BIG INTERVIEW: Tipperary tenor Joe Roche on the challenges of his life in music

Clonmel tenor Joe Roche sits down to speak to High School student Cathal Walsh

On Friday, January 12, I sat down with acclaimed opera singer Joe Roche. A tenor, born and raised in Clonmel, Joe first came to my attention in Peadar Bradshaw’s excellent Clonmel High School documentary: How Music Changed My Life.

Joe is a member of Welsh National Opera House as a member of the chorus but has played various roles throughout his varied career.

He grew up on Dillon Street with his parents Jim and Nuala Roche.

He went to Ss Peter & Paul’s and the High School and studied psychology at Trinity College and opera at the Royal College of Music in London.

Joe is currently on the Masters programme in Music Therapy at the University of Limerick.

He has been working as an opera singer for over twenty years, spending the greatest time in the Royal Opera House chorus and the chorus of Welsh National Opera, where his wife Paula and he have worked for the last ten years.

Q: I’m sure the readers would be enthralled to know your coffee order?

Just a black Americano. During the pandemic, my wife became very aware of the ills of sugar, and I always took my coffee white and with sugar. I decided to try it black. It tasted like muck. It’s funny your taste buds adapt. Things that were very plain before you suddenly begin to detect flavours in them. They come to life.

Q: Talk to me about the discipline involved in opera?

Diet, nutrition do matter. There’s a statistic that said that the primary cause of 75% of vocal disorders is gastric reflux, and a contributing cause in over 90%. People would commonly think of vocal strain, overuse, or poor technique, sinus problems. But even say, I discovered early on, alcohol and singing, and smoking certainly. But what I didn’t realise back then was the immediate impact alcohol and smoking have on the way down, it’s the problems that they cause afterwards that do the majority of the damage.

It took me quite a while to work it out, that after a heavy night out the best thing to do to get my voice back was to fast, for 36 or 48 hours. I’m not recommending that by any means, but I think it highlights that the continuing stomach issues that actually really do the damage. Even stress, emotional stress, you know your stomach is sometimes referred to as your second brain. Very close relationship with your emotional state but also impacts your emotional state. In that sense, if you were looking to maintain strict vocal health and work through intense rehearsal periods, then watching how you eat, what you eat and when you eat is actually pretty critical. That’s not to say all good or successful singers do it.

Q: On mental state of opera?

There’s a very deep seated stereotype of the opera singer being obese and there’s a good reason for that. It’s an emotionally draining profession, and can be lonely. The main reason why you might have a higher proportion of overweight opera singers versus overweight engineers, is because engineers generally don’t have to spend weeks by themselves in hotel rooms, trying to put down time, trying not to talk, trying not to use their voice too much. So that they can maintain the stamina to work through rehearsal periods, especially nowadays.

There was a time when you had two days of intense rehearsals, then a day off, then another two, then a day off, then a dress rehearsal (practice before the actual show)then a day off then the show. That can all be compressed in now, with no days off, leading right up to opening night, the significance of opening night is that’s always when the critics come so potentially the standard or existence of work for the next two years, might depend on how you do on Saturday night, and you might have seven hours rehearsals Monday to Friday to be critiqued by the world on how you do Saturday night. Emotionally, that plays havoc with people.

Being a soloist really didn’t suit me. I genuinely didn’t have the emotional stamina for it. I became quite depressed at one point and I decided I really wanted to sing, I really wanted to work in opera, but be a chorister (in the chorus of a show singing essentially background vocals) and play maybe secondary roles.

Q: What was the catalyst for performance in your life and what drove you towards opera?

I wanted to do singing musicals, I did the High School Musical, Oklahoma, in 1991. I loved it, I enjoyed being on stage. I played the secondary lead role. I remember being disgusted and demanded an answer from Michael O’Donoghue (director) he said “there’s two of ye, could do either, I’ve seen you can dance a few steps, and he can’t dance a single step”.

After that, I joined the Gable Youth Theatre under Mary Cummins, I did a couple shows with her, a couple shows with St Mary’s Choral Society, and after that I wanted to sing in musicals professionally, that was my dream. I liked Andrew Lloyd Webber, as well as Rodgers and Hammerstein, and the older stuff. I went for singing lessons, and the teacher told me “if you want to be a real singer, you want to be an opera singer”. So he told me I should listen to Tosca (Puccini), and it bored me to tears. I said no, not feeling it. So he said ok just listen to this one bit of it, four minutes, over and over again, until you begin to gain a bit of appreciation for it. That’s when I discovered, really good music often takes a while to sink in, that the thing you enjoy immediately, is often the thing you get bored of most quickly.

Q: Making opera your career, how do you still find passion and love in it?

Well, I’m in the middle of changing my career, I’m retraining to be a musical therapist. One of the reasons was because during the pandemic, I was doing some work online with a few groups in Wales, mainly working with elderly people who were largely isolated due to the pandemic and their situation, suffering from dementia of one type or another. That was brought home to me, this time last year, my dad got a heart attack, he was in the hospital for five weeks, I took a break from work and I came to care for my mother who has Alzheimers. And that kind of solidified my belief that music, at that moment for me, could do more than entertain. Opera is an amazing thing and I’ve been immersed in it for about 20 years. I’ve decided I want to do something else. I’m starting placement at ChildVision, which is St Joseph’s School for Visual Impairment, as well as visual impairment, most have multiple disabilities, and some have complex special needs.

Music therapy is about using music and its elements to address non-musical goals. So, functional, cognitive, emotional, social needs of people but using music as a bridge. A lot of people who would make use of music therapy wouldn’t really be able to use talk therapy, they may not even be verbal. So what music allows is to find a common language between people, and children will respond. Every child, every human being is an inner musician that can listen to, appreciate, or express themselves through music. It may be something incredibly simple but they’re still expressing themselves. When you have a child who is on the verge of being “locked in” because of their disabilities, one of the problems they have is that in normal development, a child gains confidence by experiencing that they can have an impact on the world. That something they do, creates change. That gives them feedback which they can acknowledge and use to then decide what their next move is.

So, children of these levels of disabilities, under normal circumstances, don’t have that experience. They don’t get to influence the world around them. But we can show them musically, they do. It might be as simple as beating a drum and having someone beating back in response, or hammering the high notes on the piano, and having someone respond on the other end. It’s amazing to see a child that barely seems to acknowledge the presence of someone else, suddenly realise that there is someone “talking back” to them. Over a period of days and weeks, watch them come out of themselves, and gain confidence and start to smile and laugh. They have a shared focus on the same thing, and they may never have experienced that before. That’s really powerful.

Q: Advice on how to get into opera? Is there an appetite for opera still?

It depends on your outlook. There is a surreal level of engagement in a great opera, performed well, by a great cast,conductor orchestra and directed well. But to say there is an appetite for it would be wrong. I think that it’s one of those things, and it goes for a lot of things. I once interviewed the head of Irish National Opera, and he said “there may not be, but imagine how much interest there would be in cinema in this country, if we showed two movies twice a year”. You have to create audience, you have to create appetite. If people don’t have access to something they don’t get to experience it. If your options are recordings and DVDs, they’re not the same. One of the reasons opera is so big in Germany still is because there’s so much of it. If you’re going to see an opera for the first time, always get really familiar with it first, spoilers are good! Listen to it at least four or five times beforehand. Because the more familiar you are with it, the more you’ll enjoy/get out of it.”