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By ALEXANDRA LEVIT

Q: I am driven, hard working and smart, but I lack the self-discipline to look for a job. I have hired a career counselor, but I still can’t muster the motivation I need and am always procrastinating. Do you have any advice for being a more effective job seeker?

A: Acknowledging the fact that you have a problem with self-discipline is half the battle. Next, you need to employ some strategies to conquer your natural tendency toward procrastination. Create a calendar of job search-related tasks that you will do each day and concentrate on checking as many of them off the list as you can. When the urge comes to do something else instead, force yourself to think about whether a momentary reprieve is worth having to overhaul the whole calendar to reschedule a particular task. You should also think about the big picture. Sometimes the most effective job hunting activities require the most effort and, in turn, produce the greatest rewards — like a job that is satisfying and pays well. A final trick I use for procrastination is to start with the least complicated part of a particular task. Once I’ve finished one component, I gain momentum and it’s a lot easier to keep moving.

Q: I’ve worked at a series of small companies where I’ve mostly done in-house computer programming. The projects were designed by me, built by me and serviced by me. However, my methods have since been replaced and I have no intention of learning new ones. I’m not sure what to do next. I’m nervous about entrepreneurship or working for a large company.

A: Here’s the thing that stood out to me in your e-mail: “I have no intention of learning new methods.” In order to stay marketable in any field, you have to keep your skills current. This is especially true in information technology, where technologies change rapidly. I know that it can be frustrating to be at a certain level in your career and still need to pursue education or certification, but to refuse to do so simply isn’t practical. It seems to me that starting your own business or making the transition to a different type of organization won’t solve your problem and will probably result in more work than revisiting your programming methods and determining what you need to learn to develop these home-grown applications in a twenty-first century small to medium-sized business.

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Get motivated to hunt for a job.

Q: For 20 years, I ran an enormously successful business in Massachusetts, raised and educated three children, and kept a nice home. I retired, moved to California, began teaching, and pursued graduate education. Along the way I noticed gaping holes in knowledge among the students, so I wrote a book comparing those who succeed to those who fail. Now, I’m running up against brick walls promoting the book. What can I do to get my work reviewed?

A: Many people believe that the hardest part about writing a book is coming up with 60,000 words worth of material, but this is not the case. Promotion, which these days is moreand more the responsibility of the author, is far more difficult. Now that more than 300,000 new titles are published every year, even with an established platform in a particular industry it’s hard to get noticed amidst all the noise. So don’t be too hard on yourself. That said, there is one major thing that you can do to increase the likelihood that your book will get real or virtual ink. First, get to know the editors at the education trades and the writers of related blogs; volunteer to write expert guest pieces for them (instead of asking them outright for reviews). You’ll be providing valuable content to their readers and your book will be promoted indirectly through the byline you’ll get at the end of each piece.

Write to Alexandra Levit at reinvent@wsj.com

By DAVID MERMELSTEIN

New York

The Finnish soprano Karita Mattila brings extraordinary intensity to her operatic roles. But the emotions don’t stop at the footlights. Ms. Mattila is a diva of the old school, high-strung and deeply passionate off stage as well as on. She has enjoyed many triumphs at the Metropolitan Opera since first appearing there in 1990—in Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Puccini—but she may be best known these days as a blond-bombshell Salome and a thoroughly miscast Tosca. More widely praised, at the Met and elsewhere, have been her portrayals of the anguished title characters in “Jenůfa” and “Kat’a Kabanova” by the Czech composer Leoš Janáček.

On Friday, the soprano adds another Janáček heroine to her Met roster: the formidable, and possibly immortal, opera singer Emilia Marty in “The Makropulos Case.” The run, limited to five performances through May 11, revives for the first time in more than a decade Elijah Moshinsky’s 1996 production, initially mounted with Jessye Norman.

Jeffrey Smith/Lauri Eriksson

Karita Mattila

“I was kind of hesitating, because I knew this wouldn’t be a new production,” Ms. Mattila, age 51, said, perched on a sofa at her hotel near Lincoln Center. Dressed fashionably in a sleeveless gray dress and lilac wrap, her makeup camera-ready, she spoke with a lilting accent that lent her words a songlike quality. “But the original director is coming to redirect it himself. That made a big difference. It’s still a challenge to make it your own. I’ve deserved all the new productions I’ve had. I’m spoiled and so fortunate. It requires a different attitude to do an old production. But it helps enormously to have the original director—and to have done such a good production already.”

