And Noda said to me, “There’s an obstacle. It’s not obvious, but it’s significant. It’s true for Asians as well as African Americans. There are lots of aspiring Asian singers in our field, but very few who are doing well.”
He didn’t mean that the Met—or the world of opera—was especially bigoted. People at the Met prided themselves on their liberal politics, their open minds. It was probably safe to say that within the opera house nearly every voter had, a few years earlier, cast a ballot for Barack Obama to become America’s first black president, and it was probably safe to say that most had celebrated when he’d won. It was a progressive place.
People assume you won’t be as good—these words lay within the shadow that Ryan felt looming, the shadow that he was determined to escape: the sense, in this well-meaning, liberal realm, that he would not meet the standards of the art, that he would be forced by his shortcomings to follow Terrence Coleman into the role of Joe, or forced into a career whose mainstay was Porgy and Bess, the story of life in an African American slum in Charleston a century ago. Porgy and Bess wasn’t Show Boat. Its music was rated as real opera by the opera world—or it had been since the seventies, forty years after its opening. That was when the composition had been reappraised, elevated. Still, making a career of playing Porgy, the crippled black beggar of Catfish Row, in front of the throngs that inevitably packed theaters wherever the show was staged, would mean being far less than successful in the Met’s terms and in his own, far less than what he’d wanted for himself since seeing Carmen at fifteen.
* * *
I’m going to spend the rest of my life getting out from that shadow. He descended to his session on Italian, his words containing an ineffable weight. It was a weight, a burden, that went beyond preconceptions and Terrence Coleman’s failure and Noda’s warnings. I’m going to spend the rest of my life. It was a burden of identity that I, hearing the reverberation of those words after we said good-bye and he walked downward, could only intuit. It was a pressure that I, being white, would never feel. I existed, white within a white city—no matter that it wasn’t a white city, that whites were less than half the city’s population; it felt to me like a white city, which was the point—white within a white culture, white within a white nation, my race irrelevant to my own definitions of self, or seemingly irrelevant. If identity was a series of words or phrases completing a sentence beginning with “I am,” how soon, or late, in my series would “white” appear? Would it appear at all? Yet for Ryan, the situation was reversed. There could be no such taking for granted. Instead, there was an inner interrogation. It merely started with the question of whether, despite his resolve, he was doomed to a path like the one Terrence was on. The cross-examination continued from there, zeroing in on whether there was something suspect, after all, about the career he was pursuing, whether opera was, finally, as white as his tormentors on the bus had believed, whether he was rejecting his race, whether he was playing the house nigger in the old scenario that divided house from field, Oreo from black straight through, false from true.
He rejected this line of thinking, spurned it now just as he had back then. But rejecting it wasn’t exactly the same thing as being rid of it.
Somehow, he thought, he’d found himself on this road. Somehow, some way, this goal, to sing opera with mesmerizing power, had gotten hold of him, gotten inside him. It had begun, he thought back, with a white singer performing the toreador’s aria—but an African American artist had been at the heart of that production. A black diva had cast a spell. And his next steps had been taken under the instruction of a black teacher. And before that, there were the lines he’d learned in Mrs. Hughes’s class, the lines she’d made them memorize, the lines from Martin Luther King’s speech. “I have a dream”—that phrase, it seemed to him, had carried forward in his mind, giving him permission to harbor a huge ambition and teaching him the importance of declaring his ambition out loud, the way he’d done on the plaza after Carmen.
“Not be judged by the color of their skin”—he felt an intimate connection with King’s historic crusade. That speech, he sensed, had helped to drive him and went right on pushing him now. He wanted his voice, his artistry, to be perceived so strongly that his complexion became secondary, immaterial. “No one before him,” he said one morning, “had ever spoken so eloquently about those ideas. Hundreds of years from now we’ll still be reciting and remembering Martin Luther King’s words. I feel awesome to try and be a small part of his dream.”
