Sing for Your Life

by Daniel Bergner

  There were other games: Fact or Opinion? Predictions. She built vocabulary puzzles. She didn’t shy away from immediate rewards; rung by rung the boys rose on the “Climb to the Stars” chart, and she doled out candy, which Ryan, whose appetite was bottomless, craved. The fury, the menacing, the moments like the flinging of his desk were replaced, to some extent, by other flashes.

  “Mrs. Hughes,” he asked one day, as he wobbled on a low wooden balance beam at the school’s playground, “have you ever been to Africa?”

  “Yes. As a matter of fact, Ryan, Mr. Hughes and I went there last summer.”

  “Me too!” He told her the highlights of his trip, talked about the many lions he’d seen.

  Still, he struggled. He wrote her letters.

  Dear Mrs. Hughes, I have been a totle jerk. I did not control myself at math. I blue it with that attitude. You have done so many things for me but I have mean to you. I am really mad not mad at you but me. I know I hate you outside but inside I know its my fault. I just am lonely inside. I know you won’t give up on me but I never improve. I just do it again. I will probly never get out of this class. I know sorry won’t do it. I am asking for you to be more strict because I need to learn to control my attitude. I hope and wish by the end of the year I will be the most respected and trusted in this hole class.

  Sincerely your friend,

  Ryan

  Dear Mrs. Hughes, I made a great fool of myself. I admit I did yell at him. I haven’t been starting the day write. Even thow I am sitting in this seat I am lessening. I will try to start over. I see how better every one would be when I’m not here. People say life would be better without Ryan. And now I know they are telling the truth. You may think I am mean hearted but I’m not. I don’t want to heart any one. I’ve always said I could work on it but it just happens again. Thank you for not giving up on me because it shows me I can do it if I try!

  Your student,

  Ryan

  * * *

  In the library, where she guided him from bookcase to bookcase, he discovered something. “I was capable of reading things other than Dr. Seuss,” he said. He wrote a research paper about lemurs, the minuscule primates that evolved on Madagascar millions of years ago, after floating to the island on rafts made of tangled branches and reeds.

  He wrote, as well, a haiku.

  A new beginning

  Shall I be a deffrent person

  I shall change writeaway.

  She led him along the shelves to the Chronicles of Narnia, to Peter and Susan, Edmund and Lucy. They stepped into a supernatural land and defeated the witch who had imposed a perpetual winter devoid of Christmas. He plucked sequel after sequel from the bookcase. “I would turn the light back on and try to read another chapter. Just another three pages. Just another page.”

  He wrote more haikus.

  Sorry for bad times

  Life can chang with a heart love

  You can make it better.

  Winter so beautiful

  Makes my heart grow like a snow bird

  After it ends I’m sad.

  But what stayed with him more than anything else from his two years with Mrs. Hughes was the memorization of King’s lines. The four words, “I have a dream,” resonated in his mind years later, layered in personal meaning, during the week leading up to the finals at the Met. He sensed King speaking directly to him.

  “To Mrs. Hughes,” Ryan had written. Choppily he had cut a piece of white paper in the shape of a heart. In crimped, quavery, erratic letters, fitting his words within the heart’s borders, he printed, “You have bin a very good teacher to me. You have change my life. I know you have by looking at my report cards and seeing the differens. This gift is for the sweetish of your love for us!”

  FIVE

  ARE YOU UNDERSTANDING?” the conductor asked.

  Ryan stood before him in jeans and a bright blue dress shirt, the shirt taut across his colossal shoulders and biceps and untucked over the bulge of his belly, the bulge minor relative to his muscle. The shade of blue emphasized the softness of his face and the size of his eyes; he looked unguarded.

