Caught Without the Pill: A Surprise Solo in a Major Opera House
- Gökçe Kutsal
- Apr 11, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
* This story is shared with care. To respect the client’s privacy, some details have been changed. The essence of their experience and the outcomes remain true.
When I first met this client, what stood out wasn't just the quality of her voice. It was the steadiness and warmth she brought into conversation — the way she listened, the slight pause before she answered. The kind of presence that, on a good day, would translate beautifully to the stage.
She was a classically trained opera singer with a BA and MA in vocal performance and over a decade of professional work behind her. Her voice had agility, colour, and real expressive range. She was already performing regularly as part of a respected opera choir.
But she hadn't trained for years to remain in the chorus.
She wanted to sing arias. She wanted solo roles. She wanted to step into the centre of the stage, not the row behind it. And every time a solo opportunity appeared, something inside her tightened instantly. Thoughts about judgement, mistakes, ridicule, technical failure... phe panic would arrive before she'd had a chance to orient herself, let alone sing the line.
The Feedback That Cracked Something Open
This wasn’t only about nerves.
Around the same time, a new voice teacher had told her that her technique needed to be rebuilt from the ground up.
After ten years of professional singing, that kind of feedback lands badly no matter who's delivering it. (Whether or not the teacher was right is beside the point. What mattered was what the comment did to her sense of confidence and standing.) Even in lessons, anxiety started showing up in her body before she'd opened her mouth: A knot in her throat, shallow breath, dry mouth... plus an occasional tremor in the sound that hadn't been there a year earlier.
The painful part was that none of this reflected what she could actually do. Her natural tone was beautiful. Her musical presence and acting skills were compelling. The gap between how she sounded and how she felt had become exhausting to carry.
The Pill In The Bag
This wasn't her first attempt at managing performance anxiety either.
Years earlier, a teacher had suggested beta blockers — a common enough recommendation in the singing world. She'd been using them ever since for solos, for auditions, for anything where the stakes felt high enough to need a chemical floor underneath her.
The pill helped her get through. That part was real. But over time, it had also started to dull her emotional range, flattening exactly the colour and presence that made her singing hers. She could deliver the notes, yes, but she couldn't quite be there with them.
And there was something else, harder to name: The pill had become a condition of her performing at all. A small, daily reminder that she couldn't be trusted to do this without it. She wanted an alternative that didn't sit in the bottom of her bag like a question mark.
How We Worked
We began during the pandemic, which gave us time and an unusual amount of stillness to work with.
As I often do, we started with values. What did she actually want her singing life to be about? Why solos, why now, why this particular career? Technical excellence was central, which made sense given the recent feedback. But underneath that was a more important question about her relationship with the inner critic that had become almost constant.
She'd tried therapy before. She'd tried mindfulness. Neither had landed for her — something I see often, because both can be the right tool and the wrong fit, depending on the person and the moment.
So we worked differently. Rather than formal daily practices, we built brief, low-pressure moments of sensory awareness into her day. Noticing the thought patterns as they appeared, without engaging with them. Learning where to put her attention when fear arrived, rather than trying to argue it away. (Anxiety isn't a logic problem, you can't reason your way out of a survival state. But you can learn to stay oriented inside it.)
Even with this light-touch approach, her insight grew quickly:
“I realised I could just not concentrate on other people watching me and listening to me. I could just concentrate on what I have to do. Even that small thing changed the whole perspective.”
It sounds like such a small thing, but it made all the difference.
What The Numbers Showed
We tracked her progress with two measures, which I want to share because they tell part of the story that quotes alone can't.
The Kenny Music Performance Anxiety Inventory (KMPAI) is a research-grade measure used widely in performance anxiety studies. (It was also one of the tools I'd worked with extensively during my MA project on coaching for music performance anxiety, so I knew what to do with the results.) Scores above 105 typically indicate problematic levels of music performance anxiety.
She started at 158.
After six sessions, she was at 110 — just above the clinical threshold.
We also used the Experiential Shame Scale (ESS), which captures something often missed in performance work: Not just shame about the music, but shame about having anxiety in the first place. A lot of musicians carry that quietly, the meta-layer of "what's wrong with me that I'm still struggling with this". Her score on the ESS dropped from 5.9 to 2.2.
The numbers matter, but I want to be clear about what they're measuring. They're not measuring how brave she became, or how much she "overcame", I find these frames unhelpful. They're measuring a change in the relationship between her and the pressure. Essentially, pointing towards a wider window of tolerance to actually do the work she wanted to do.
In her words:
“It’s easier now I know what I have to do... even if you’re not able to do it 100% all the time, it’s a big step forward.”
The Night Without The Pill
Then came the moment...
When pandemic restrictions lifted and opera performances resumed, she returned to the stage. Midway through one production, the scheduled soloist tested positive for Covid. With no time to prepare, she was asked to step in and sing the solo — in a major opera house, on a stage she'd never sung a solo on before.
As you might imagine, anxiety hit. Instinctively, she reached into her bag for a beta blocker.
It wasn't there.
There's a moment that happens, sometimes, when the thing you've been quietly relying on isn't available, and you realise you're going to have to find out what's underneath. She had a few seconds of that... you know, the drop, the panic, the recalibration. And then she went on.
She sang the solo. Without the pill. With anxiety fully present in her body. And it went well... really well.
“Even though anxiety was taking over, it was a big step forward and I managed to go through it and be in the moment. It was my first solo in a big house and also without a beta-blocker. It went really well. It was a big achievement!”
It was. I'd add only this: The night wasn't a triumph over fear. The fear was right there, present and loud, and she sang anyway. That's a different kind of accomplishment, and in my experience, a more durable one.
You can't build a career on the absence of fear. You can build one on knowing what to do when it arrives.
What had changed wasn't the size of her anxiety. It was her relationship to it. The pill had moved from being a condition of performing to being one option among others — and on that night, the option she didn't have turned out to be the one she didn't need.
About
I'm Gökçe Kutsal, a performance coach for professional orchestra musicians and opera singers, with an MA in Voice Pedagogy and over 2,100 hours of coaching and teaching experience. I work with principals, titled positions, and audition candidates across Europe, the UK, North America, and Australia — and I write about performance anxiety, audition preparation, and the craft of practice for musicians who already have the technique and are trying to work out why it doesn't always hold up under pressure.