* * *
Sometimes, listening to Ryan, I thought about the last years of King’s life and the book he published a year before he was assassinated. The civil rights movement had split, and as King made his way into a White House–sponsored conference on civil rights, black protesters ridiculed him as an Uncle Tom. His belief that someday Americans would transcend race, that race would no longer be the primary way we perceive and categorize one another, was derided by rival black activists, who not only dismissed nonviolence but championed a purely black concept of identity. King’s book, Where Do We Go from Here?, was his response.
“James Baldwin,” King wrote, “once related how he returned home from school and his mother asked him whether his teacher was colored or white. After a pause he answered: ‘She is a little bit colored and a little bit white.’ This is the dilemma of being a Negro in America. In physical as well as cultural terms every Negro is a little bit colored and a little bit white. In our search for identity we must recognize this dilemma.” The dilemma, for King, was a spiritual blessing, pointing toward the “society of brotherhood” that awaited, in his religious vision. But over the half century since, though King had become universally revered, this conflict between the dream of racial transcendence and the need for racial identity hadn’t gone away, not really. It had quieted, become less overt, more complex, yet it still vibrated—vibrated for Ryan in the word “Oreo,” vibrated on the bus as his schoolmate grabbed the music from his lap and spat out, “We knew you was white,” vibrated as Ryan said, “When you come from a certain demographic, it’s frowned upon to talk properly,” vibrated right up to the present in the long persistence of a metaphor Ryan referred to, the metaphor of house and field. And recently it had echoed in a different way, after Obama’s first election as president, when, for a fleeting interval, some had been willing to speculate—in a state of giddy misapprehension—that America was striding toward being “post-racial.” The term had multiple wishful meanings. One was simply that American society was moving beyond racism. Another was that America was moving beyond race itself.
On the night of November 4, 2008, the night Obama was elected, Ryan was in Florida, in Tallahassee, working as a bouncer. This was how he paid some of his expenses as he studied at Florida State’s graduate conservatory. He’d done the same in Hartford as an undergraduate. Given his size, the jobs just found him. In Hartford, he had gone with his suite mates to a club, gotten in line, and, on the spot, been offered a job with the security team. His shift ended at four o’clock, four nights a week. Mostly, the only difficulty was that with his classes starting at nine, he didn’t have much time for sleep. But the club sometimes booked musicians who came with a rough following. Ryan and his bouncer colleagues tossed out fighters trying to cut each other with broken bottles. One night, as he herded brawlers out the door, someone sprayed him with mace. He showed up the next day for a dress rehearsal without a voice.
In Tallahassee, the bar where he worked was near campus. Crowds spilled onto the sidewalk from happy hour till last call. But by three in the morning after election night, the place was deserted, and Ryan was straightening up on the patio. A straggler stood nearby, facing the other way, talking drunkenly into his cell phone, his voice leaping into a yell. “I hope they’re friggin’ happy with their nigger president.”
Ryan looked over; the student wore a polo shirt, a visor, boating shoes.
“I really hope they have fun with their nigger president.” The kid hung up, turned a
round. He saw Ryan and seemed to grasp, over a slow, inebriated second, that what he’d been saying wouldn’t sit well with the person he was looking at.
He ran. And Ryan sprinted after him. A moment earlier, he’d been trying not to hear the student’s words. He’d been trying to pretend that none of this was happening. But now something had switched on—or switched off—inside him. He was going to teach the kid a lesson.
They ran past palm trees, past fraternity houses. The student had gotten a head start, and Ryan wasn’t fast; the kid receded. But Ryan kept him in view, watched where the boy turned, and trailed him, though he was no longer in sight, past the cannon on the lawn and between the white columns of one of the frat houses. Ryan knocked on the wooden front door. He banged.
“What do you want?”
But before Ryan could answer, the person behind the door told him to go, to leave, told him he’d call the cops.
“No, no. No, I just want to talk to one of your fraternity brothers. One of your brothers was at my bar, and I just want to talk with him about the election.”
The heavy door stayed shut. Behind it, the person introduced himself as the fraternity president. “We don’t have any brothers who were out tonight.”