  The conductor, Patrick Summers, was half Ryan’s size. He was the musical director of Houston Grand Opera; the Met had flown him in for the week to prepare the eight finalists and then to lead next Sunday’s concert. He didn’t hold a baton now as he interrupted Ryan’s singing and as the rehearsal pianist went silent. Instead, he held his reading glasses. He’d removed them as he lifted his eyes from the score and gazed at Ryan’s open, eager face. On the page was Mozart—unimaginable inspiration and infinite complexity, the crescent of each fermata and the mark of each appoggiatura leaping from the composer’s sacred, unfathomable mind across two and a quarter centuries—and in front of Summers was Ryan’s willing expression, so empty of edges and facets.

  Summers pinched his glasses. His mouth hardened, and below his receding hairline his forehead formed an expanse of dismay. Not only did Ryan appear incapable of reading music with rudimentary fluency, let alone with any appreciation for Mozart’s nuances; in addition, he didn’t know the basics of Italian, one of opera’s most essential tongues. Summers pinched harder.

  “Do you understand that the stress in ‘Ispagna’ is on the second syllable?”

  * * *

  “You have, with opera, these extraordinary works of art, and for the rare person who is gifted to sing in this way, truly gifted—and it is a very few people, and the gift only begins with the ability to perform in a mammoth room without a microphone—for that person, the voice is a life force, nothing less,” Summers told me. “Perhaps the force is even more fundamental than erotic desire. Some would say that there’s nothing more fundamental than that, but when a truly gifted singer attains the right technique, his whole body vibrates with the creation of this profound music.

  “And the creation is occurring literally out of nothing. It’s just air. Living, vibrating air. And maybe, as I think about it, it is tightly connected to erotic desire, not just because so much of opera is about desire but because of the way a singer can feel himself, or herself, bodily, physically, and because great singing—the voice without mechanical amplification; the naked, overwhelming voice—ties bodies together. The vibrating air leaves the singer and passes into you, the listener. It enters you.”

  Summers was a librettist as well as a conductor; lately he’d finished an opera based on the novel Siddhartha. It was the story of an ancient ascetic and seeker much like the Buddha, and the main character’s quest for purity and enlightenment matched Summers’s ideas about music: that unerring precision and piercing comprehension were critical to operatic singing—comprehension of what was printed on the page and what lay underneath. And meanwhile he lived in fear for his art form, sensing that it might be dying and—worse—deteriorating. America’s regional houses were cutting their seasons or closing altogether, and New York’s second company, where Sills and Carreras had launched their careers, was about to shut down. Europe’s grand houses were flourishing, but not without government support. The Met wasn’t quite selling out. But worse, for Summers, than worries about distant extinction was the threat of erosion, the danger that quality would crumble away, almost imperceptibly at first and then unmistakably, technique weakening and artistry diminishing and the voices of opera gradually less able to invade the body with the special, inarticulable meaning that great music could communicate.

  He felt insidious factors at work, believed that the culture’s ever-mounting emphasis on youth and beauty was applying an ever-heightening pressure. More than they once did, he said, looks mattered in operatic casting. He knew that they had always been relevant, yet appearance was, these days, much more valued in casting than a century or two ago—and beauty in Verdi’s time had been defined differently. Its contours had been more full, and full contours tended to contribute to vocal strength, and sheer power was part of great operatic singing, especially in the most emotionally wrenching roles.

  Heft migh
t be involved, too, in more delicate aspects of the art. Was body fat linked somehow to the musical shadings the larynx and pharynx could produce? Summers couldn’t be sure—and nor could any singer or scientist—but while listening to him I thought about one of the semifinalists. Her frame was oversized and well padded, and her arias, in the semis, rang out with promise. A voice teacher I knew, a man I chatted with in the interval between the singing and the announcement of the final eight, predicted that she would be chosen. He felt that she deserved to be, based on her talent. “As a child,” she had said to me, “I always felt big, enormous. I could never be the fairy princess. With opera, there’s something magical for me about getting to play dress-up and pretend, getting to be something you’re not. And there’s something about experiencing music from another century. I don’t know if I could function as a person if I didn’t sing. When I sing, my face feels hot and my mind shuts off; I don’t know what I’m doing onstage. On high notes my vision shakes—it bounces. Without singing, I don’t know if I could survive.”

