Mary works in Nordstrom’s fashion jewelry department. Genevieve has her own Internet start-up. One man works in a cancer research lab. Another woman is a nanny. And you would never think it to look at their jobs, but every one of these 20-somethings is a classically trained opera singer with a graduate degree from one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

“It scares me to see all the grad students who graduated (from Northwestern), and none of them have jobs,” Senior voice major Melissa Treinkman said. “I mean, they may have jobs, but most of them are not making their living singing,”

Enter Mary Lutz, Genevieve Thiers, and their brainchild OperaModa. After these two women received their master’s degrees (Lutz in 2003, Thiers in 2004) from NU’s School of Music, they decided to create an opera company in which recent voice graduates would have the opportunity to add a professional role to their resume, thus helping them bridge the awkward gap between school and full-time professional work.

Both Thiers, the company’s general director, and Lutz, its artistic director, will perform in OperaModa’s premiere production, “Tartuffe,” running this weekend at the Athenaeum Theatre (2936 N. Southport Ave.).

And the company’s NU links hardly stop with its founders. NU students fill the positions of stage manager, orchestra musicians, music director, rehearsal pianist and all but two performers.

“It’s just Northwestern-tastic in this show!” Lutz said.

CULTIVATING THE COMPANY

Lutz and Thiers were inspired to create OperaModa when they completed graduate school and found themselves with a rare opportunity. While still in school the two had performed in a student-run production of “Dialogues of the Carmelites.” Peter MacDowell, the artistic director of the Chicago Cultural Center, offered the students funding and use of the Center to perform the opera again, and the students agreed. With 600 people in the audience, the show was a wild success.

“(Thiers) and I got to talking about, ‘What if we kept doing this?” Lutz said. “This was a great experience for everyone in it. Everyone got to put another role on their resume, everybody got to learn all about the production of a show, so why don’t we do more?'”

In fall 2003 the two discussed putting on their own show, but because Thiers was in her last year of graduate school and Lutz had just begun her first 40 hour/week job, the show didn’t come together until spring 2004, when Lutz had a job with more flexible hours and Thiers was approaching the end of graduate school.

When the two were working out the initial details of the company, Thiers, as producer, was in charge of funding, which has come from a combination of private donations and seed money from the four founders — Dan Ratner, Stay Ratner, Thiers and Lutz. Saint Scholastica Academy, a Benedictine Catholic girls’ high school in Chicago, donated their space for the opera’s rehearsals.

“These four founders and the independent donations have helped us afford the theater, crew, director and orchestra, and most importantly, they have allowed us to offer payment to the cast, since helping young artists is the primary thing that we are all about,” Thiers said.

Because its members are generally young, most of the company either have full-time jobs or are still in school, so the rehearsals are at night. The average age of a person in the company is 28, which is considerably younger than the average opera singer.

“For an opera singer, unless they’re a prodigy or very lucky, their voice peaks somewhere between 35 and 48. If you’re under 35, you’re considered a young artist,” Lutz said.

Older singers often are preferred, in part, because their voices are more mature, said Sunny Joy Langton, an assistant professor of voice at the School of Music. Both Lutz and Thiers studied with Langton during graduate school, and Thiers continues to do so.

“Mary has an instrument that’s a big voice, but she’s still a young singer, so she sort of has to wait to be more settled vocally and more mature to do the kinds of roles that her voice is right for,” Langton said. “For all young singers, going from college, where you are a non-professional, into the professional world, you’re trying to make contacts and establish yourself in terms of reputation without having any professional experience.”

This need for professional experience in order to develop a professional reputation amounts to a Catch 22 for many singers.

“All of the good music schools, including Northwestern, do a good job of training their singers, but once they graduate, they are released into a large pool of aspiring professionals competing for recognition,” Langton said. “Basically opera is one of those forms of art that is very expensive, and so a lot of the professional companies want to hire someone that is either a known quantity or a proven quantity. A degree from a university doesn’t necessarily make you a proven quantity, unfortunately. It’s basically being given visibility in a competitive marketplace that is the most difficult thing.”

Treinkman summed up this idea bluntly.

“When you’re 24 and you’re just out of grad school, unless you make it into one of the very, very competitive apprentice programs, you’re kind of screwed,” she said.

BYPASSING “BOHEME”

OperaModa’s premier fits well with the company’s desire to perform non-traditional opera. Kirke Mechem, an American composer, wrote the work as an operatic version of the Moli