Through the door, Ryan described the student and what he’d been shouting. He warned that he knew someone at the university newspaper, and that the writer would be happy to come over for an interview about the incident. “Or you can come out as president and hear what I have to say.”
The door opened.
“You know, people shouldn’t use that word,” Ryan began.
“You don’t have to say that.”
“He has a name. His name is Obama.”
“It won’t happen again.”
“Tell your friend he’s not welcome at the bar. I don’t want to see him there, ever.”
“I apologize for what happened.”
Ryan had one more thing he needed to make clear. There was a lot inside it. There was his mother’s service in the military, the best job she’d had, which made him appreciate Obama’s war hero opponent. There was his anger about all kinds of assumptions. But he couldn’t explain everything.
“And tell your friend,” he said before walking away, “I voted for McCain, too.”
FOURTEEN
RYAN’S VOICE IS dark and rich and velvety. And long.”
Brian Zeger ran the training program. Across the street from the Met, he also directed the vocal division at Juilliard, where we sat in a rehearsal room with tiers of empty seats rising at one end. And as a pianist, he’d performed throughout the world in recitals with the best singers in opera—Anna Netrebko, Marilyn Horne, Bryn Terfel. Now that he was nearing his sixties, he still performed, but he was aware that his fingers were stiffening slightly. He needed to put himself through protracted exercises to get them limber enough to draw the sounds he wished from the keys. And new music, which he’d once memorized effortlessly, took much longer these days to imprint in his mind. Nothing pathological was at work, nothing more than age and the administrative demands of two jobs, and the decline of hands and brain was imperceptible to anyone listening to him play. Yet the difference whispered to him, foreshadowing an end to performing. “I see a time coming when I won’t do it anymore, and I don’t know what that will cost me,” he said, his gray hair full and hazel eyes steady, unwavering from the truth. “I love getting up onstage. I love the whole process of being on tour. In a way, it’s an infantile mode of existence; everything is about the performance—everything else becomes minimized. And I feel a sense of authority in front of audiences. I don’t know what it will be like to stop, but I feel there’s a knee-jerk reaction from anyone I talk with about it. ‘Oh no’”—he imitated their voices—“‘there’s no reason you should stop. You have to keep going. You must.’ But why? Because I once was good at it? Because that was my life? Our lives are finite.”
As we detoured from talking about Ryan, he touched on music he was recording, an adaptation, for voice and piano, of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.”
…for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath
He spoke about an ascent in the music, a flight that approached freedom, accentuating the “emotional opening up” in the word “easeful.” He spoke about the way the permanence of his recordings would, and would not, counter what was beginning to ebb from his fingers.
Then we returned to Ryan. “It’s a large voice, yes—and the size of his sound alone is a gift. But the length is remarkable. It’s one of the first things I noticed. It’s one of the things we dream about. Sometimes with low voices the range is restricted. The artist, over a career lasting decades, will explore and develop the beauty of his voice within a somewhat narrow span of notes. And in a small set of roles. Even so, it will be a memorable career. But Ryan, with his strong bottom and strong top, his climactic top—he can thrive up there, live up there—Ryan could be a shape-shifter.”
Zeger’s eyes, sober as he’d talked about his own aging, seemed to quiver as he invoked this magic-laden phrase. If Ryan’s career unfolded the way it should, his repertoire would be wide and unpredictable: romantic, comic, demonic, mythic—Zeger named an array of roles. Perhaps the Dutchman, Wagner’s tormented sea captain, or Wotan, Wagner’s god of gods, would become signature parts. “These roles are like playing Lear,” Zeger said. “The stamina, the emotional demands, the demands on the bottom and top of the voice. Wotan has this tremendous Oedipal struggle. He has to kill his own son. In opera, these roles are like Olympus.” Singers capable of the music Wagner had written—merciless for the artist, rapturous for the audience—came along so rarely, appearing, with luck, once in a generation. Perhaps Ryan would be one of them.
