Sing for Your Life

by Daniel Bergner

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  For Natalie and Miles,

  the music that saved me

  ONE

  RYAN SPEEDO GREEN did not belong here. He didn’t belong in the hotel room they had booked for him, where the headboard was high and plush and the light was faintly gold. There was more gold in the lobby, lots of it: the shimmering antique frame of the huge mirror beside the elevators; the austere silk curtains that rose three stories toward the vaulted ceiling; the velvet of the deeply curved couches; the abstract sculpture at the turn of the stairs.

  Each time he left the lobby, passing under the hotel’s marquee and facing Lincoln Center, in the middle of New York City, he felt even less at home. He climbed the broad steps to the Lincoln Center plaza and was surrounded by towering white stone columns that made him think of ancient stadiums—Olympians competing for Zeus’s pleasure and gladiators battling one another for survival. At the far side of the square stood the opera hall. This was the home of the Met, the greatest opera company in the country. The building looked as grand and remote as the White House.

  As he started to traverse the plaza, the fountain ahead of him was almost inaudible. But as he neared the circular pool, the countless silvery plumes of shooting water created not a loud trickle or a concentrated splash: the heavy plumes produced a crescendo of sound that compounded the anxiety or thrill he felt on any given crossing of the square. It was a crossing he made repeatedly during those few days—in the early spring of 2011—leading up to the semifinals of the contest.

  Behind him, the clamor of the fountain hushed swiftly. In front of him were the giant poster stands, the posters announcing the season’s productions, lead singers photographed in dramatic shadow, and the opera house—the series of archways, the excess of glass, the vast murals with their airborne goddesses, their harp, cello, violins, horns. Beyond the windows hung an array of chandeliers with their pinpoints of pale gold light, and beyond the chandeliers was an aura of darker gold.

  Backstage, awaiting his turn to sing, Ryan definitely did not belong, but there he was on the Sunday of the semis. This was the most revered competition in America for would-be opera stars. Twenty-two singers had made it this far after the district and regional rounds. Ryan was slotted eighteenth of the twenty-two for his minutes in front of the judges. He listened to the others; he couldn’t escape their voices as he sat in the common area outside the dressing rooms, where their performances were piped in. But it wasn’t only the voices themselves that confirmed how misplaced he was. It was the backgrounds of the other semifinalists. One had begun vocal training at seven, another at eight. His rivals brandished the invisible badges of having studied at the country’s most prestigious conservatories, at Curtis or the Academy of Vocal Arts or Juilliard. They not only belonged—for years they had been destined for this moment here at the Met.

  Ryan’s home, in southeastern Virginia, was as much a shack as a house, with bullet holes above his mother’s bedroom window. Before that, he’d grown up in a trailer park; before that, in low-income housing. Along the way, he spent time locked up in Virginia’s institution of last resort for juveniles judged to be a threat to themselves or to everyone around them.

  And Ryan was black. There was one other African American among the selected twenty-two, but she’d had a much different upbringing. A part of him—a driven, half-conscious part—sang to make race disappear.

  * * *

  He was twenty-four years old. Waiting, he listened to Philippe, who had a low voice like his own, a bass-baritone, and the looks of a teen idol, with curly blond hair and fine expressive lips and a wisp of a nose. They had struck up an unlikely friendship during the past few days. Philippe was relentlessly confident. Walking through the corridors of the Met, he crooned out lines of Sinatra—“Fly me to the moon; let me play among the stars”—as if he’d bypassed awe and deference and took for granted his place in this house. Never mind if famous singers and conductors heard him in the hallways.

  With his turn several singers away, Ryan heard Philippe perform an aria by Wagner, probably the art form’s most daunting composer. Philippe was one of the youngest contestants; they were all required to be between twenty and thirty. In the first round the previous fall, twelve hundred artists had sung in cities from Seattle to Philadelphia, Houston to Cincinnati to Boston. Ryan’s journey through the competition had started in Denver. He had a job, at seventeen hundred dollars per month, driving between Colorado towns with a small troupe and putting on drastically abridged operas in schools and community centers.

  The contest had been inaugurated back in 1935, broadcast nationally by NBC radio and sponsored by the Sherwin-Williams paint company. “The largest paint and varnish maker in the world takes pleasure in presenting the Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air!” the nasally MC declared. Winners were guaranteed a Met contract. But gradually things had changed. The contest no longer had a corporate sponsor; it was no longer an advertising vehicle; it was funded by opera-loving benefactors. And it no longer gave out Met contracts. Even for the winners—and the judges usually named a few, depending on how they rated the talent when the final round was over—a thriving career was far from certain. Yet there were winners from eras past who occupied opera’s pantheon, and some recent victors were ranked among the best opera singers in the world, and the Met made it known that the competition was a crucial way of finding promising artists to keep tabs on, so the prospect of being chosen seemed like the beginning of a fairy tale.

  Philippe’s voice, full of gravity yet capable of elevating effortlessly, floated to a high plateau. He sounded, to Ryan, as though spirits had blessed him, lifted him.

