Okay, let’s be honest—opera isn’t at the top of most people’s lists of super exciting activities. It’s a genre that often bores and intimidates people and reeks of a bygone era, but does it have to?
Not according to 26-year-old opera singer and content creator Jade Neal. After several major health scares and setbacks, opera lifted her up, and she’s ready to change the way people view it.
Flying Free
While Neal’s first exposure to opera was watching Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s 2004 film adaptation The Phantom of the Opera, she started singing it herself around age 12.
“I was skeptical at first when my voice teacher introduced me to it and thought I should try some classical stuff, but I absolutely fell in love,” the young opera singer admitted. “I loved the feeling of it.”
“It feels like you’re flying, and I loved how powerful it was and that it asked for my whole voice. I didn’t have to hold back.”
It Catches Up
Neal stuck with opera and decided to major in vocal performance in college. Unfortunately, the performance world is demanding and takes its toll on the body. A 2008 review of injuries sustained by musicians compiled by Michelle Heinan notes that “throughout the centuries, performing artists generally have kept physical problems and injuries to themselves.” As the saying goes, ‘The show must go on,’ and there are constant internal and external pressures perpetuating this attitude.
“Basically, I always had health issues… and my body just sort of fell apart,” Neal recalled. “The first big thing was actually breathing issues…due to issues with my diaphragm, and so that made it really hard to sing. I had to have a mass removed from my diaphragm, and then I was also diagnosed with celiac disease around the same time, but that didn’t seem to be the whole picture. I was having other symptoms.”
Despite feeling “extremely weak” and struggling to walk and stand for long periods, the young opera singer felt obligated to keep going. One show in particular stood out:
“I remember everything was falling apart, and I was doing a show at my college. I was backstage, and I just felt my heart doing weird things and I was extremely dizzy…”
“…there was a voice that was just like ‘This is it. That’s the end. This is your last time.'”
Sadly, Neal had to leave her major and her college altogether soon after this performance.
Lowest Points
Once she returned home, things only got worse. Neal’s symptoms amounted to something significant.
“It turned out that I had a connective tissue disease or disorder and a bunch of comorbidities that kind of wrecked my life.”
As Neal reflected on her lowest points during this health crisis, the young opera singer recalled the months before doctors put her on total parental nutrition or TPN.
“I had been slowly starving for months. I was incredibly weak. No one quite understood what was going on because I wasn’t starving in an obvious way. There were obscured blood tests and different factors, and I’d basically been on the couch for months.”
There is very little from this period that Neal remembers due to her nutritional deficiencies. Luckily, after months of suffering, help finally came.
“One day, a doctor was like ‘You can’t sit up; you need to go to the hospital.’ I went to the hospital. Because of that doctor’s note, they admitted me. They wouldn’t have otherwise because they thought I was fine, but once they hydrated me and looked at my labs again, they realized that I was actually deficient in things. And once I had a GI evaluation, it was decided to attempt tube feeding. That didn’t work. I had an endoscopy where things went really south and they were surprised that I woke up, and eventually, we ended up with TPN.”
Do I Dream Again?
In the music and performance world, community is everything. One 2006 survey demonstrates that music students prefer going to teachers and peers for support rather than seeking out help from medical professionals for their symptoms. Sadly, when Neal needed support the most, she felt spurned by her own community.
“As I said, I was being pushed really hard musically. And another factor there is no one really believed that anything was wrong in my music community, and so I kind of shunned it. I thought ‘Music is the problem, this is what made me sick.'”
While performance environments can certainly cause harm, Neal discovered something that completely changed her outlook.
“It was Music and the Mind edited by Renée Fleming and I read that and it talked about how music can actually be physically and mentally good for you, and it went into a lot of detail with that. And I started incorporating music back in my life. I started to realize that the people around me who were reinforcing that [music made me sick] weren’t good people.”
Of course, there’s more than just music to thank. Neal credits her TPN treatments, better management of her inflammation, and working with a different physical therapist with her rapid recovery. Neal is still on TPN but is working with her medical team to incorporate nutrition drinks as a potential replacement. She can also walk and stand unassisted for the first time since 2019. When asked if she believed returning to opera saved her life, Neal had this to say:
“For me, yeah. I guess you could say all music did, but my specialty is opera. I was struggling so much before I let music back into my life.”
“What I’ve realized is that my body grew around it, if that makes sense. It needs it.”
Opera Fusion and Social Media
While there is no set definition for opera fusion, Neal uses vocal opera technique to cover famous songs on her TikTok (@LowOxSinger) and Instagram (@jade.loren9).
“I plan on using opera fusion to introduce people to opera and I plan on one day creating my own works that incorporate opera. At the same time, I hope to work with different opera organizations to ensure that the product they’re presenting is accessible…”
When it comes to accessibility, opera has a lot of hurdles to overcome. This is something that Neal openly acknowledges.
“It is seen as something that is very stuffy and snobbish and, I’ll be perfectly honest, at times it can be. It can also be very expensive to attend opera events. Additionally, it’s often performed in languages that are not the common tongue of the country it’s being performed in.”
The young opera singer also acknowledged the sometimes obscure historical and literary references that younger audiences may not understand. While Neal acknowledges a need for “…modernized pieces that people can hold onto.”
“I think there is a way to incorporate that tradition into modern works…there are modern operas that do reference current events. They’ve had various responses from the public, but that is something that is being done in opera, and I think that’s something that should continue. Also, there are a lot of opera stories that aren’t rooted so heavily in literary or historical events. There are things that are digestible to modern audiences, and there are things we can make to be digestible to the average modern consumer.”
Through her social media presence, the young opera singer hopes to energize Gen Z around the genre and revive it.
“Gen Z should care about opera because it’s a beautiful art form that holds no limits as to what it can express. It could be about anything from the dramatized lives of royalty to drone warfare or being stuck in the belly of a whale. The singing and orchestration gives the creators a lot to work with and the audience a lot to love.”
Sing Once Again With Me
Since her return, Neal has performed with two opera companies and one choir. Of course, returning to performance wasn’t an easy choice.
“On a whim, I decided to sing with the chorus of an opera company. A friend of mine had shared that they were looking for people for an operetta they were doing, and I thought I was going to crash and burn.”
With her first performance coming up, the young opera singer redoubled her efforts in physical therapy. She focused on improving her strength and stamina. When asked about significant milestones in her preparation, Neal had this to say:
“I think one of the first moments was I was gearing up for the operetta that I was doing, and we were rehearsing, and it was time for us to stand. For all the music rehearsals we had been sitting most of the time and it was time for us to start standing most of the time. I was very nervous about this because I had been using a walker and not standing for long periods of time at all. And we did the rehearsal and I did it. I was okay.”
Things did not crash and burn. In fact, the opposite happened.
“I feel like I’m proving myself to myself and it’s been fun, honestly. A lot of it has been fun, just working with really talented individuals, an amazing conductor, and making something really beautiful has been great.”