But the characters Ryan might one day inhabit weren’t the only reason Zeger’s eyes danced as he talked about the expansiveness of Ryan’s voice, from the lowest note he could sing without struggle to the highest he could hit without strain, a range, found and fostered in increments over the years since high school, that covered more than twice as many notes as an average person’s. Zeger thought, too, of individual musical moments. “The longer the voice, the more colorful and more interesting any one note can be. You know the term ‘chiaroscuro’ from art history? From ‘chiaro’—clear and bright. And ‘oscuro’—dark.” He evoked religious paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, their shadowed figures illuminated by shafts of divine light. “We use the same term to describe voices. It’s the mix of tones, of bright and dark, that a singer can incorporate within each note.
“Every instrument produces this mix. If you play the A above middle C on the piano, you will hear a wave frequency of four hundred and forty cycles per second. But as you strike that one key, there will also be a series of frequencies, of harmonics, of partials, above four forty. Something similar happens with the human voice. And it’s the prevalence and ease and richness of those harmonics that make for the distinctive colors as an artist sings.
“It’s about options. One of the principles of vocal production, whether you’re a soprano or a bass, is that the higher the top you have and the lower the bottom you have, the more options you’re given in the coloring. You might be singing a note near the middle of your range, but you can tinge your voice with the levels of brightness above and the levels of darkness below.”
At the center of the rehearsal room, Zeger sat at the piano, and though the tiers of empty seats seemed to press inward on the space, his words, and the scattered passages he played to help me understand his points, filled the room gracefully. He had an air of elegance that was an antidote to the frenetic desperation of all those singers, at Juilliard and in the Lindemann Program, who strove to cure the ills their teachers and coaches perceived in their technique. “It’s all so subjective,” he said. “And each singer hears so many perspectives on what he is and
needs to be. On his flaws and how to fix them. The teachers, the coaches—we’re like blind men trying to talk about an elephant. One of us is touching the trunk, and one of us is touching the flank, and one of us is feeling the tail. We’re each grasping at our area, whatever we ourselves are best trained at, whatever we think is most important, and we’re all tugging. We’re describing, we’re prescribing. We’re laying claim to the finite hours in a singer’s day. And the singer has to deal with all of us.”
Subjectivity had gripped and pulled at Ryan maybe more than most. Because of his vocal range—a range that elevated, these days, from a basement D to an F-sharp or G two and a half octaves higher, and that encompassed this vertical distance almost effortlessly, with no suggestion, especially at the upper end, that he had yet extended himself as far as he could go—his teachers and coaches had been debating over the most basic aspect of his voice since his undergraduate years in Hartford. They had been telling him one thing and another about whether he was really a bass or a bass-baritone or a dramatic baritone or a lyric baritone or, moving upward in range, a baritenor or a heldentenor.
He was classified and reclassified, identified and reidentified. The categorizations could sound abstract to an outsider, but they weren’t for any singer of opera; they controlled how you trained, the roles you were considered for, the repertoire you prepared for your auditions. But it was more than that. For the singer, the sound was the self, propelled directly from within, put into the world. Your category defined you. Disagreement over your identity was tolerable only to a degree. Close differences of opinion were bearable; bass or bass-baritone—this was a common uncertainty. But to be called a bass one month and a heldentenor the next was to be spun into a state of panic.
Back in Hartford, it didn’t help that his voice sometimes slipped into periods of complete turmoil. One week he sang notes higher than anyone would have predicted, no matter how they identified him, and the next it seemed he couldn’t sing anything, regardless of where the notes lay on the staff. Since then, his voice had settled, but the memory of never knowing what it would and wouldn’t do, never knowing where on the staff it would and wouldn’t comply, unnerved him. And though the disagreements over his classification had faded, they still lingered. One of his coaches at the Met believed he was destined for a historic career, if only his other instructors and Ryan himself would acknowledge that he was born to be a baritone, and that he must concentrate more thoroughly on nurturing the glorious upper register he’d been given. Ryan refused to hear it. He couldn’t afford to. The judgment of this coach threatened to leave him unanchored, drifting, not knowing what or who he was.
Sing for Your Life Page 17