready to leave, a little girl came up to me with a printed program and asked me to autograph it.

That, I was not expecting. Bemused, I signed my name for the first and only time anyone has ever asked for my autograph. How hilarious.

The next week at voice lessons, my instructor handed me a small piece of paper folded in half, like a square.

“Huh? What’s this?” I asked.

“It’s your share of the proceeds from the show,” he said.

This, I was also not expecting.

I unfolded the check and saw that it said: “Ron Stauffer: $50.00.”

Just looking at that blew my mind. I had no idea we’d make any profits on this silly little show, but we did… sort of. It was just about enough money for one tank of gas, but still… what a game-changer! I had just gotten paid for singing!

In a sense, I was now officially a “professional singer.”

It was all so silly though: so much work for a whopping $50? That didn’t even come close to the thousands I’d paid by now for lessons, sheet music, accompaniment tracks, suits and ties, etc. But it was real money.

In the following years, the checks I got for singing got bigger and bigger. Being in the chorus of two professional opera companies never brought in big bucks but it did feel a lot more respectable.

Actually, I did make a decent chunk of change around Christmas time, singing for a Christmas Caroling troupe. For a few years, I put all my singing money toward buying Christmas presents for my kids, and that was awesome.

Yet, it all started that one evening near Valentine’s Day when I made my first $50 by faking my way through Italian folk songs I didn’t know until that week.

I don’t recall what I spent the money on, but I do remember this: I decided to get a bottle of Champagne to celebrate, since this was a significant milestone.

I went to a wine store and found some small bottles in the sparkling wine section. Instead of getting Champagne (which is from France), I got a tiny bottle of Prosecco (which is from Italy) since I was buying it with money I made singing Italian songs.

It cost me about $8, so I had about $42 left over.

I’m not the world’s greatest tenor, and $42 isn’t a big sum. But that night, sipping on a drink with tiny bubbles from a tiny bottle with a tiny amount of money I made from performing a tiny gig in a tiny art gallery and having a few bucks left over… that was just delightful.