She is alluding to Olivier Tambosi’s coolly elegant staging, which had its premiere at the San Francisco Opera in 2010. That production marked her debut as Emilia, and she proved sensational in the demanding role, singing and acting with wit, charm and vast self-confidence. Jiří Bělohlávek conducted those performances, and the Met has retained him for this run as well.

“This is a gift from heaven,” Ms. Mattila said with characteristic overstatement, referring to Mr. Bělohlávek’s presence in the pit. “He understands this music; it’s in his native language. Uta Hagen writes that the director is the actor’s main support. We singers are so lucky that in the best situation we have two support vessels: the conductor and the director, especially if they work well together. And that’s also called heaven—having two wonderful guides.”

The singer’s familiarity with the acting precepts of Uta Hagen—including the famous Six Steps—came thanks to a compatriot who gave her one of Hagen’s books after studying with the pedagogue in New York. “She is my big idol and hero,” Ms. Mattila said of Hagen, who died in 2004, “and she writes things in those books that everybody should read, especially young singers.”

Ms. Mattila’s commitment to dramatic as well as musical values dates to her days at the prestigious Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. “It was part of the schooling,” she said. “I was fortunate to study with fine acting teachers together with the musical side. So from very early on it became as important as singing the part. I was taught to realize that opera is a theater art.”

But knowing and doing are two separate things, and creating a believable character while holding one’s own against an orchestra is no easy task. “The secret is to make it look spontaneous and believable and natural,” Ms. Mattila affirmed. “But the professional part is to be in control. The intellectual study is the preparation, and then you have to leave it. Then it’s all about the here and now and bringing the character to life. You find the physical experience, the way to express yourself, coming from how you understand the music, and then you find the balance—that’s the eternal work of the opera stage.”

Ms. Mattila demurs when the term “singing actress” is mentioned, despite its frequent use as a compliment, whether generally or when applied specifically to her. “I don’t like this title,” she said. “I have far too much admiration for actors to call myself one. I’m an opera singer and very proud of my profession and my training. For me, these are the things that are required of an opera singer. It’s a challenging profession because you must master so many disciplines. It’s old-fashioned to think you can just do it musically; I think that’s only the starting point.”

The finish line, if you will, is the freedom that comes from security. “The feeling that you believe and trust what you’re doing, and you know why you’re doing it—that’s what gives you the so-called artistic freedom on stage,” she said. “So often in the opera you see great singers, but they just aren’t alive somehow. Being flesh and blood on stage, that’s the aim. The goal of the process is to liberate you. That’s art for me.”

The singer recalled once remarking that being an opera singer was boring and that she preferred instead to be an artist. “That is what we are aiming for,” she concluded. “Sometimes it works; sometimes it’s harder work. When you’re free and alive and connected, then the space—the theater—is yours, including the audience. And it becomes a very present moment. Time kind of stops.”

Like all opera singers, Ms. Mattila does not always respond warmly to the productions in which she appears. But she tries hard to suppress such feelings, so as not to sabotage the audience’s reaction. “We don’t need to moralize,” she said of herself and her colleagues. “That’s not our job. Our job is to try to understand what we are creating as these characters. The audience then has every right to like it or not like it, and that’s the way it should be. We shouldn’t let our personal views upset or influence that. But it’s a challenge. Vanity is a hard part of yourself to forget.”

Mr. Mermelstein writes for the Journal on classical music and film.

A version of this article appeared April 26, 2012, on page D4 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Opera’s Drama Queen.

By DAVID MERMELSTEIN

Washington

The German baritone Matthias Goerne is a tough man to please. During a lunch interview last month, he sent back a plate of fried calamari. Too garlicky, he said, without having tasted it. Later that week, over coffee in Georgetown, he complained that a bowl of berries was not sufficiently fresh. His high standards are not limited to food. He passes judgment freely on most things, but especially music. Which is fitting given that he is among the era’s great singers—albeit one better known in Europe than in America.

Mr. Goerne’s appearances at New York’s Metropolitan Opera have been limited to two widely spaced runs of Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” in which he sang the bird-catcher Papageno with uncommon tenderness and verve. He was to have returned to the Met last season to perform his signature operatic role—that of Wozzeck in Alban Berg’s atonal masterpiece of the same name—but knee surgery (necessitated by a youthful obsession with speed skating) forced him to cancel.