  What made me think of her as Summers spoke was a story she had told, the story of Deborah Voigt, the illustrious soprano who’d won this contest in the eighties. Two decades later, despite her voice, she was fired from a lead role in London because her girth clashed with the director’s ideas about an outfit her character should wear. Soon after the firing, she resorted to surgery: she had her stomach stapled. She was a hundred pounds lighter now, and lots of her fans mourned a loss of vocal shades and warmth that they blamed on the shedding of fat. Others disputed the loss, and still others heard the loss but doubted the reason. The semifinalist didn’t doubt. She said she had considered surgery to get her career going, but she was holding out, guarding the mysterious instrument she’d been given.

  She wasn’t picked for the finals. Nor were the other women of large proportions. The bodies of the three female finalists were all fetching, one shapely and two svelte, and all three faces were pretty. It was impossible to say that this was why they’d been selected over some of the others. Certainly Summers wasn’t saying it. Yet it fit with his fears, anxieties that focused more on female voices but encompassed male singing as well. The Met’s new live video broadcasts drew millions into movie theaters all over the country and the world, but they also compounded the threats he perceived. The broadcasts were full of close-ups. And they were full of amplified sound. They added to the value of surfaces and negated the rapture of the naked voice.

  “Singing is the embodiment of inner beauty. There’s a completely individual imprint that comes from within each singer.” Summers’s task, for the week, was to help the finalists to reveal who they were as artists, to help them “unlock the scores, to express their individual connection with these glorious combinations of words and music, with Handel, with Mozart, with Verdi.”

  With Philippe, Summers worked at a high level, pointing out gently that the particular ornamentations, the improvised notes, that Philippe was choosing for one of his arias might not be quite optimal. With Deanna, he spoke about the rhythms of one passage and then about the distinctive harmony the Met orchestra would provide as she sang a specific measure—for it would be a full orchestra, not a mere piano, accompanying the finalists at the concert. With Michelle, he praised her lush tone and proceeded to the interpretation of character.

  But he didn’t see Ryan as ready for artistic analysis. “‘Ispagna’”—he demonstrated the pronunciation.

  “‘Isp-a-gna,’” Ryan tried, a glimmer of sweat emerging on his freshly shaved scalp.

  “‘Ispagna,’” the conductor enunciated again. Pronunciation was prized as crucial to opera, even if half of any American audience wouldn’t know the difference. To garble the language, which librettists and composers labored over like poets, was to make a mockery of the art.

  Dutifully, avidly, Ryan turned to a table behind him and penciled a reminder into his score, for when he practiced later.

  The pianist recommenced. Ryan reverted to his mistake, weighting the first syllable, and Summers, setting his reading glasses aside on the piano, recorrected.

  The gleam of perspiration became a trickle.

  The conductor took a breath. “Are you aware,” he said, switching to another issue, “that you’re actually adding notes?” He didn’t mean the type of adding, of artistically legitimate embellishing, that Philippe had done. He meant notes that simply didn’t belong, that hopped from Ryan’s throat to spoil Mozart’s music.

  Ryan met his gaze uncertainly, smile collapsing.

  Summers suggested that they move on to another aria. One purpose of these initial sessions was to decide which two pieces each singer would perform in the finals; unlike in the semis, there would be no requests from the judges. Now Ryan began “La calunnia,” one of the arias he’d listed as possibilities. Summers put up his hand. The pianist stopped, his silence like a sudden abandonment. The conductor elaborated on a pair of failings, and Ryan concentrated with a seemingly limitless capacity for absorbing criticism. The piano fluttered to life once more, and fell quiet again at Summers’s direction, the quiet resounding like a crash. “It’s ‘come un colpo’”—Summers moved his mouth slowly, modeling the Italian. “It’s ‘temporale.’”

  Mired at this level of learning, nowhere near the levels of interpretation, Ryan started to panic. Foreign languages, he felt, were more than foreign to him; they were alien.

