Winning seemed to say, as well, that fantasizing about the stardom reached by a small subset of past victors was not quite as fantastical as it had been a day earlier, though it was hard to forget the metaphor Gayletha Nichols had used during the previous week. Winning put them at the base of a new and extraordinarily arduous, unforgiving ladder, a ladder packed with talented singers vying for work in an art form whose regional American companies were shrinking their seasons—a ladder, she told me, that most winners would ultimately either fail to climb or tumble off. Being asked to audition for the Lindemann Program was like being told that you belonged a rung or two up from the bottom, nothing more. But Ryan was the only one of the finalists who received this invitation. It came in an email the day after the finals. The audition consisted of two parts: a series of coaching sessions with the Lindemann staff, and then arias sung for the staff and the Met’s beloved conductor and Lindemann founder, James Levine.
Ryan got the invitation despite the limitations in his performance of Banquo’s aria, limitations that had persisted from the semifinals to the finals, even as he’d been less rigid and allowed something more of himself to enter his singing, his face, his body. “Generic” was how one of the Lindemann faculty critiqued Ryan’s singing of the piece. It had pleased the crowd well enough, at an event where the audience was feeling forgiving, but the same performance would have made no impression—except maybe for the mispronunciations—within a full Met opera.
But his delivery of “La calunnia” was another story. On this darkly comic aria, his flagrant gestures, his unhinged expressions, his voice that ventured to extremes had been, for moments and even extended passages, mesmerizing. It wasn’t absurd to imagine that someday his singing and charisma would help to make an entire Met production riveting. Seven years in the future? Ten? Fifteen? Given the low range and arresting size of his voice, and given the length of time it took for such a heavy instrument to come under a singer’s control and attain full resonance, there would be year after year, phase after phase, of uncertainty. The anatomical reasons for such slowness were unknown, Dr. Paul Kwak, who worked with singers as an accompanist and an ENT surgeon, told me, though he added that “learning to capture an explosive subglottal pressure, the pressure just under the vocal cords, and learning to organize the sound that results from that explosiveness” might be part of the long maturation.
There would be, for Ryan, phase after phase as he grew capable of more and more demanding roles, weightier and weightier roles, phase after phase if he progressed without faltering dismally, without revealing unalterable shortcomings or irremediable bad habits that would relegate him permanently to secondary parts in secondary houses, or that could cause him to injure his cords, to damage them beyond repair, leaving him unable to sing much of anything.
But there were immediate problems. “He couldn’t read the recipe, let alone cook,” Ken Noda remembered thinking about Ryan’s ability to comprehend a score. Noda, one of the Met’s most revered coaches, worked with Ryan as part of the audition process, to better understand what he lacked and how easy or laborious it would be to lead him past the deficiencies. To grant him a place among the Lindemann trainees would be like welcoming him as a novitiate in an exalted monastic order. The teachers needed to be as sure as they could about whether he was up to it. When Noda and other faculty ushered him into practice studios for solo sessions, it was to test whether their time and the Lindemann Program’s funds were best offered to him or some other aspirant in this art form whose future they were perpetually guarding and constructing. But there was also something more. They needed to know whether he was likely to thrill them in the way that teachers can be electrified by their most inspiring students. “It can be agonizing if the singer is not giving back,” Noda said. He was middle-aged, but his faintly brown Japanese skin was flawless. His black bangs were youthful, his clothes crisp, his body spare. “It’s like having sex with an inert object. You use every position in the world to try and try to get the person to respond. But you get nothing back.”
Noda had been a prodigy at the piano, a stunning musician at the age of seven, when he was accepted into Juilliard’s precollege program, and an international soloist by his late teens. At twenty, he’d played duets with the violinist Itzhak Perlman at the White House. Noda’s mother, a printmaker who’d emigrated with his father from Japan, pushed him as a young child, propelled him later. “But I didn’t love the piano enough as an instrument. Some pianists have a sensual relationship with the piano; they adore the keys. I thought the instrument was utilitarian, unfriendly. It’s so large; you sit behind it like a desk. And a piano’s sound—the note is dying the instant you play it. A string player—or a singer—can control the vibration of his sound. It’s intimate. He can extend the sound, make it live. But as a child, what I had was the piano. I was like a little prize horse, put on a track by my mother. I was being trained and trained.”
His parents took him to the opera as something ancillary, inessential. But he was lured by the voice, drawn to the theatrical; early on, opera became a covert obsession. With his parents at home, he practiced his solo pieces. When his parents left the apartment, he propped opera scores on the music rack and mastered the accompaniment for arias. At nine, in the precollege program, he made use of Juilliard’s library to read through more arias and overtures. At ten, he composed his first—and only—opera, the tale of a singing canary who is trapped inside a baseball, gets discovered by two boys who take it to a pet shop, and is then trapped inside both the baseball and a cage until the story arrives at a happy ending. The twenty-five-minute work was performed by New York City Opera throughout the city’s schools. “But my parents thought opera was a musical side hobby. They didn’t think I would ever work in it.” His mother kept her prize horse, her prodigy pianist, racing around the track.