Ken Fallin

Now the baritone is back in the U.S. for a series of concerts featuring the repertory that forms the bedrock of his career: German art songs, or lieder. On Wednesday at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Mr. Goerne performs Schubert’s stygian song cycle “Winterreise,” with Christoph Eschenbach, the music director of Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra, at the piano. (They performed the composer’s “Die Schöne Müllerin” on Monday.) And from Friday through Saturday, also at Disney Hall, he sings Schubert songs arranged for orchestra, with Mr. Eschenbach guest conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Mr. Goerne then immediately joins the pianist Leif Ove Andsnes for a five-city tour of songs by Mahler and Shostakovich, starting at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco, on April 23, and concluding at Carnegie Hall in New York, on May 1.

“Singing lieder is more interesting than other types of singing because, together with the pianist, you have full influence over how the music is rendered,” the bearish Mr. Goerne, age 45, said in heavily accented but fluent English. “It’s harder than singing arias, because you have to use your voice in so many different ways. In a recital, you have to think more; you’re not just following automatically wherever the music is going. There is a huge intellectual part to singing lieder, less so in opera. The emotions you have in one song you sometimes have only after four hours of opera. And you have to sing in between the rhythms and play with dynamics more in lieder.”

Not that the baritone is knocking opera. In fact, he credits it with strengthening his abilities in lieder. “Without opera I wouldn’t have this success that I have,” he said. “Singing loud against a huge orchestra, you acquire the space to sing with all that variety. Without that experience, you don’t have the consistent force to sing in a dramatic voice. It is very helpful to balance song recitals, opera, and concerts with orchestra.”

Mr. Goerne’s voice sounds richer than ever these days. In performances with Mr. Eschenbach at the Kennedy Center in Washington last month, the baritone probed his instrument’s darkest reaches—both emotionally and sonically—to craft devastating portraits of grief and loss, first in “Winterreise” and then, three nights later, in a concert performance of Béla Bartók’s macabre chamber opera “Bluebeard’s Castle.”

“I’m very pleased that people are picking up what I’m trying to communicate even without fully understanding the meaning of the words,” Mr. Goerne said, specifically complimenting American audiences on their receptiveness to his artistry. “There are no borders when it comes to great music. It could be in Chinese, and it would have the same effect.”

His God-given gifts notwithstanding, the singer attributes his success to a combination of continuing study and experience—something manifest in his series of Schubert recordings for the Harmonia Mundi label, in which he is variously accompanied by six different pianists over 11 volumes, the sixth of which was just released. “It helps when you know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Clearly the understanding of text and how it is linked with the music makes the difference. When I remember 20 years ago, it felt different from how I feel and what I’m doing now.”

The soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and the baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau—two paragons of 20th-century lieder singing—were among Mr. Goerne’s demanding teachers. He credits them with instilling in him a commitment “to take things very seriously” as an artist. “From them I learned that the most important thing is to look to the piece itself and accept, and respect, what the composer intended,” Mr. Goerne said, “to get away from saying that instead of slower, which is what the composer wrote, I will sing faster. If a piece really is getting better when you do something like that, then we’re talking about a piece that isn’t very good. But if we’re talking about the masters, then I’d say you failed if you think you are more important than geniuses like them. You must have humility. And this kind of humility should come first when you’re trying to get closer to a piece. All great artists will tell you that this is the only way to discover something in music.”

A teacher himself now, Mr. Goerne draws on lessons learned from his eminent predecessors. “Sometimes it makes sense to get deep into the emotion of the piece,” he said. “But other times it doesn’t work, and you have to say to the student things like ‘More piano here’ or ‘Your rhythm is too weak.’ This is what Fischer-Dieskau did. For a long time I asked myself, ‘What did I learn from him?’ And then finally I realized that all the things he is telling me are written in the scores. This is a big step. The key to finding the right way for a piece is not just focusing on emotion, but also finding the right way in the score, because 95% is already there from the composer. We have just this little part, to make the sound and do it as right as possible.”

Mr. Mermelstein writes for the Journal on classical music and film.

A version of this article appeared April 17, 2012, on page D5 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Follow the Lieder.