  Ryan heard Deanna, a soprano, carry out coloratura acrobatics. She did a tightrope walk with flourishes and flips, never so much as teetering. And Nicholas, a bass, offered the judges an entire lake of sound on his final note, a flawlessly smooth and seductive expanse.

  By the time he was told to get to the edge of the stage, Ryan felt like he was evaporating. He stood six feet five and weighed over three hundred pounds. He wore size seventeen shoes. His biceps were about three times as big as an average man’s. But he felt like his body was almost gone. It didn’t help that to walk from the dressing area to the wings meant pushing through doors striped yellow and marked “Do Not Enter.” It didn’t help that he had to pass through a long desolate space of rough wood and raw metal, the opposite of everything on the Met’s public side. Multiple stories of backstage apparatus and nothingness loomed crushingly above him. With a couple of other singers, he waited in a tight, scarcely lit spot between a stage monitor’s booth and a set of immensely tall black curtains, three or four strides from the exposed part of the stage.

  In his gray suit, he drew a few steps back and tried doing jumping jacks to calm his nerves. Three hundred–plus pounds of him, tremendous muscle and soft belly, jumped and reached, jumped and reached. He tried running in place. He quit running and touched his toes. When that failed, he attempted to deep-breathe his body back into being.

  He prayed silently, If this is meant to be it’s meant to be. Let me sing to the best of my ability. Let me share my voice.


  He told himself, Don’t cheat yourself.

  He warned himself, Take full breaths.

  He blew air through his closed lips, flapping them, hoping to keep the muscles around his mouth from freezing up.

  He schooled himself, Don’t follow the piano, let the piano follow you.

  He recited the lyrics of his aria in his mind:

  Studia il passo, o mio figlio!

  Usciam da queste tenebre.

  Watch your step, oh my son!

  Let us leave this darkness.

  * * *

  His father had promised that if he made it through this round, he would come to hear him sing in the finals. His father, Cecil Green, who had given him his middle name and whom he had spent time with on just a handful of occasions since he was four, said he would get himself to New York from Bakersfield, California. Ryan had reached him there by phone some days earlier and told him about the contest and how well he’d done so far.

  Usciam da queste tenebre.

  Ryan had chosen Banquo’s aria from Verdi’s opera of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The king of Scotland has just been stabbed to death, and Macbeth has claimed the throne. But three witches have suggested to Banquo, a nobleman, that his son will somehow rise to displace Macbeth and rule the land. All feels anarchic and ominous. One night, as Banquo stands with his son outside the king’s castle, he has a premonition that they are about to be murdered. Sensing the killers near, he sings protectively to his child.

  To learn and prepare the aria, Ryan had done what opera singers do these days: study the renditions of renowned artists on YouTube. He had a range to pick from, but quickly he hit on a video of Nicolai Ghiaurov, a Bulgarian bass, playing Banquo at Italy’s historic house, La Scala, a decade before Ryan was born. It became his favorite, and he watched and listened to it over and over, as Ghiaurov delivered the opening lines with his head bowed and his hands tenderly on his young teenage son, one palm on the boy’s back and the other on his chest. Then, singing about the menace hovering close around them, the father clutched the child fully to him, to his warrior’s breastplate; Ghiaurov opted completely for sentiment, hugging his son, gripping him, fingers digging in, cheek pressing against the boy’s head. “Di terror,” he sang, and kissed the boy with an urgent look of love seconds before the cloaked villains swarmed. He pushed his son into flight and surrendered himself, martyred himself, so the boy would not be caught.

  * * *

  Ryan knew little about his father, and there were lots of times growing up when he didn’t want to know anything, yet the limited things he did know had a special clarity, and when he wasn’t spurning these details he clung to them. One was that his father, who stood no taller than five seven, had been a bodybuilder as a young man. Ryan had an old scratched photograph of him, posing. The picture’s background was black; maybe the snapshot was taken during an amateur competition of some kind, or maybe his father was in a photographer’s studio and fantasizing about being in a contest. He wore a tiny red swimsuit. His expression was all determination. He flexed his arms while squatting with one leg extended to make the most of his quads. His oiled pecs shone in the flash.

  Another thing Ryan knew, or recalled hearing and believed to be true, was that his father had once met Arnold Schwarzenegger somewhere, that his father had been touched by greatness in this way, and that he’d also met Lou Ferrigno, the Incredible Hulk. He knew no specifics of these meetings but remembered that his father worshipped Schwarzenegger and that he’d watched Terminator 2 with his father during one of their times together. Ryan had been seven or eight. Battling the horrifying T-1000, Schwarzenegger rescued the ten-year-old boy who was destined to be the savior of humanity. Since then, Ryan had seen every Schwarzenegger movie. His most-watched was probably Kindergarten Cop: Schwarzenegger, as a tough detective, went undercover, became a beloved kindergarten teacher, vanquished an evil drug dealer, and saved the dealer’s son.

  * * *

  Ryan walked toward the black piano at the center of the Met stage. The piano was the only accompaniment in this round; below him the empty orchestra pit plunged like a canyon. No one sat in the orchestra level of the house except the judges behind their laptops, their seven luminous white faces almost lost yet godly amid the endless rows. This was among the largest theaters for opera anywhere, a space that threatened to take any voice and swallow it. His mother was someplace up in a balcony with the families of the other contestants. He kept his eyes on an uninhabited point between the tier where she sat and the territory of the judges.