By the time he was in his twenties, he felt suffocated by his burgeoning career, soloing with orchestras from Los Angeles to Vienna. “I kept thinking, When are people going to find out that I don’t even like this repertoire? This is not going to last. They are going to hear it; they are going to find out.” With concerts booked five years ahead, he walked into his manager’s office. He quit. “My mother was so angry. Devastated. But for me, it was exhilarating. It was an act of total self-destruction, but I was tearing down this false edifice she wanted me to keep building. And a year later, I was at the Met. She’s still condescending about the work I do here. No matter how respected I am at the Metropolitan Opera, she will never fully accept it. To her, it is something nice. To her, the important question is whether I ever think about giving a solo concert again.”
The interaction between music and libretto enthralled him; the suppleness, the living vibration of the voice galvanized him; the collaboration between coach and performer consumed him. He loved the way a blend of fealty to what was written and interpretation by the singer could bring about a performance that felt like a revelation. This was his focus, this combination of faithfulness and vocal interpretation. In the upper echelons of opera, a distinction was drawn between two types of instructors: voice teachers, who were specialists in the production of sound, in the mechanics of projecting and shading notes, and coaches, who specialized in sensibility, in helping the singer to understand the nuances in the score and to add the singer’s own spirit. The line was blurry, but Noda worked on one side of it: he was a coach. He worked with Met divas as well as Lindemann trainees. He played for them, sang for them in a voice that appalled him but that provided rough demonstrations, led them deeper into the page and into themselves. Except for when he slept, he worked all but ceaselessly, studying scores when he wasn’t in sessions or speaking with colleagues about how better to elicit, to guide. This, not a solo career, was now his existence. One had replaced the other. “I have to do what I’m doing in order to live. I would be dead if I didn’t. I might be alive, but I would be just dead.” Every year, the summer weeks when the Met went into hiatus were torment. He knew t
hat he needed to rest, to restore himself for the next season. He walked through the city for hours at a stretch, kept a stack of books beside his bed—the novels of Thomas Mann, a biography of Verdi—and waited for his vacation to end.
Was Ryan the type of singer who could meet this level of teacherly intensity, receive what Noda and the others had to give, and reciprocate with enough that was already his own? The team had their doubts about whether he belonged in the program; they wondered if he could so much as survive it. “The recipe, the most fundamental ingredients—he really didn’t even know how to read the rhythms correctly. He didn’t know the difference between a teaspoon and a tablespoon of salt. And a musical score contains so many expressive markings from the composer. He didn’t know what cloves were. He didn’t know what ginger was.”
It was almost unfathomable that he’d passed through his undergraduate conservatory, plus two years in graduate school, without gaining a fair grasp of these notations. Yet, Noda thought, instruction was seldom as exacting as it should be. And then there was something about Ryan that appeared at a loss, out of his element, no matter that he’d just won the contest. It was endearing. He carried no hint of the entitlement Noda sometimes felt in the Lindemann singers. During the audition sessions, Ryan’s forehead was forever glazed with perspiration. Apologetic laughter leapt from his throat. The glaze and the smile that went with the laughter gave him a radiance but also showed a disorientation, as if he’d been abducted and dropped here rather than arriving step by step. And maybe at his undergrad and graduate schools the mental noise and clutter of nervousness and disorientation had gotten in the way of his truly taking in what he’d been taught.
So he was left confused when the recipe demanded cloves. “And he had very little linguistic skill. It wasn’t only that he didn’t know how to pronounce a good percentage of the words; it was that somehow he hadn’t been trained to translate the words, all of them. He hadn’t learned that this is the necessary beginning, and that then you have to delve into the psychology of a character. I was making suggestions, and he had this respectful, uncomprehending look, like I wasn’t quite speaking English. It was alarming. We thought, how would he ever be able to catch up? The program is loads of pressure. This is the Met. The standards, the constant judgment. There’s no grace period. You feel the pressure in the first month, and he needed so much remedial work.”
After the coaching sessions, Ryan performed for James Levine, Noda, and two other Lindemann faculty members. Levine had been conducting the Metropolitan Opera for forty years; he was one of the most legendary maestros in the world. This part of the audition was held in a small theater within the opera house, and Levine rode into the room on an electric cart. Back injuries had left him barely able to walk. When Ryan auditioned, Levine could still get up from the cart and get himself into a regular seat, but he would soon be partially paralyzed and conducting operas from a customized wheelchair that rested on a motorized platform. The impediments only added to his artistic reputation.
Around the back areas of the Met, Levine wore rumpled polo shirts and gray sweatpants, with aviator-shaped eyeglasses on his cherubic face. Thinning frizzy hair bloomed from the orb of his head as Ryan sang the Banquo aria and “La calunnia.” Levine and the Lindemann team thanked him, sent him out, and deliberated.