  “It’s ‘tumulto.’” Summers stressed the twin u’s. Ryan rushed to make another note in his score, then attempted to master the ill movements of his lips.

  “You must work on that word.”

  Multiple rivulets of sweat forked around Ryan’s temples.

  “Let’s try the Floyd”—the conductor named an English-language piece from Ryan’s list.

  Ryan sang it through.

  “Do you even like this aria?”

  Ryan did—he loved it. “Not really,” he said. He couldn’t bear to acknowledge his attachment to the piece and hear Summers tell him every way that he’d ruined it.

  “What would your first two choices be for Sunday?”

  “I’d love to do ‘Come dal ciel’ and ‘Madamina.’” These were the two he’d performed in the semis; the first was the Banquo aria, the second the Mozart that he’d just mangled with Summers.

  The conductor pondered wordlessly, considering what he’d heard in the semis and today. “On the Banquo, well, we will have corrections. You will have to work. On ‘Madamina,’ no. No. You have a lot of learned errors. Too many. And I am constitutionally unable to rehearse it full of mistakes. I think we can choose ‘La calunnia’—with me telling you what’s wrong when we meet again.” He paused. “As you plan out your pedagogy for the next years of your life, Italian needs to play a bigger part.” He turned toward Gayletha Nichols, who was sitting in on the session. “Can he have an Italian coaching before the end of the day?” He turned back to Ryan. “So the next time we work together, you are better prepared.”

  SIX

  VALERIE WRAPPED CHRISTMAs lights around the shrubbery. She did what her father had done every Christmas when she was a little girl, when he’d adorned the front of their tower in the Brooklyn projects. The bushes—faint gestures of landscaping—stood in front of each low building in a rough complex in Newport News, where she’d found a job helping with upkeep. On the weekends, she took Ryan and occasionally Adrian to work. Ryan was eleven, twelve; Adrian was thirteen, fourteen. They helped her to scrub the kitchens, the toilets, when tenants were evicted; they helped her to clean the stairs, sweeping outside apartment doors where squatters had broken the locks. Sometimes a resident handed them a dollar or two for their efforts, and when the holidays came, everyone seemed to appreciate the way the shrubs flashed with blue and white and red light.

  Valerie had found God. A believer had taken her under his wing and brought her gifts of psalms. “You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness.…If yo
u say, ‘The Lord is my refuge,’ and you make the Most High your dwelling…you will tread on the lion and the cobra—you will trample the lion and the serpent.”

  She took God at His Word. And she thought of her periods of depression and her suicide attempt in religious terms. “There are powers and principalities aiming to work against us,” she said. “The Devil gets in your head and gives you a false report, tricking you when you’re weakest, telling you you’re no good.”

  From studying the stories of the Old Testament, she drew one paramount lesson: “God doesn’t play.” When Aaron’s sons, Moses’s nephews, erred in their sacrifice to the Lord, lighting their own fire rather than waiting for God’s flame, “He incinerated them right then and there.” When Uzzah, transporting the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem, worried that the Ark would tumble from his cart and reached up to steady it, breaking His law against touching the shrine, the Lord slaughtered him instantly. “He was gone right like that.” And when Moses, seeking water for the Israelites in the desert, struck the rock with his staff, instead of speaking to it as God commanded, the Lord barred him from ever reaching the Promised Land, despite all the faith Moses had shown. “That gives you an idea—God is serious about what He wants from us.”

  As though compensating for the anarchy that had dominated her life with her sons, Valerie now took her cue from these biblical lessons. She forbade Adrian and Ryan to play a popular card game pitting wizard against wizard, then discovered that they had disobeyed her. They had concealed a deck in their bedroom, with illustrated cards labeled “Lord of Riots” and “Fiend Blooded” and “God of the Dead.” That afternoon, when Adrian and Ryan returned home from school, she informed them that she had set fire to their collection, burned it to cinders.