  His eyes were big and espresso brown, and his face was gently tapered, gracefully shaped. His features, both handsome and childlike, had a vulnerability that contrasted with the contours of his body. His emotions seemed to live, most of the time, in his wide eyes, and on his forehead below his closely shaved head, and on his animated mouth. Whenever Ryan smiled, people took notice, and often his feelings of distress were unmistakable. But at the moment his face was opaque.

  Beginning an aria felt, to him, like getting on a roller coaster despite having a dire fear of heights. The car climbed inexorably, chuck chuck chuck chuck, and if you handled your dread during those initial seconds, the rest of the ride might go all right. You might be swept along. But if you lost control early, if your nerves started to surge, you would quickly be left wailing, your brain and throat giving way irreversibly to chaos.

  Now the pianist played the opening rumble of notes, the low, tremulous introduction, and then, while the piano went silent, Ryan intoned his first lines, his recitative. And soon the two, piano and voice, were joined; he was past the initial treacherous bars. Yet his face remained rigid. His body was stiff, motionless. His feet in their polished black shoes didn’t shift an inch on the wood of the stage; they were angled awkwardly apart. The size of his voice was striking, and his sound held intimations of hidden layers, a wealth of barely revealed tones. Yet his singing was robotic.

  The stiffness of his body and sound were not only due to his own fear. Nor did these failings stem mostly from his wish to evoke Banquo’s apprehension, though that was part of it. There was a third reason, a choice he had made.

  He wanted his performance to be pure. He wanted it to be devoid of any acting, or any embellished drama in his voice. All the emotion should come directly from his adherence to Verdi’s score. He would honor Verdi’s composition; he would rise to the demands of the piece. Working on the aria, he had formulated this abstract goal and grown fixated on the notion of purity. And he had wrapped this idea into the understanding he developed about Banquo’s character. He focused on Banquo’s noble rank and royal stature. He decided that Banquo’s dignity thoroughly overrode any other feeling and that the piece was above all about Banquo’s regal, unflinching acceptance of death.

  After picking the most sentimental version to study on YouTube, a rendering that blended the theatrical heavily with the vocal, a rendering that put Banquo’s gripping fingers and fatherly love at the heart of the performance, Ryan all but eliminated the dramatic and jettisoned the paternal feelings, purging them without pausing to think about how far his decisions were taking him from the portrayal that spoke to him.

  Partially, his emphasis on Banquo’s nobility and on paying strict tribute to Verdi was compensation for the way he felt among the other singers. The day before yesterday, another contestant had asked what he would perform. When Ryan told him, the young man, who had already been awarded a training fellowship with a major opera company, murmured “Oh” and named the more challenging aria he would sing. Now, onstage, Ryan made his delivery stately. And his performance, though strong and deft enough vocally, fell flat. With every noble-sounding measure, he seemed to progress further toward the impassive; every bar seemed to mark a further disappearance of self, of anything that might have made his minutes unique to the judges. He sang his way toward forgettable.

  TWO

  ABOVE AND UNSEEN, in an ivory-colored dress with floral brocade, Ryan’s mother, Valerie, sat a few mile
s from the Brooklyn housing project where she’d spent some of her girlhood. Next to her high-rise complex was another, made famous by the hip-hop mogul Jay Z, who had grown up there. He advertised having shot his older brother when he himself was twelve, because his brother had stolen some of his jewelry. He rapped about dealing crack as a teen and announced that he’d been shot at, from a distance of six feet, that three bullets had been fired and he’d gotten away unscathed.

  Check the four corners of the earth I’m a man of respect

  Marcy Projects motherfucker I’m the man of respect

  In 2014, three years after the semifinals, at the corner of Tompkins and Myrtle, at the boundary of Valerie’s childhood project, two cops were shot in the head as they sat in their patrol car, assassinated in revenge for the deaths of two black men killed by police—and, indirectly, in revenge for the aggressive, racially fraught policing that had been employed, in recent years, on these streets and in neighborhoods like this one across the country.

  But Valerie didn’t remember the area in a way that mirrored its reputation, possibly because crack hadn’t arrived to carry out the worst phases of destruction around her project until after her family moved away. She recalled sweet things as we walked through the cluster of city-run brick towers where she’d lived. “They would have block parties in this inner area,” she said, standing between the tightly placed buildings that were home to three or four thousand. “Coca-Cola would sponsor them. With different artists. People would yell, ‘The Coca-Cola truck is here!’ We had Kool and the Gang come and play.”

  Every Christmas brought a competition among the eight towers: which one could create the best holiday lights. Valerie’s father, who worked in a foundry, pouring scalding liquid metal into molds, took charge of their building’s entry each year. Starting before Thanksgiving, he canvassed the residents for ideas. He and the helpers he recruited bent wire hangers into stars and animals, and wrapped strings of lights around the wire. He crawled out a neighbor’s window and somehow managed to mount the twinkling displays to the facade.