The decision was a weighing of the deficits against the possibilities contained in the raw voice, the comic flair, something more: he stirred a reaction. “It was to him, it was to the person,” Noda said. “There’s something about his emission of personal energy. You could tell. He was singing to live.”
* * *
Back when Ryan had entered the first round of the Met contest, he’d been singing in abridged operas, performing Hansel and Gretel as part of an operatic road show in Colorado. He’d also been given an upcoming role in a festival in the town of Central City. He still had to fulfill the commitment, though he was now one of the Lindemann trainees.
Central City was an old gold-mining settlement, known in the mid–eighteen hundreds as the richest square mile on earth and packed with ten thousand prospectors. These days it got by on some tourism, on the slot machines and roulette wheels in a few homey casinos. Cecil loved to play the slots; Ryan had recently learned this about his father. His father had told him about a trip or two that he’d made, driving from his home in California to gamble in Nevada. Since the finals, Ryan had hoarded information like this from their phone conversations. The talks hadn’t included any heart-to-hearts, but he collected the gems and insights, which he stored carefully, as though his mind contained a built-in jewelry box designed for such items.
In his rented room in Central City one night after rehearsal, Ryan thought of the casinos around him. He phoned his father. He told him about the slots and about opening night, which was near, and said he would pay for his trip. At the airport, he picked Cecil up in a car lent to him by a patron of Opera Colorado, and he drove his father to the restaurant he’d chosen. Cecil was an avid football fan, and the restaurant was an upscale steak house owned by a fabled quarterback for Denver’s football team.
The place was perfect: a dazzling mix of flat-screen TVs tuned to sports events, sumptuous upholstery, gleaming wood. They started with a round of Dark and Stormies, a cocktail of rum and ginger beer that Ryan had just discovered. He wanted his father to like it, and Cecil did, and they ordered another round. “I never thought the day would come when I would see one of my sons…” His father’s voice faded.
Cecil’s stepson had just been sent back to prison on gang-related charges. Adrian, after Cecil had whisked him away from the group home and taken him to California, had dropped out of high school. He’d put his strength and anger to use as a local-level extreme fighter, battling in cages where all manner of bodily assault was approved. But he’d brawled outside the ring, too, with Latin gang members. He’d punctured someone’s lung, and there had been a shank that Adrian “deflected,” he claimed, into one of the gang. This had all led, according to him, to a trumped-up statutory rape charge pressed against him by the gang members, for having sex with an underage Mexican teenager. He’d been put in prison for two years. Since getting out on parole, he’d been homeless and unemployed and barred, because of his violent temper, from seeing the son he’d had when he was twenty-one.
“…when I would see one of my sons do something like this. Fly me here. I have no words.” He was tearing up; they switched to talk of sports. Cecil wore a football jersey from his favorite team and billowy pants imprinted with a pattern of tamales. The pants might have been embarrassing if Ryan hadn’t been so happy and if his father, between their chatting about the recent basketball play-offs and their discussion of the approaching football season, hadn’t said just that: “I’m so happy.”
The waitress came over to deliver more drinks and get their food orders going.
“Do you know who my son is?” Cecil asked.
She said she didn’t.
“Well, he’s an opera singer. He’s a professional opera singer.”
She asked where he’d gotten his voice.
“He didn’t get it from me. Must have gotten it from his mom.”
They all laughed.
“He’s singing with Opera Colorado now. And before long he’s going to be singing with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.”
She remarked on how proud Cecil must be—all the more, she said, because his son was so tall.
“He didn’t get that from me either.”
They laughed harder.
Father and son talked more basketball and football, devoured their meal, talked about the fishing trip Cecil dreamed of taking one day with all of his boys, and went to the bar for a nightcap.
“Do you know who my son is?” Cecil asked the bartender.
They drove up to Central City, up to eight thousand feet. One thing Ryan was beginning blurrily to see, beyond how much his father loved him, was how easily his father connected with people, joked with them, ch
armed them, broadcast things about himself. The tamale pants were part of that: he was a chef, a barbecue expert, running a restaurant. It had only five tables, but he was in charge. Ryan noticed a link. He traced his own comedic, over-the-top performance of arias like “La calunnia” to his father’s playfulness and antics and habit of self-announcement. He tied the ability he recognized in himself, the ability to pull people in, to what he’d seen with the waitress, his father’s quickness at winning people over. The link elated and soothed him at the same time. The realization spread within him physically, like something pumping through his blood vessels.
They reached Central City and collapsed, his father in the room next to his, and late in the morning, when Ryan awoke, Cecil was gone. Ryan phoned; his father was in a casino. He’d been up since four, he said, playing the slots. When he’d taken a break for a drink, he told a guy at the bar that he was here because his son was an opera singer, and he’d learned that the guy was cooking in a barbecue festival that afternoon. They struck a deal to collaborate on the guy’s grill and smoker.
Sing for Your Life Page 15