An aria crossed Parkway traffic in Philadelphia Monday afternoon.
The source of the song was tenor Issachah Savage. He was practicing “In Des Lebens Frühlingstagen,” a solo from Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio.
Savage countered the noise pollution of nearby construction and cars around Shakespeare Park by drilling the sky with phrases like “Gott! Welch Dunkel hier!" That means “God! What darkness here,” in German.
“I’m practicing my four-wall technique,” Savage said after I jaywalk-stalked the Pavarotti trail that led me to him. “I’m not paying attention to anyone or anything.”
His diction and his dog, a toy poodle named Bear, were Savage’s only focal points on Monday. A Philadelphia native who attended Creative and Performing Arts High School, Savage has spent his adult life touring the world as an opera star. He’s usually catching planes to play stages from Australia to Austria, Los Angeles to New York; this week, he’s “getting a bit of downtime at home, being a normal, regular human being.”
It was hard for passersby like myself not to turn their awareness away from speeding vehicles and towards the God-like voice slowly boasting itself out of the museum district's sliver of green space. Or towards the tiny pup punctuating a casual opera performance with soprano squeals of joy.
Savage and Bear met five years ago at a live show. That is, Savage sang at a private breeder's house to test a litters' tolerance for his voice after his wife worried he was so "big and loud" he might scare off little lap dogs.
Savage finished the saga then and there: “I started to sing, and 20 different puppies all ran away from me. Except Bear! He was actually named Timothy at the time.”
“So isn’t opera dead?” I asked Savage as he threw tennis balls for Bear to chase.
“Nein!” he declared. “A lot of people think that because so much of opera funding has dried up and so many opera goers are of an older generation.
“I think it’s just changing. We can label it gone, ineffective, inoperable. It’s simply in transition.”
While Savage primarily sings songs that are hundreds of years old — his favorite being Wagner’s 1845 opera, Tannhäuser — he pointed to several modern shows that intend to carry 21st century resonance: Fellow Travelers; Omar; Why the Caged Bird Sings.
“In Des Lebens Frühlingstagen,” meanwhile, translates to “In the Spring Days of Life.” The piece premiered in 1805. I heard it for the first time in 2025 thanks to Savage’s use of a public practice space.
“We can’t sustain opera by maintaining the puritanism of classical art,” Savage concluded. “Opera is powerful and relevant because it is free flowing. It’s absolutely magnanimous. It’s unbeatable because it calls upon every force.”
Savage is next off to Colorado to sing in Beethoven’s better known choral work, Symphony No. 9. He’ll miss Philadelphia when he goes: “Philly is like a mecca for any musical idiom you could look for; from Portuguese music to jazz to rock to R&B and certainly gospel and opera."
“I don’t often perform in Philly, but when I do it’s always a special time,” he said.
